from the great-stuff dept.
Strongly recommended by Foresight chairman Eric Drexler is this paper by Senior Associate Josh Hall. Josh writes "The final version of my ethics for machines paper is now available. Thanks to all those at the "Confronting Singularity" Gathering who read the draft and discussed the ideas with me."Do you agree with Eric that this work is important and should be expanded into a book?

from the technology-makes-strange-bedfellows dept.
BryanBruns writes "Publius enables anonymous publishing over the internet, with strong protection built in for privacy. An article in the Washington Post describes the system, developed by AT&T researchers, which will have a public test from July 28-September 28.

It seems like a good example of pro-actively developing tools to protect key values, which will be important, for example, in trying to make nanotech accessible and safe.

Anonymity raises some of the usual censorship issues like dangerous information, defamation, etc., versus the benefits of enabling free speech, especially to those whose governments would stop them from speaking out. "

from the Moravec-as-religious?! dept.
Virtual reality pioneer/musician JaronLanier has published a Critique of Machine Intelligence. Excerpt: The culture of machine consciousness enthusiasts often includes the expressed hope that human death will be avoidable by actually enacting the first thought experiment above, of transferring the human brain into a machine. Hans Moravec is one researcher who explicitly hopes for this eventuality. If we can become machines we don't have to die, but only if we believe in machine consciousness. I don't think it's productive to argue about religion in the same way we argue about philosophy or science, but it is important to understand when religion is what we are talking about. Do you agree with Jaron that the uploading meme is a religious concept?

from the driven-researcher dept.
Author RobertGrudin recommends this news article in US News & World Report. It includes a clear explanation of why researchers won't stop developing nanotech: "We are compelled to keep going. It is just so cool," says Paul Alivisatos, professor of chemistry at the University of California-Berkeley. "We are knocking on the door of creating new living things, new hybrids of robotics and biology. Some may be pretty scary, but we have to keep going." Read More for additional highlights.

from the little-machines-in-your-body dept.
For nanomedicine to be accepted someday, doctors and patients will need to get comfortable with small robots working in the human body. Brian Wang writes "waterproof microrobots made of gold and polymer over silicon can work in liquid (like bodily fluids). They can move small objects 100-300 microns. 100 microns is the size of large cells. These could be used for more precise surgery. These devices are leading the way to nanobots in medicine. Report is at msnbc link "

from the great-stuff dept.
If you missed the wonderful Spiritual Robots Symposium held at Stanford in April, featuring the best debate on machine intelligence seen in academia in years, you can now see it online courtesy of Dr Dobb's. Includes Frank Drake, Doug Hofstadter, John Holland, Bill Joy, Kevin Kelly, John Koza, Ray Kurzweil, Ralph Merkle and Hans Moravec.

from the diamonds-not-a-girl's-best-friend dept.
For friends of yours just getting oriented on nanotechnology, here's an interview of Foresight Advisor Ralph Merkle. Based on the interview is a digested article with photos and video clips (Windows Media Player only, unfortunately). One of the less-technical questions: "So what do I give my girlfriend when I want to get married." Merkle: "Diamonds arenít going to be that valuable. Youíre going to have to give something that shows a certain creative input that you provide." After this interview, Merkle left Xerox PARC for nanotech startup Zyvex, which is hiring

from the nanomania?-sounds-fun dept.
From BradHein's site we find The New York Times reports: "Once it is possible to create molecular circuits (as opposed to silicon-based chips) on a mass, affordable scale — by about 2010, according to some industry researchers — prepare for nanomania…If this vision turns out to be accurate, then we will find ourselves, before too long, in a previously unfathomable medical and ethical terrain. Our relation to aging, to mortality, to the messages sent us by our own bodies may be forever altered by infinitesimally small computers that diagnose our diseases, repair our ravaged cells and ultimately transform — for better or for worse — what it means to be human." CP: But can we live without mortality?

from the intriguing-but-scary dept.
davesag writes "The gRobots project is a forthcoming distributed supercomputing platform specifically developed for the simulation of evolvable nanotechnology. The project is both for the use of evolutionary computation to simulate the design of nanotechnological devices, and for the ongoing simulation of self-replicating devices. The system will be open-sourced so that the broadest range of researchers, evolutionary computing enthusiasts, simulation geeks, chemists, engineers, students and others can participate. " From the site: "We think that the safest and best way forward as these fields merge is to provide a virtual environment for self-replicating machines running evolving software to be tested, evaluated and even farmed." Good idea or too risky–what do you think?

from the when-he's-famous-will-he-still-talk-to-us dept.
Senior Associate Ka-Ping Yee (Ping) launched his future-tech lecture career with great success, earning a standing ovation and great media coverage for his inspirational talk including nanotechnology and machine intelligence. What advice do you have for Ping and other Foresight speakers?

from the all-we-need-is-love dept.
Strongly recommended by Foresight chairman Eric Drexler is this essay by David H. Miller: "If one wants to understand how a political order, a constitutional structure, or an economic system will actually work, one must understand how effectively it makes use of the limited altruistic impulses available among the members of society. If a society is to avoid widespread misery and suffering, it must make effective use of the existing potential for altruism, and it must not require levels of altruism exceeding that which is available. In short, it must do an adequate job of economizing on love." CP: Those of us able to direct our altruism to longer-term goals have a comparative advantage in doing so. How are you leveraging your limited supply of altruism?

from the hurry-or-they'll-copyright-our-memories dept.
Ownership of coming powerful technologies will determine how many are benefited, and how quickly. In a paper prepared for this year's spring Foresight Gathering, Senior Associate Markus Krummenacker presents four scenarios for how intellectual property laws could operate in the future: the two extremes (no IP, suffocating IP) and two compromise proposals. Let's pick one, or come up with a better one, and make it happen. Which scenario do you prefer, and why? Or propose another.

from the molecular-rotor-rooters-fan dept.
Senior Associate TomMcKendree alerts us to The Age of Transitions by Newt Gingrich: "Nanotechnology is probably twenty years away but it may be at least as powerful as space or computing in its implications…This approach to manufacturing will save energy, conserve our raw materials, eliminate waste products and produce a dramatically healthier environment. The implications for the advancement of environmentalism and the irrelevancy of oil prices alone are impressive….Imagine drinking with your normal orange juice 3,000,000 molecular rotor rooters to clean out your arteries without an operation." Read More for further comments from Tom. Comment below on your views of Newt: useful to us or not?

from the a-nanogram-of-sugar-helps-the-nanomedicine-go-down dept.
Robert Freitas writes "NIH is issuing Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants for projects on nanotechnologies useful to biomedicine. The grants provide funding to develop near-term nanomedical applications involving primarily engineered nanomaterials and biomaterials. While the goals are admittedly modest by MNT standards — nanomedicine with a small 'n' — at least they are experimentally accessible now. The level of federal interest in this area is clearly growing. Here, NIH appears to be bending the usual federal rules a bit to help jumpstart the 'nano' sector of biomedicine. I've excerpted the most important parts of the announcement [Read More below]; the full text is at http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/pa-files/PA-00-018.html."

from the Palm-Pilot-will-be-smarter-than-we-are dept.
Senior Associate Ka-Ping Yee (ping) writes "For a recent keynote talk i gave on the future of technology, i put together a chart of computing power based on the data in Ray Kurzweil's book, The Age of Spiritual Machines. I wasn't too happy with the readability of the chart in the book, so i asked myself "What would Tufte do?" and tried to design a clearer layout. A couple of things to note (if you have not already read Kurzweil's book):

• The vertical scale is a log scale, yet the best fit is not a straight line. It still curves upward slightly. (Try to fit a straight line and you'll see that it doesn't work.)
• We aren't just plotting maximum available computing power here — it's computing power available for a modest amount of money ($1000 in 1999 dollars).
• All the data, except for the last point (the Athlon) is taken from the book.

What do you think? Are we on schedule? Any bets for when the computational power of an affordable desktop machine will approach the computational power of a human brain? "

from the turning-space-into-a-place dept.
Senior Associate TomMcKendree is the only one we know working on a PhD in nanotechnology for space applications. He spoke at an internal NASA planning conference, "Turning Goals into Reality": I put together a new presentation, based on NASA's technical goals, my work on MNT and space, and lifting heavily from JoSH's aircar study, since a majority of their technical goals related to aircraft. The charts are available at link …A partial transcript is at link "Read More" for the full story.

from the if-it's-Clinton's-idea-they-don't-like-it dept.
SteveLenhert writes "The $500 million US nanotechnology initiative proposed by US President Clinton for the year 2001 may not happen as planned. While Congress supported the increased NIH spending, many cuts were proposed in the various other initiatives, including nanotechnology." See also the Clinton Administration's protest.

from the no-more-need-for-bzzzz-slap dept.
Greg Burch told us about the first stable germ line changes to the species of mosquito that transmits malaria. (Malaria kills an estimated 2.7 million people a year.) Researchers at Imperial College London and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, inserted a fluorescent marker gene in Anopheles mosquitoes. This is a first step toward making anti-malarial changes to the mosquito, such as making it produce antibodies against the malaria parasite. Greg comments: "What a great breakthrough in gene-engineering PR it would be if this line of research would prove fruitful against malaria!"

from the maybe-he's-not-all-wrong dept.
28 June, CP: This has been toned down at the request of a former Foresight Conference chair. YakiraHeyman reports that many Foresight members alerted us to this story on WiredNews: "Some scientists believe that nanotechnology will transform computing, biotechnology, and medicine, even proclaiming that the technology will one day solve every problem from hunger to disease. But researcher Steven Block has one thing to say to these nanotech Polyannas: Wake up." Read More for additional quotes. (Important: please don't send rude email to Prof. Block; he makes some good points.) Query to Nanodot readers: If some call us PollyAnna (too optimistic) and some call us Chicken Little (too pessimistic), does that mean we are about right?

from the yet-another-response-to-Bill-Joy dept.
GlennReynolds brings to our attention a worthwhile essay coauthored by Xerox PARC's director, John Seely Brown, pointing out that "Nanotechnology offers a rather different example of how the future can frighten us. Because the technology involves engineering at a molecular level, both the promise and the threat seem immeasurable…nano devices are theoretically feasible. No one, however, has laid out a route from lab-based simulation to practical systems in any detail. (emphasis added) In the absence of a plan, it's important to ask the right questions: Can nanotechnology fulfill its great potential in tasks ranging from data storage to pollution control, all without spiraling out of control? If the lesson of genetic engineering is any guide, planners would do well to consult and educate the public early on, even though useful nano systems are probably decades away." Query to JSB: Good points. But is there a particular reason why we're assuming such a plan hasn't been prepared?