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In Popular Mechanics, longtime Foresight friend Prof. Glenn Reynolds looks at the future of nanotech and artificial intelligence, among other things looking at safety issues, including one call that potentially dangerous technologies be relinquished. He takes a counterintuitive stance, which we’ve discussed here at Foresight over the years: According to the loose length-scale based definition, nanotechnology has long since conquered the world: feature sizes in microprocessors have been below the 100 nanometer mark for some time, qualifying them, if anyone wanted to, to be called nanoprocessors. The latest reports and plans are mentioning 22-nanometer parts just 2 years from now: From the Albany (OR) Democrat Herald: Phone robots: Let’s all rebel There was some objection to my post Is Robo Habilis a gateway to Intelligence? to the effect that it might take a lot of extra time to build the robots, and that would lengthen the time necessary to develop AI. That might certainly be true of the garage experimenter, but in the world at [...] In response to my Robo Habilis post, Tim Tyler replied: There are at least 4 stages of intelligence levels that AI will have to get through to get to the take-over-the-world level. In Beyond AI I refered to them as hypohuman, diahuman, epihuman, and hyperhuman; but just for fun let’s use fake species names: Robo insectis: rote, mechanical gadgets (or thinkers) with hand-coded skills, such as [...] My Robo Habilis post was picked up on by Michael Anissimov who wrote: (me:) It seems to me that one obvious way to ameliorate the impact of the AI/robotics revolution in the economic world, then, is simple: build robots whose cognitive architectures are enough different from humans that their relative skillfullness at various tasks will differ [...] One of the species of early hominids is named Homo habilis, meaning “handy man,” after their significant advancement in tool use over previous hominids. One of the goals of the AGI Roadmap is to chart paths to full human intelligence, and one of the paths might follow the one that evolution took. The Wozniak Test, [...] Foresight’s mission is essentially an educational one. In simplest terms we are here to point out foreseeable technological developments that not only will make the future different from the past, but make it different in ways that aren’t obvious and which everyone isn’t already planning for. Nanotechnology — true nanotech in Drexler’s original sense of [...] Nanotechnology Enables Real Atomic Precision is the title of a piece by Susan Smith in Desktop Engineering, which includes comments by longtime Foresight Senior Associates Steve Vetter and Tihamer Toth-Fejel: The 2-millimeter dash was a nanobot race held as part of the 2009 RoboCup Nanosoccer Demonstration Competition. That was July; typically entry time, as for Robocup 2010 in Singapore, would be year end, but I can’t see any announcement for it on their page. Does anyone know any more details? Special thanks to longtime Foresight member Monica Anderson for setting up this November 4 Bay Area talk by another longtime Foresight member, Keith Lofstrom: I (and others) get interviewed by Minnesota Public Radio (podcast) about machine ethics… Lithographic Graphitic Memories. In Singularity or Bust I discussed the work of econophysicist Didier Sornette et al in using oscillating hyperexponentials to predict the collapse of Chinese equity markets. They have a new paper out which tells a bit more about how they predict the point of collapse. H/t Physics arXiv Blog. IEEE Spectrum: Boston Startup iWalk Lands Funding for Robotic Prosthetics. Jason Palmer of BBC News brings us an AFM image from IBM Zurich which is simply wonderful: Accelerating Future » Folding DNA into Twisted and Curved Nanoscale Shapes. This is the Motoman SDA10 15-axis robot (“for high level of dexterity and range of motion”) putting together an office chair. This is roughly the kind of thing we need for the Feynman Path assembly robot. (in case the embedding isn’t working on your browser, it’s here) More evidence for a Society of Mind model, complete with economics: The Brain Economy by Michael L. Anderson over at Forbes. |
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