A cover article in Time magazine portrays the Singularity, Ray Kurzweil, AI, life extension, and nanotechnology as “an idea that rewards sober, careful evaluation.”

MIT computer scientist Joseph Bates is featured in Business Week as an innovator working to make computers much faster and more powerful by letting the computer make estimates instead of making precise calculations for all steps.

DARPA is basing an approach to AI on devices called memristors that use a nanoscale property to mimic neurons.

Humanity+ @ Caltech: Redefining Humanity in the Era of Radical Technological Change is being streamed live.

Redefining Humanity in the Era of Radical Technological Change, December 4-5, 2010, Pasadena, CA

An article in New Scientist with the optimistic title “Artificial life forms evolve basic intelligence” gives an update on how two specific examples of computational artificial life is doing in terms of evolving to have more interesting behavior.  An excerpt: Brains that have been evolved with HyperNEAT have millions of connections, yet still perform a [...]

Nanowerk describes a recent advance toward the “e-nose” by an international team of researchers. Team member Andrei Kolmakov explains: Our approach demonstrates the potential of combining bottom-up nanowire fabrication protocols with state-of-the art microfabrication methods to design prospective simple sensing arrays which, in principle, might be scaled down to the size of few micrometers and [...]

Finishing off the week on a fun note, we see that robotic firm Willow Garage — of special interest to Foresight due to their emphasis on open source — has achieved an important milestone in robotics: namely, the ability for a robot to fetch a beer from the fridge and deliver it. It’s worth seeing [...]

Small investors who want to invest in nanotech startups have for years turned to publicly-held venture group Harris & Harris Group, which has focused on private companies in nanotech and microsystems. With the economy down, and initial public offerings (IPOs) more rare, this strategy is changing.  Brian Gormley of the Wall Street Journal’s Venture Capital [...]

Tihamer Toth-Fejel let us know that the public can comment online today, right now, our views on nanotech: http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/ostp/pcast President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) President’s Innovation and Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) Golden Triangle1 Workshop 1 Golden Triangle: Research Encompassing Information Technology — Biotechnology — Nanotechnology. June 22, 2010 Webcast at: http://www.tvworldwide.com/events/pcast/100622/ Goal [...]

Many Foresight leaders and members will be gathering at this year’s Singularity Summit in San Francisco, expected to draw up to 1100 participants.  It’s a bit pricey, but it’s for a good cause and there are student and referral discounts plus discounts on the hotel rooms.  I can testify that this is a fun and [...]

Our friends over at Singularity University are described in some detail in a long article in the New York Times.  An excerpt, with names familiar to Nanodot readers as speakers at Foresight conferences: Some of Silicon Valley’s smartest and wealthiest people have embraced the Singularity. They believe that technology may be the only way to [...]

If you can’t make it to Harvard this weekend, June 12-13, you’ll want to catch the live webcast of the H+ Summit: “Rise of the Citizen Scientist”.  No link yet, but presumably they’ll be putting it on the event homepage before it starts.  Also presumably they will post the videos somewhere for longer-term viewing. UPDATE: [...]

John Faith brings to our attention a writeup by Annalee Newitz over at io9.com which colorfully describes a new achievement by Foresight Feynman prizewinner Nadrian Seeman and team at NYU and Nanjing U.: Today in Nature, a group of researchers announced they’d successfully operated the first assembly line populated entirely by nanobots. The bots in question [...]

David Cassel brings our attention to an h+ review of the long-awaited film The Singularity is Near, based on the book by Ray Kurzweil: In documentary style, we have Ray discussing his ideas about the Singularity, with commentators variously supporting or refuting or worrying about his ideas. With Bill McKibben in the role of the [...]

Videos for all talks and slides for some are now available for the Foresight Conference held in January. Here’s the list: http://www.foresight.org/conf2010/ Or if you prefer to watch them in chronological order: http://foresight.org/conf2010/schedule.html There are 17 videos, so in case you’d like some guidance in getting started, consider starting with the top three talks as [...]

From Singularity Hub, 5 Axis Robot Carves Metal Like Butter: Industrial robots are getting precise enough that they’re less like dumb machines and more like automated sculptors producing artwork. Case in point: Daishin’s Seki5-axis mill. The Japanese company celebrated its 50th anniversary last year by using this machine to carve out a full scale motorcycle helmet [...]

Longtime Foresight Senior Associate and senior research scientist at Genetic Programming, Inc. has done an interview on memristors over at blog FrogHeart for those of us trying to keep up on this challenging topic.  He concludes: So why are memristors useful? Sticking with our water analogy, I can make the pipe bigger or small depending [...]

Finally, the first step has been made toward the longed-for goal of a robot which can do laundry: http://singularityhub.com/2010/03/31/berkeley-gets-willow-garage-robot-to-fold-towels-simply-stunning-video/ Of course, this also gives us some idea of other formerly human-only tasks that robots are likely to take over in the next decade or two. Thanks to SingularityHub.com for bringing this to our attention.  —Chris [...]

This conference track is being chaired by a real computer scientist with a specialty in AI, so it should be more meaty than some popular discussions of this challenging topic: We invite submissions describing systematic attempts at understanding the likelihood and nature of these projections. In particular, we welcome papers critically analyzing the following issues [...]