The brothers Montgolfier invented the hot air balloon upon the observation that smoke rises, and thus they figured that if they could catch it in a bag, the bag would be pulled upward. Hot air ballooning is quite popular today; people think of balloons as being quaint and pretty and natural, or at least more [...]

We’ve had a fair amount of interest in the Kartik M. Gada Humanitarian Innovation Prizes, mostly from RepRap types. They pointed out that we had a slight incompatibility in the specification of the open source requirements with those of the RepRap community itself. We’ve changed the requirements to allow either BSD or GPL. To make [...]

At the Foresight congerence special-interest lunch on IQ tests for AI, Monica Anderson suggested a test involving separating text which had had spaces and punctuation removed, back into words.  As a somewhat whimsical version of the test, I suggested the Sigil of Scoteia: In case you’re unfamiliar with it, it’s the frontispiece of the novel [...]

In the terminology I introduced in Beyond AI, all the AI we have right now is distinctly hypohuman: The overall question we are considering, is AI possible, can be summed up essentially as “is diahuman AI possible?”  The range of things humans can do, done as flexibly as humans can do them, and learned the [...]

40s: Cybernetics, the notion the brain did logic in circuits, feedback 50s: the computer, stored programs, Logic Theorist 60s: LISP, semantic nets, GOFAI 70s: SHRDLU, AM 80s: AI winter, expert systems, neural nets 90s: robots, machine learning 00s: DARPA grand challenge level of competence The main point of this post is to answer any objections [...]

I’m about to start a series of posts on the topic of why I think AI is actually possible.  I realize that most of the readers here don’t probably need too much convincing on that subject, but you’d be surprised how many very smart people, many of them professors of computer science, are skeptical to [...]

Feynman anniversary event to be held at University of South Carolina. h/t Nanowerk In February 1960, the Caltech magazine Engineering & Science published Feynman’s “Plenty of Room”, and it has been re-published ten times since then. This has become one of the best-known papers in the history of nanotechnology. The fiftieth anniversary of the initial [...]

From Ars Technica: Nobel Intent, a thought-provoking article on what the prevalence of computational science portends for reproducibility in science: Victoria Stodden is currently at Yale Law School, and she gave a short talk at the recent Science Online meeting in which she discussed the legal aspects of ensuring that the code behind computational tools [...]

Roadmaps to Nanotech and AGI slides are here Josh [note -- we know about the permission problem, trying to get it fixed][should be fixed now]

Glenn Reynolds, a past Foresight Director, writes some analysis of the recent special election in Mass.: Of course, what the GOP apparat does is less important nowadays than it was. As I noted before, there’s a whole lot of disintermediation going on here — Scott Brown got money and volunteers via the Internet and the [...]

Today is the last day of the free webcast of the 2010 Foresight Conference being held now in Palo Alto. The bandwidth coming out of the Sheraton is marginal, so the video may be low-res, but we will be posting high-res videos later, funds permitting (feel free to assist with this goal!). You can also follow the conference on [...]

There’s still time to register, but if you just can’t participate in person this year, check out the free webcast of the Foresight Conference being held this weekend in Palo Alto. The bandwidth coming out of the Sheraton is marginal, so the video will be low-res, but we will be posting high-res videos later, funds permitting [...]

Two nanoparticles connected by a polymer will tend to be drawn together at finite temperatures (though not at absolute zero) because as the polymer chain explores the states available to it, there are many more tangled and balled up ones than stretched-out straight ones — even though there is no overt force pulling the chain [...]

A round-up of commentary about the state of nanotech research, given the 50th anniversary of Feynman’s talk: Adam Keiper in the WSJ If this dispute over nano-nomenclature only involved some sniping scientists and a few historians watching over a tiny corner of Feynman’s legacy, it would be of little consequence. But hundreds of companies and [...]

Foresight 2010 will be webcast live (free) at http://www.techzulu.com/live.html. You can also follow it at Twitter:  #Foresight2010 I’ll be travelling (mostly standing in airpote security lines) between now and then. See you there!

Actually, the ominous part is all over, so relax. A week before the very first Foresight Conference, there was an earthquake — the famous 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.  The conference was moved from the Stanford campus to the Garden Court in downtown Palo Alto as a result. Now, just a week before our 2010 Conference, [...]

Just for fun, imagine you could build a tower up to geosynchronous orbital height. If you stepped off the top floor, you’d just hang there, in orbit. If the tower you build is shorter, you’d fall, since (a) you aren’t going quite as fast, and (b) orbital speed is faster as you get lower. However, [...]

Back in April, I wrote: Nanotechnology, the revolutionary technology, was always about the power of self-replication and never only about the very small. The ability of a machine system to make more of itself, or more generally, make its own parts and be able to assemble or replace them as needed, is called autogeny.  There’s [...]

The other day I got a worried call from my mother-in-law.  My wife usually calls her during her commute but that day she neither called or answered her phone. Turns out my wife’s iPhone had crashed — the software had wedged and there was no way to reboot.  The amusing, if you can call it [...]

Roboplane tech can deal with air-traffic control directly • The Register. Flying cars – or personal aircraft anyway – have moved a step nearer, as ongoing trials using robot aeroplanes and next-gen air traffic equipment in America are said to offer the option of “reduced crews” on commercial cargo flights. US aerospace firm GE Aviation [...]