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. It was, in simple terms, a case of [...]

There are those who worry about AIs or robots taking over the world.  Isaac Asimov famously worried about people worrying about it — what he called the Frankenstein Complex — and invented the Three Laws of Robotics to show, at a sort of literary level of understanding, that we could build machines that were safe [...]

With the Singularity Summit fast approaching, it’s worth spend a little time pondering the perennial question of nanotechnology vs AI: which will happen first, will they be independent, symbiotic, or synergetic, and so forth? I say perennial because this is a question that has been discussed at Foresight meetings ever since the first Conference 20 [...]

Josh Hall, on his way to catch a plane, sends us this news from Technology Review’s Katherine Bourzac: A California company is using silicon ink patterned on top of silicon wafers to boost the efficiency of solar cells. The Sunnyvale, CA, firm Innovalight says that the inkjet process is a cheaper route to more-efficient solar power. [...]

More on the “is technological change accelerating front, from Ars Technica: High-tech adoption happening faster, driving economic growth – Ars Technica. Some economists have attempted to measure the spread of technology within various nations, and discovered it’s not just our imagination: newer tech is being adopted faster, and appears to account for some of the [...]

Koreans Show Feasibility of Room Temperature Version of IBM Millipede Super High Density Memory.

Accelerating Future » World Future Society 20 Forecasts for 2010-2025. Michael A is mildly skeptical about World Future Society claim we’ll have “human-level AI” by 2025. This caused me to think about whether I believed it myself. I think the answer depends on how you define it. I think AI is going to be really [...]

Five essential things to know about evolution – Ars Technica. John Timmer dispels some common misconceptions. An understanding of evolution is key to understanding technological change — we individual humans are the mutations and crossover, but the dynamics of the overall process is similar.

I (and others) get interviewed by Minnesota Public Radio (podcast) about machine ethics… Robots: Our Future or Our End? | In the Loop | Minnesota Public Radio . Not deep but fun…

Norman Borlaug: The Man Who Saved More Human Lives Than Any Other Has Died – (h/t Reason Magazine). Norman Borlaug, the man who saved more human lives than anyone else in history, has died at age 95. Borlaug was the Father of the Green Revolution, the dramatic improvement in agricultural productivity that swept the globe [...]

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 [...]

Lithographic Graphitic Memories. HPC Wire reports that advances by the Rice University lab of James Tour have brought graphite’s potential as a mass data storage medium a step closer to reality and created the potential for reprogrammable gate arrays that could bring about a revolution in integrated circuit logic design. (H/T Sander Olson) (H/T Brian [...]

One of the major problems for micromachines, much less nanomachines, is wear. The phenomenon of stiction combines the two worst aspects of surface-to-surface interaction — a high coefficient of friction and a locally-generated high applied force — to cause enormous problems. At the very smallest scale, once we gain complete control over atomic configuration, superlubricity [...]

In Singularity or Bust I discussed the work of econophysicist Didier Sornette et al in using oscillating hyperexponentials to predict the collapse of Chinese equity markets. They have a new paper out which tells a bit more about how they predict the point of collapse. H/t Physics arXiv Blog. By combining (i) the economic theory [...]

A nice article in New Scientist about the search for substances harder than diamond. This is important for nanomechanical engineering because hardness translates into properties useful in machine parts at the nanoscale. A nanocrystalline form of diamond, sometimes called aggregated diamond nanorods, was described in 2003 by Tetsuo Irifune and his colleagues at Ehime University [...]

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). What are the great concerns of the Singularitarians? [...]

Recent advances in nanoplasmonics, h/t arXiv blog: Plasmonic Laser Heralds New Generation of Computing If you’re into buzzwords, nanoplasmonics is one you ought to know about. Nanoplasmonics, we’re told, is the next big thing–the field that will allow us to sense and manipulate the world on the smallest of scales. Plasmons, of course, are waves [...]

SENS4 is going on in Cambridge, England. The purpose of the SENS conference series, like all the SENS initiatives (such as the journal Rejuvenation Research), is to expedite the development of truly effective therapies to postpone and treat human aging by tackling it as an engineering problem: not seeking elusive and probably illusory magic bullets, [...]

The blogosphere (and science news-cliposphere) is all agog aver the discovery of magnetic monopoles, from Nature to Slashdot.  Nanowerk Physicsworld What’s happened is the publication of some papers and preprints about observation and measurement of monopoles in spin ices, particularly in the complex crystal structures of compounds such as Ho2Ti2O7 and Dy2Ti2O7 at cryogenic temperatures. [...]

Previous: What Singularity? Yesterday I took issue with Alfred Nordmann’s IEEE post in which he claimed that technological progress was slowing down instead of accelerating. I claimed instead that it was being distorted by the needs of the next rungs of the Maslow hierarchy, and that a huge portion of society’s energy was going into [...]