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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: IEEE Spectrum: German Environmental Agency Miffed at Exploitation of Position Paper on Nanotechnology. Germany’s Federal Environment Agency (UBA) last week made a background paper available on their website, which they now concede contained no new research and none that their organization had actually performed, entitled “Nanotechnology for Humans and the Environment: Increasing [...] Back in my Moral Railroads post I opined: Unless I am completely mistaken and deluded, there was and is nobodyassociated with the DC train system who wanted the crash to happen. It’s not a question of morality at the level of bad intentions, either of people or machines. On 9/11/01 I stood at Newark airport in New Jersey waiting for my flight to Toronto, which never flew. The airport was in clear sight of the World Trade Center 10 miles away across Jersey City and the Hudson River. As I watched the towers fall, I had a curious sense of detachment from the [...] Last week I posted an essay in which I claimed that the Singularity could be said to be halfway here already because we had already set up a huge program that was more or less running the world (and that it was fast becoming a computer program). Previous: What Singularity? There’s an interesting piece up at the IEEE robotics blog, by Alfred Nordmann, with the subtitle “The story of the Singularity is sweeping, dramatic, simple–and wrong.” He argues that far from accelerating, technological progress is slowing down: Here at Foresight our main focus is on longer-term technologies such as molecular manufacturing, but we keep an eye on what’s arriving along the nearer-term pathways as well. In 2007 I attended a workshop on “Nanotechnology for Chemical and Biological Defense” and the proceedings volume of that meeting, with the same name, is now available. [...] Nanodot appears to be back on the air again. Our outage was an aftereffect of the hack attack we had a few weeks ago. This, and the other lingering effect (de-listing of the main site from Google) are both not actual results of the hacking (which put code in that popped up ad [...] 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! Wordpress seems to be queueing comments somewhere in the system and I’m not seeing them for moderation till days later sometimes — even my own! Once you have a comment approved, tho, all further comments by you should be posted automatically. (A spam control measure, as you can imagine.) From The Gulf Times via Nanowerk: Over at Accelerating Future, Michael Anissimov continues the discussion about nanofactories. He says a number of reasonable things, but then mischaracterizes, or at least greatly oversimplifies, Foresight’s position on nanofactories and self-replicating machines in general: The general implied position of the Foresight Institute appears to be, “we’ll figure these things out as we go, MNT [...] Over at Accelerating Future, Michael Anissimov has a post about self-replication in which he seems to find it remarkable that Foresight, among others, can view a world containing mechanical replicators with aplomb: What is remarkable are those that seem to argue, like Ray Kurzweil, the Foresight Institute, and the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, that humanity is [...] Conference to tackle what they claim is “the single most important issue in science & society in this century.” From the February 2009 issue of the “science is culture” publication Seed magazine, not yet online: In an interesting coincidence and counterpoint to Jim’s Nanophobia post this morning, I ran across the following on Nature News: We’ve received an invitation to participate in the Center for Nanotechnology in Society’s project to build and critique nanotechnology scenarios. Longtime Nanodot readers and Foresight members know that our goal here at Foresight is to maximize the benefits and minimize the downsides of nanotechnology. Our friends over at the Wilson Center’s Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies share that goal, as shown in their mission statement: Nanowerk brings news that the World Economic Forum is both rewarding nanotechnology pioneers and taking a look at potential risks of nanoparticles. Excerpts: |
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