Nice carpet! It’s very long, and as groups of fibres in front of my feet spell “Get ready, 3, 2, 1″, I brace like a surfer. But the acceleration is gentle; soon I’m cruising at 40 km/h. So glad we have no cars in this city.

yrjo

The notion of forecasting or prognosticating this advance or that event is kind of absurd. For one thing, the mediums these developing technologies are being created in have seeming arbitrary and more importantly unknown constraints. They may make self-cleaning arteries or self-repairing cells, but what if cells and tissue structures become obsolete? Even if you find the proper criteria for anticipating a singularity, because advances are transactional and distributed across several dimensions of inter-related fields what you’re actually looking at becomes a line of best fit on a statistical graph near an asymptote. Here the law of diminishing returns does apply.

“Meet Novamente, and Dr. Ben Goertzel. Novamente’s mission statement is to have self modifying human level intelligence in roughly 2012.”

If you dig around that site you’ll find more links to the original sources.

Its the full AI by 2013 I find the most questionable. Put aside the hardware factor- we’ll get the hardware, that’s not an issue- but if by full AI you mean human level intelligence, man we can barely *define* that. Don’t get me wrong, I consider there to be nothing magical about our brains, I think we can take a divide and conquer approach and knock it out a lobe at a time, but right now I think we’re still mapping out our strategy.

Anyway, would love a link.

That sounds a lot like someone in the 1800′s saying “in the 20th century, they’ll breed faster horses for transportation.” I mean, that’s incredible short-sightedness, imo. That’s something Smalley would say.

And I seriously doubt nanotech is going to look like the last 50 years of computing. Computers don’t self-replicate, each generation of chip and manufacturing had to be paid for by consumers.
If the first CPU self-replicated, we would not have HAD the last 50 years of computing..

“Let me ask you all for your views:

When do you estimate we will have:? :

1 Mass production of Diamondoid and Fullerene networks
2 Basic Programmable Molecular Assembler devices
3 Mass produced true Nano computers
4 Cell Repair machines
5 Artery Cleaning machines ”

Freitas and his group, plan to have DMS by 2012. And several groups (novamente, google, nasa, darpa, etc.) all plan to have full AI by 2011 or 2012. I predict all those things and more no later than 2013 (most people in this field’s opinions differ from mine though, but I think my reasoning and evidence is stronger. I doubt most people will believe it until it’s here though.)

James G.

When do you estimate we will have:? :

1 Mass production of Diamondoid and Fullerene networks
2 Basic Programmable Molecular Assembler devices
3 Mass produced true Nano computers
4 Cell Repair machines
5 Artery Cleaning machines

When networks grow they become more valuable.

Consider the future of biology in the coming decades.
Cost of sequencing a genome drops.
More genomes combined with massive computation generate modest correlations between DNA regions and traits.
Knowing where in the genome to look, scientists will sequence DNA from people from the extreme trait range.
This will lead to discovery of rare variants with large effect on the trait.
This will lead to identification of coding-DNA and regulatory DNA underlying a trait.
This will lead to identification of proteins and molecular pathways underlying a trait.
This will lead to computer models of biological mechanism that accurately predict phenotype from genotype.
This will revolutionize medicine and agriculture.
As knowledge accumulates, each piece adds more value to the whole.

I suspect such network effects will be common in knowledge systems. Intelligence is probably a complex, network-like, knowledge system that will benefit greatly from massive computation. I.e., hard take-off AGI.