Jason Palmer of BBC News brings us an AFM image from IBM Zurich which is simply wonderful: Their measurement of a pentacene molecule using this carbon monoxide tip shows the bonds between the carbon atoms in five linked rings, and even suggests the bonds to the hydrogen atoms at the molecule’s periphery. Breathtaking work by [...]

Accelerating Future » Folding DNA into Twisted and Curved Nanoscale Shapes. Cool pics of some (artist’s conceptions of) shapes made from DNA.

“You have given considerable study to the Bible, haven’t you, Mr. Bryan?” “Yes, sir; I have tried to … But, of course, I have studied it more as I have become older than when I was a boy.” “Do you claim then that everything in the Bible should be literally interpreted?” “I believe everything in [...]

This is the Motoman SDA10 15-axis robot (“for high level of dexterity and range of motion”) putting together an office chair. This is roughly the kind of thing we need for the Feynman Path assembly robot. (in case the embedding isn’t working on your browser, it’s here) There are several times when the Motoman uses [...]

More evidence for a Society of Mind model, complete with economics: The Brain Economy by Michael L. Anderson over at Forbes. Together with fMRI, DTI and connectomes offer an unprecedented opportunity to understand how the brain operates. This is similar to learning about a city from looking at a map. You could easily find major [...]

As I pointed out yesterday, the internals of a super-AI are likely to look more or less like some organization of human-level AIs (which in turn are likely to be Societies of Mind of even simpler ones). So just drawing a box around it and calling it “weakly god-like” doesn’t help understand or design it.  [...]

Consider this marvelous story by Richard Feynman: (watch it now, this won’t make too much sense otherwise) Feynman and his friend John Tukey discover that they have completely different internal ways of thinking, or at least of counting, even though they are using the same words to talk about what it is they’re doing. Consider [...]

It’s a question of some interest whether the Singularity will consist of just more exponential growth, or whether some superexponential growth mode is likely to happen (or is even possible), such as would be required for a real mathematical singularity. On the side of exponential growth, as I pointed out here, is the fact that [...]

From nanowerk: Nanotechnology speeds desalination. This story illustrates both the best and worst of near-term nanotech research and reporting. It’s a valuable result in a very important application: “Current desalination methods force seawater through a filter using energies four times larger than necessary. Throughout the desalination process salt must be removed from one side of [...]

Previous in series: VTOL So, how close are we to flying cars? For specificity, let’s pick a technological bar to hurdle that answers most of the objections to the concept we’ve seen as comments on the previous posts: It should be relatively high-powered compared to current light craft. It should be STOVL for safety and [...]

The usually reliable Michael Anissimov has claimed that I seem to think that “superintelligence will automatically acquire a favorable morality without any real work.”  Now I’m not all that sensitive about such things; but it bothers me that SIAI, of all people, should fail to understand the basic parameters of the problem, and thus have [...]

cute video from nokia about what a nanotech phone might be like…

Previous in series: Why would I not want a flying car? How close to a true VTOL does a flying car have to be to retain the advantages we would like?  If you have to keep it at an airport, you have to drive there and back in a separate vehicle, obviating many of the [...]

Previous in series: Why would I want a flying car? There have been many reasons urged against the concept of flying cars; let’s take stock of them here: They are impractical (and thus time spent on the concept is wasted) They would be noisy or unsightly They would be dangerous, to the occupants or to [...]

Previous in series: Where is my flying car? Let’s consider:  I live in Laporte, PA, and have an office in the Foresight suite in Menlo Park, CA. That’s a distance of about 2800 miles, and I could drive it in about 40 hours, a full working week.  That’s a substantial commute. Of course, I don’t [...]

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 windows) but [...]

There’s a nice article over at the Singularity Hub that’s a round-up of currently-available haptics devices.  They seem primarily excited over the prospects of haptics in gaming, but there are two reasons we’re interested in developments. First is simply telerobotics, as in Feynman Path manipulation.  We want the feedback to help develop an intuitive feel [...]

While we’re on the subject of machine morality, here’s a talk I gave a couple of years ago on the subject.  You can see Wendell Wallach, one of the authors of Moral Machines, ask a question at about minute 27. Ethics for Machines

Over at Accelerating Future, Michael Annisimov has a pointer to a review of Moral Machines by Wallach and Allen.  He makes one major factual mistake, though:  MM is not the “first published book exclusively focused on Friendly AI” as he calls it. The first book dealing exclusively with these issues was my Beyond AI, which [...]

A short comment on Drexler’s paper Biological and Nanomechanical Systems: Contrasts in Evolutionary Capacity:  He distinguishes two types of design, O-style (like organic) and M-style (like mechanical) systems.  He points out that O-style systems are much more robust to incremental design modification, where M-style systems require coordinated changes that are much, much less likely to happen [...]