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 [...]

(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 [...]

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 [...]

PALO ALTO, Calif., Oct 06, 2009 (BUSINESS WIRE) — The Foresight Institute, a nanotechnology education and public policy think tank based in Palo Alto, has announced the winners of the prestigious 2009 Foresight Institute Feynman Prizes in Nanotechnology. Established in 1993 in honor of Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman, two $5,000 prizes are awarded in [...]

Spammers hacked into Foresight.org recently and inserted junk into some of our pages;  we think we’ve gotten rid of it but let us know if you see any more!

The nominations for Foresight’s 2009 Feynman Prize will be closing soon, so if you know someone who has done outstanding work to advance the goal of molecular nanotechnology, please visit the Instructions Page to nominate them. Research areas considered relevant to MNT (e.g., productive nanosystems and molecular machine systems) include but are not limited to: [...]

Nominations are now open for the Foresight Institute Prizes for 2009, due June 30. Our best-known prizes of course are the two annual Foresight Institute Feynman Prizes in Nanotechnology, one for Experiment and one for Theory: Description Instructions Also open are nominations for the Foresight Prize in Communications: Description Instructions And the Student Prize: Description [...]

The Foresight Institute has appointed Dr. J. Storrs Hall to the position of President.

Josh Hall, author of Nanofuture: What’s Next for Nanotechnology, sends this message to Nanodot readers: Dear Foresight members & friends, It’s the time of year when many of you are renewing your Foresight memberships, and helping us meet our $30,000 goal for our Challenge Grant by December 31: http://www.foresight.org/challenge I believe that the next decade [...]