Foresight Institute Co-Founder and Projects Director Christine Peterson (full biography) was interviewed recently by 80000 Hours, “an independent nonprofit funded by individual donors” and founded “because we couldn’t find any sources of advice on how to do good with our own working lives. Since 2011, we’ve been on a mission to figure out how best… Continue reading Cyber, Nano, and AGI Risks: Computer Security and Effective Altruism
Prof. Art Olson discussed how we understand what we cannot see directly, how we integrate data from different sources, and how to develop software tools to move forward.
Designing and building spiroligomers, robust building blocks of various 3D shapes made from unnatural amino acids, decorated with various functional groups, and linked rigidly together by pairs of bonds, and a new approach to nanotechnology design software.
Nanotech promises more commonplace access to advanced technology as material and fabrication costs fall and traditional barriers to innovation are removed. Examples are already being seen globally: more access to laptops and cell phones in developing countries, desktop 3D printers, a surge in establishment of shared-use research facilities, etc. A couple recent cases getting attention… Continue reading Recent cases of 'accessible' high-tech: Open source chips & Origami robots
B.R.AI.N.S., Berkeley BioLabs, and Foresight Institute to build an open source biological parts repository and design and distribute a line of “How-to Build Biological Machines” educational kits.
A very large community of online gamers has consistently produced RNA designs that outperform the best design algorithms by a large margin. Can online gamers designing RNA, protein, and other molecules contribute to the development of atomically precise manufacturing?
A collection of open access journals on a variety of topics provides a very useful entry point to the rapidly growing collection of scientific, technical, and scholarly research that is not hidden behind pay walls.
In a 47-minute interview Christine Peterson discusses the future that science and technology is bringing over the next few decades, and how to get involved to push the future in a positive direction.
A set of rationally engineered transcriptional regulators for yeast will make it easier to build complex molecular machine systems in yeast, some of which may become useful additions to pathway technologies for atomically precise manufacturing and productive nanosystems.
Foldit game players have again out-performed scientists in protein design, this time improving the design of a protein designed from scratch to catalyze Diels-Alder cycloadditions.
