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The usually reliable Michael Anissimov has claimed that I seem to think that “superintelligence will automatically acquire a favorable morality without any real work.” Now I’m not all that sensitive about such things; but it bothers me that SIAI, of all people, should fail to understand the basic parameters of the problem, and thus have [...] Once upon a time, or so the story goes, there was a young man who was hauled up before the court on charges that he had killed his father and mother. He readily confessed to the crime, but nevertheless pled for clemency: after all, he pointed out, he was an orphan. Recently on his blog Soft [...] A “Call for Participation” for the first post-US election Prediction Markets Summit and Collective Intelligence Conference of 2009 has been announced. A recently released poll shows that the American public is largely uniformed about both nanotechnology and synthetic biology, and furthermore that the level of public awareness about nanotechnology has not changed since 2004. Christine Peterson passes along this press release from NANOART FESTIVAL-STUTTGART: The 2nd International Festival for NanoArt organized by NanoArt21 (www.nanoart21.org) will be hosted in Stuttgart, Germany by NAHVISION Institute for International Culture Exchange, between November 1st and November 30th, 2008. The show is curated by artist/scientist Cris Orfescu (USA) and art professor Dorothea Fleiss (Germany). The Convergence08 conference (www.convergence08.org) on Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno (NBIC) technologies and their interactions will be held November 15-16, 2008 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. The event will use an innovative “unconference” format to enable participants to customize the event in a highly interactive way. Foresight Nanotech Institute is partnering with the Singularity Institute and other organizations for The Singularity Summit 2008, to be held October 25, Montgomery Theater, San Jose, CA. The speakers include names that will be familiar to most Nanodot readers. A separate Emerging Tech Workshop may also interest many Nanodot readers. A few excerpts from The [...] Kurzweil’s concept of an impending “singularity,” in which machine intelligence surpasses human intelligence, has garnered support from Intel’s Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner. We’ve previously pointed out the usefulness of looking at future-oriented fiction as a way of stimulating thinking about nanotechnology. Now Annalee Newitz’s io9 site brings an interview of Kathleen Ann Goonan, who “was writing about nanotech before most people even know it existed.” An excerpt: The U.S. National Academy of Engineering wants input on what should be the Grand Challenges in engineering over the next century. Let’s let them know: nanotechnology! Specifically, nanotech leading toward, and achieving, productive nanosystems. Heck, they can just follow the Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems. These days Foresight is focused on our Technology Roadmap and policy initiatives such as Open Source Physical Security. But we still have our visionary side, shown in a Fortune profile of Foresight advisor Ray Kurzweil, which also features Foresight director and X PRIZE founder Peter Diamandis: Gazette.net reports that nanotechnology is bringing dramatic advances: We should assume that those participating the ETC Group’s nanotechnology hazard symbol contest are all trying to be helpful, and such a symbol may someday be of some use. However, of the three top symbols named as winners, the first one — by far the most vivid — has a real problem. In the November 2006 issue of Nano Today, researcher-turned-science-journalist Jason Palmer urges nanotechnology researchers to open up to the public about the long-term promise of their nanotech work: Richard Jones asks: “Why does the molecular manufacturing community seem to have many fewer members in the UK than it does in the USA? I don’t think it’s fair to say that the dramatic vision of molecular manufacturing is pursued in a contextual vacuum – I think there is quite a well-developed world view that [...] You may like the “for Dummies” series, or dislike it, but surely it was inevitable that there would be a Nanotechnology for Dummies book, due out in five days. I can’t tell from the description whether this will be a useful introduction or not, but am always a bit nervous when the first phrase [...] Concerned about real or imagined risks in nanotechnology? Check out the report of a European workshop on Risk Perception and Risk Communication in the Field of Nanotechnologies. Excerpt: "There are some peculiarities of Nanotechnology which make the risk assessment challenging. The first aspect is the diversity of Nanotechnology. Because Nanotechnology is mainly defined in terms of size, a huge variety of different techniques, research topics, methods of creating or structuring materials, and manipulating surfaces are summarized under the term of Nanotechnology. Very often, the proponents have quite different things in mind when they are talking about Nanotechnology." Er, indeed so. –CP Foresight Senior Associate Ramez Naam informs us that his book More Than Human has been released. Here's a description of the book: More… Two molecular mechanisms from the book Nanosystems have been animated by Gina Miller: a rotary sorter and a molecule binding and orienting mechanism. Such graphics are highly useful for communicating molecular machine concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences. Great job, Gina! Wikipedia is an free online encyclopedia written cooperatively using WIKI technology. Their nanotechnology entry seems to need tweaking: the illustration appears to be of MEMS, not nanotech. Those of you familiar with this community: please help them out by suggesting a more appropriate graphic. (The molecular nanotechnology entry needs a graphic too.) |
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