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 [...]

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: [...]

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 [...]

Here we present a special report from Dave Conz of ASU on Josh Hall’s talk and subsequent panel discussion at the SME nanotech conference.  An excerpt: Technoscientific development is difficult to direct and nearly impossible to predict.  Because of this – not in spite of it – panel discussions like “How Do We Get There [...]

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 [...]

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” [...]

If you appreciate the mind-boggling abilities of today’s nanoscale probes and microscopes, and/or want to move your career in the direction of nanotechnology, consider joining the Center for Probing the Nanoscale gang at Stanford’s 6th Annual Nanoprobes Workshop on May 14, 2010.  Registration accepted until May 7.  Fees range from $100 for industry to free for [...]

One way to reach molecular machine systems is to get really, really good at protein engineering. If that’s your goal, you’ll want to be in Boston on May 17-21 for PEGS 2010, “the essential protein engineering summit”. Not sure if this is your pathway? Just reading the talk titles is educational. And they have great [...]

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 [...]

Feynman anniversary event to be held at University of South Carolina. h/t Nanowerk In February 1960, the Caltech magazine Engineering & Science published Feynman’s “Plenty of Room”, and it has been re-published ten times since then. This has become one of the best-known papers in the history of nanotechnology. The fiftieth anniversary of the initial [...]

Roadmaps to Nanotech and AGI slides are here Josh [note -- we know about the permission problem, trying to get it fixed][should be fixed now]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.  

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 [...]

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. [...]

Eric Drexler has posted the slides from his keynote talk at the Berkeley Nanotech Forum. These are a fairly painless way to get an overview of the Productive Nanosystems Roadmap.

Conference to tackle what they claim is “the single most important issue in science & society in this century.”

Jeriaska has made available videos of presentations from Convergence08, held on November 15-16, 2008 in Mountain View, California, to examine the convergence of NBIC (Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno) technologies. Among those of special interest to Nanodot readers: Mapping a Cone of Uncertainty, Paul Saffo Convergence: Artificial Intelligence Panel, Peter Norvig, Steve Omohundro, Ben Goertzel, Barney Pell Convergence: Synthetic [...]

How well prepared is the FDA to regulate nanotech products? Perhaps not very well, at least in the area of dietary supplements.