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Gaming the Future: The Book!

Category: Nanodot

Feynman’s Path to Nanotech (part 2)

Historical Note It’s appropriate on this July 7 to make at least a reference to the history of ideas that lies behind the Feynman Path. That’s because July 7 is the (102nd) birthday of Robert A Heinlein, the famous SF writer, futurist, and inventor. His invention of interest is the “Waldo F. Jones Synchronous Reduplicating… Continue reading Feynman’s Path to Nanotech (part 2)

Feynman’s Path to Nanotech (part 1)

The Problem In 1997, Philip Collins, then a graduate student at Berkeley, won the Foresight Institute’s Distinguished Student Award for his experimental verification that a defect location in a carbon nanotube could form a near-perfect rectifier, as well as various other heterojunction device behaviors, as had been theoretically predicted just the year before. “Such junctions… Continue reading Feynman’s Path to Nanotech (part 1)

Nanotech and climate change

Eric Drexler is apparently at the Renaissance Weekend with the intent to speak to the assembled interesting people about how “advanced nanotechnology can address the climate change problem providing low-cost solar energy and by removing accumluated CO2 from the atmosphere.”  In the same spirit, for the rest of us, here’s how I think we should… Continue reading Nanotech and climate change

Medical nanorobot control

Robert A. Freitas Jr., author of the Nanomedicine series of books, has just published a major new theory paper on aspects of medical nanorobot control, providing an early glimpse of future discussions of this topic that are planned to appear in Chapter 12 (Nanorobot Control) of Nanomedicine, Vol. IIB: Systems and Operations, the third volume… Continue reading Medical nanorobot control

Robo-ethics paper and Open-Texture Risk

There’s a paper on roboethics by Yueh-Hsuan Weng of Taiwan’s Conscription Agency in the International Journal of Social Robotics that has gotten a write-up on Physorg (h/t to Accelerating Future). Here’s the abstract:

Super-dense magnetic memory

There’s a post on Technology Review’s blog about a paper on arXiv about a theoretical result in magnetic memories. Current-day magnetic memory is already “nanotechnology” under the loose definition, involving 5-nanometer particles of cobalt (having about 50,000 atoms). The authors have shown that a single molecule consisting of a cobalt dimer sitting on top of… Continue reading Super-dense magnetic memory

Feynman Prize nominations: last chance

The nominations for Foresight’s 2009 Feynman Prize will be closing soon, so if you know someone who has done outstanding work to advance the goal of molecular nanotechnology, please visit the Instructions Page to nominate them. Research areas considered relevant to MNT (e.g., productive nanosystems and molecular machine systems) include but are not limited to:… Continue reading Feynman Prize nominations: last chance

Moore's Law and Robotics

One thing I was at some pains during my recent visit to Willow Garage was the likely impact of Moore’s Law on the course of robotics development in the next few years. This is of great interest to a futurist because if computation is a bottleneck, it will be loosened in a well-understood way over… Continue reading Moore's Law and Robotics

Moral Railroads

Over at the Moral Machines blog, there’s a pointer to an AP story about the recent DC train crash: Investigators looking into the deadly crash of two Metro transit trains focused Tuesday on why a computerized system failed to halt an oncoming train, and why the train failed to stop even though the emergency brake… Continue reading Moral Railroads

Willow Garage Robotics

After hearing an excellent talk by Willow Garage president Steven Cousins at PARC last Thursday, I wangled a visit to the company Monday and talked to a few more people. Willow Garage is a research robotics company in Silicon Valley which has a unique mission for a start-up. They are oriented to making an impact… Continue reading Willow Garage Robotics

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