The Nanomanufacturing Summit, held in Boston recently, was largely what you would have expected — near-term bulk-tech approaches to nanostructured materials, some interesting research aimed at new electronics, and so forth. Notable, however, was a plenary talk by M. C. Roco, who appears to have changed his tune to the extent of predicting nanorobotics and… Continue reading Nanorobots from the NNI?
What will your car run on in 2020 or 2030? What form of energy storage and transmission will allow intermittent energy sources, such as wind and solar, to be a viable input to the economy? There’s a good chance, of course, that cars will still run on gasoline — its demise has been predicted early… Continue reading The Fuel of the Future
Continuing the discussion of nanofactories from here and here: Michael writes: The common definition of “nanofactory” is a desktop, user-friendly system capable of building macroscale products using positional placement of individual atoms. Dr. Hall appears like he may (?) be using the term to describe “any nanomachine that makes another nanomachine”, but reading the writings… Continue reading Limited, expensive nanofactories
Over at Accelerating Future, Michael Anissimov is worried about what we might call a hard nano-takeoff: The first nanofactories will be both impressive (in their exponential qualities and complete automation of manufacturing) and unimpressive (their chemical inflexibility, possible cooling requirements, electricity consumption, limited initial design space, etc.) I predict they will be revolutionary enough that… Continue reading The first nanofactories
Here’s a University of Rochester press release from 2006: Scientists at the University of Rochester have created a way to change the properties of almost any metal to render it, literally, black. The process, using an incredibly intense burst of laser light, holds the promise of making everything from fuel cells to a space telescope’s… Continue reading Darker = Brighter?
A few new futurism resources have come to our attention recently: The Millennium Project Futures Research Methodology Version 3.0, a “handbook on methods and tools to explore future possibilities.” The contents include methodologies such as statistical modeling, technology sequence analysis, etc. Detailed Roadmap of the 21st Century, a list of predictions for the twenty-first century,… Continue reading Futurism resources
A paper on arXiv referenced (and nicely explained) in a Technology Review blog: How altruistic behaviour emerges has puzzled evolutionary biologists for decades. From the point of view of survivial of the fittest, the unselfish concern for the welfare of others seems inexplicable. Surely any organism should always act selfishly if it were truly intent… Continue reading Evolving altruism
A recent Newsweek article on Kurzweil seems to have been something of a hack job, judging from this reply: … For example, of the many accurate predictions for the year 2009 that I wrote in my book The Age of Spiritual Machines, written in the late 1990s, only three are listed in the sidebar “Kurzweil’s… Continue reading Kurzweil responds to Newsweek
The greatly anticipated “AI” project recently unveiled, Wolfram Alpha, appears to have flopped, at least insofar as being an AI. Next up looks to be Siri, an app coming to your iPhone this fall. From the San Jose Mercury: Siri, a San Jose company, announced Wednesday that it would offer an “intelligent agent” for Apple’s… Continue reading Steps to AI?
Nanotechnology is, ultimately, a mechanization of the molecular processes of life. One of the most important of those processes is photosynthesis. If we really understood photosynthesis as deeply as we do, say, gear trains, and had the machinery to build whatever molecular machines we designed, we could build trees that produced gasoline from sunlight and… Continue reading Quantum entanglement in photosynthesis?
