One of the species of early hominids is named Homo habilis, meaning “handy man,” after their significant advancement in tool use over previous hominids. One of the goals of the AGI Roadmap is to chart paths to full human intelligence, and one of the paths might follow the one that evolution took. The Wozniak Test, [...]

Foresight’s mission is essentially an educational one.  In simplest terms we are here to point out foreseeable technological developments that not only will make the future different from the past, but make it different in ways that aren’t obvious and which everyone isn’t already planning for. Nanotechnology — true nanotech in Drexler’s original sense of [...]

IEEE Spectrum: German Environmental Agency Miffed at Exploitation of Position Paper on Nanotechnology. From Dexter Johnson at nanoclast: Germany’s Federal Environment Agency (UBA) last week made a background paper available on their website, which they now concede contained no new research and none that their organization had actually performed, entitled “Nanotechnology for Humans and the [...]

Nanotechnology Enables Real Atomic Precision is the title of a piece by Susan Smith in Desktop Engineering, which includes comments by longtime Foresight Senior Associates Steve Vetter and Tihamer Toth-Fejel: While nanotechology might mean different things to different people, the term was originally coined to describe the building of things from the bottom up with [...]

Accelerating Future » RepRap “Mendel” to be Released Soon!. Nicw round-up with videos of the latest in the Rep-Rap world.

The 2-millimeter dash was a nanobot race held as part of the 2009 RoboCup Nanosoccer Demonstration Competition.  That was July; typically entry time, as for Robocup 2010 in Singapore, would be year end, but I can’t see any announcement for it on their page.  Does anyone know any more details?

Here’s a talk happening next Tuesday at UCLA: NanoSystems Seminar Series Title: High-speed AFM meets the Holographic Assembler Mervyn Miles Physics Bristol University Abstract: High-speed AFM is important for following processes occurring on short time scales inaccessible to conventional AFM. We are working on two versions: one is capable of extremely high imaging rates and [...]

Interview of Artificial General Intelligence Researcher Itamar Arel by Sander Olson. on Next Big Future This is particularly apropos, since as I write I’m heading off to the AGI Roadmap meeting which Itamar has organized (and of which Foresight is a sponsor).

From The Atlantic: Nouriel Roubini, the New York University economist who accurately forecast the bursting of the housing bubble and the resulting economic contraction, has become famous for his pessimism—he has been the gloomiest of the doomsayers… “The question is, can the U.S. grow in a non-bubble way?” [Roubini] asked the question rhetorically, so I [...]

Nanoparticle Breakthrough Can Make Higher Efficiency Solar Cells and Speed Development of Nanotechnology. Brian Wang at Next Big Future has the story of a classic case of serendipity in research. The yellow is what the sun puts out that hits the top of the atmosphere (what a solar power satellite would see, for example).  The [...]

Special thanks to longtime Foresight member Monica Anderson for setting up this November 4 Bay Area talk by another longtime Foresight member, Keith Lofstrom: Server-Sky: Solar powered server and communication arrays in Earth orbit. http://www.server-sky.com The EPA predicts US data center power consumption in 2011 will be  120 billion kilowatt hours, or 3% of total [...]

Researcher honored for experimental work in nanotechnology. — AFOSR via Eurekalert This is a re-announcement of Custance, Sugimoto, and Abe’ Feynman Prize from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. (I have a personal fondness for AFOSR since they funded some of my optical computing research back in the 80′s.) The Feynman Prizes in Nanotechnology [...]

Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: Self-Propelling Bacteria Harnessed to Turn Gears. No, it’s not harnessing the flagellar rotory motor to turn nanogears, it’s harnessing the entire beast, statistically, to turn microgears. Still interesting.

Don Eigler: Two decades of nanotech – opinion – 14 October 2009 – New Scientist. An interview with Don Eigler of “IBM in 35 xenon atoms” fame. Has nanotechnology trickled down into everyday life yet? To some extent. It’s showing up in coatings, cosmetics and sunscreens, and it’s starting to show up in electronic devices. [...]

An Interview with Peter Diamandis, Founder of X PRIZE: On Colonizing Space and Reinventing the Philanthropy Model | OppGreen Insights. The money quote: PD: So today, one of my companies, Space Adventures, sends people into orbit privately. A trip is $40 million. Our next customer goes up in 5 days, Guy Laliberté, the founder of [...]

There’s an excellent round-up over at Next Big Future on the Roadmap for Additive Manufacturing. This is solid freeform fabrication, 3-D printing, stereolithography, rapid prototyping, and so forth. In the long run, 3-D printing is one of the more straightforward paths to full-fledged nanotech with mechanosynthesis. Mechanosynthesis might be seen simply as the ultimate in [...]

US General Demands Robot Army, Counts 122 Lives That Bots Could Have Saved | Popular Science. It isn’t really clear from this story whether the “robots” involved or available were autonomous, teleoperated, or some combination. However, this story wraps up my reaction to a lot of techno-angst in a nutshell: Speaking at the Association for [...]

Superconductor World Record Surpasses 250K. Superconductors.ORG herein reports the observation of record high superconductivity near 254 Kelvin (-19C, -2F). This temperature critical (Tc) is believed accurate +/- 2 degrees, making this the first material to enter a superconductive state at temperatures commonly found in household freezers. In 3 months, it will be colder than that [...]

Overcoming Bias : Prefer Law To Values. Robin Hanson blogs on what kind of robots we’d want to live with in the future: The later era when robots are vastly more capable than people should be much like the case of choosing a nation in which to retire.  In this case we don’t expect to [...]

Less Wrong: I’m Not Saying People Are Stupid. The real question isn’t whether people are stupid. The real question is whether people make decisions that matter a lot incorrectly. I claim that we’ve already, as a society, decided that they do.  We’ve replaced kings — human beings — with artificial rule-based decision procedures based on [...]