Foresight Feynman Prize winner Nadrian Seeman will share the $1 million Kavli Prize in nanoscience with IBM’s Don Eigler.  From the SciAm blog by Katie Moisse: Donald Eigler from IBM’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., and Nadrian Seeman from New York University will jointly accept the nanoscience prize for illuminating the basic units of [...]

The U.S. President’s Council on Advisors on Science and Technology requested public input on a number of manufacturing topics including “molecular-level, atomically precise production.” Foresight joined with our sister organization IMM to produce a statement on Atomically Precise Manufacturing, now posted on the OpenPCAST site, with public voting and commenting still continuing, so join in the [...]

I’ll be speaking at the following event. If you miss the early registration rate, you can get 20% off regular registration with the discount code ‘Foresight’: Open Science Summit 2010: Updating the Social Contract for Science 2.0 July 29-31 International House Berkeley http://opensciencesummit.com Ready for a rapid, radical reboot of the global innovation system for [...]

Once again, the Society of Manufacturing Engineers has donated one free pass to their Nanomanufacturing Conference to Foresight: April 14-15, 2010 — SME Nanomanufacturing Conference Hilton Phoenix East in Mesa, Arizona http://www.sme.org/cgi-bin/get-event.pl?–001875-000007-nhome–SME- This includes free admission to one of the pre-conference workshops on April 13, including Understanding Nanotechnology, taught by Foresight Senior Associate Tihamer “Tee” [...]

In case anyone wonders where I’ve gone, I’m resigning from Foresight for medical reasons (adhesive capsulitis — long and painful course of therapy) and to concentrate my few remaining neurons on my AI research.  I really wish nanomedicine had advanced further in the interim

I’m on my way to AGI-10, the general AI conference, in Lugano.  If any readers are attending, let’s get together. Among other things, we’ll be unveiling a preliminary take on the AGI Roadmap (of which Foresight is a sponsor).

Foresight Institute Feynman Prize winner Dr. Ralph Merkle, perhaps better known to Nanodot readers for his nanotech work, has just won the IEEE’s Hamming Medal along with Martin Hellman and Whitfield Diffie: Thirty-five years ago, Martin Hellman, Whitfield Diffie and Ralph Merkle developed an easy method for sending secure messages over insecure channels. With the [...]

The debate held at Foresight 2010 between Robin Hanson and Mencius Moldbug on the subject of futarchy is now online at Vimeo. Watch it online or download it: 1. Get a vimeo account by registering. 2. Option-click on the download link close to the bottom right on the video’s page 3. Wait an hour It’s [...]

We’ve had a fair amount of interest in the Kartik M. Gada Humanitarian Innovation Prizes, mostly from RepRap types. They pointed out that we had a slight incompatibility in the specification of the open source requirements with those of the RepRap community itself. We’ve changed the requirements to allow either BSD or GPL. To make [...]

There’s still time to register, but if you just can’t participate in person this year, check out the free webcast of the Foresight Conference being held this weekend in Palo Alto. The bandwidth coming out of the Sheraton is marginal, so the video will be low-res, but we will be posting high-res videos later, funds permitting [...]

Foresight 2010 will be webcast live (free) at http://www.techzulu.com/live.html. You can also follow it at Twitter:  #Foresight2010 I’ll be travelling (mostly standing in airpote security lines) between now and then. See you there!

Actually, the ominous part is all over, so relax. A week before the very first Foresight Conference, there was an earthquake — the famous 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.  The conference was moved from the Stanford campus to the Garden Court in downtown Palo Alto as a result. Now, just a week before our 2010 Conference, [...]

Tonight on Fast Forward Radio J Storrs Hall, president of Foresight joins FFR to continue their special series leading up Foresight 2010. The conference, January 16-17 in Palo Alto, California, provides a unique opportunity to explore the convergence of nanotechnology and artificial intelligence and to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the founding of the Foresight [...]

Longtime readers know that we at Foresight would prefer that our members, and Nanodot readers in general, actually live long enough to experience the benefits of molecular nanotechnology personally.  In that vein, we bring to your attention America’s Wellness Challenge, which I am helping as a member of their Social Media Advisory Board. If you [...]

(h/t Next Big Future) Tonight on Fast Forward Radio Economist Robin Hanson and futurist Brian Wang join us as we continue our special series leading up Foresight 2010. The conference, January 16-17 in Palo Alto, California, provides a unique opportunity to explore the convergence of nanotechnology and artificial intelligence and to celebrate the 20th anniversary [...]

The Speculist blog’s FastForwardRadio podcast is featuring speakers from Foresight’s upcoming conference next month (January 16-17 in Palo Alto) for the next few weeks. Tonight: Futurist Michael Anissimov and nanotechnologist Ralph Merkle.  10:00 Eastern/9:00 Central/8:00 Mountain/7:00 Pacific.  

Our conference is coming up January 16-17.  Conference page and registration info here. Time is running out for registration and lodging discounts! I put together the slate of speakers for this conference by inviting the speakers I personally wanted to hear, talking about AI and nanotech and how they will change the shape of the [...]

It’s a good thing we got Nanodot moved onto a new server recently — we just had a huge spike in readers.  This is due to one recent post, Some Historical Perspective, being picked up and spread around the climate-change blogosphere.  Of the pageviews we have had over the past three months, 10% of them [...]

This year is the 20th anniversary of the original Foresight Conference on Nanotechnology. The neat, clear vision of nanotechnology we had in 1989 rested on two key aspects that would make it a transformative, rather than merely an evolutionary, technology: The ability to construct and observe at the atomic scale, and the construction of machines [...]

Less Wrong: I’m Not Saying People Are Stupid. The real question isn’t whether people are stupid. The real question is whether people make decisions that matter a lot incorrectly. I claim that we’ve already, as a society, decided that they do.  We’ve replaced kings — human beings — with artificial rule-based decision procedures based on [...]