The UK-based Institute of Physics (IOP) publishes, among other things, the journal Nanotechnology, one of the leading journals in the field, and has had special issues with papers from Foresight conferences gaoing back to the 90s. It was thus somewhat surprising, yet gratifying, to find them submitting quite a strongly-worded critique of practices in climatology [...]

It’s been snowing continuously here for about 2 days.  The heaviest snows I’ve experienced in my life (for any significant amount of time) were an inch an hour, but this has been half that — amounting to a foot a day. If it were to keep snowing like this for a week, it would be [...]

Robin Hanson comments on David Brin’s response to a New Scientist editorial. As Brin notes, many would-be broadcasters come from an academic area where for decades the standard assumption has been that aliens are peaceful zero-population-growth no-nuke greens, since we all know that any other sort quickly destroy themselves.  This seems to me an instructive [...]

Let’s try to pull all the threads together, as futurists — which is the whole point here — and get some idea about when it might be reasonable to expect AI to show up.  When I say AI I want to look at the entire diahuman range, so the answer would still be a range [...]

Rob Freitas has a new paper up: Robert A. Freitas Jr., “Diamond Trees (Tropostats):  A Molecular Manufacturing Based System for Compositional Atmospheric Homeostasis,” IMM Report 43, 10 February 2010 Abstract. The future technology of molecular manufacturing will enable long-term sequestration of atmospheric carbon in solid diamond products, along with sequestration of lesser masses of numerous [...]

Why we should suspect that the brain has a limited ability to recurse, but prefers to daisy-chain instead: The house the malt the rat the cat the dog the cow with the crumpled horn the maiden all forlorn the man all tattered and torn the priest all shaven and shorn the cock that crowed in [...]

… to boldly go where no man has gone before! This final phrase of the classic Star Trek opening spiel had two problems with it, one as seen by people after the fact, and the other as seen by those who had gone before. As seen by earlier generations, the phrase “to boldly go” is [...]

Foresight Institute Feynman Prize winner Dr. Ralph Merkle, perhaps better known to Nanodot readers for his nanotech work, has just won the IEEE’s Hamming Medal along with Martin Hellman and Whitfield Diffie: Thirty-five years ago, Martin Hellman, Whitfield Diffie and Ralph Merkle developed an easy method for sending secure messages over insecure channels. With the [...]

Over the past ten to fifteen years, research in computational linguistics has undergone a dramatic “paradigm shift.” Statistical learning methods that automatically acquire knowledge for language processing from empirical data have largely supplanted systems based on human knowledge engineering. The original success of statistical methods in speech recognition has been particularly influential in motivating the [...]

It’s pure palladium, 8 nm wide, made at the University of Birmingham’s Nanoscale Physics Research Laboratory. h/t Nanowerk

In E.E. Smith’s famous Lensman series, the galaxy is the battleground between two races of superintelligent beings, the (good) Arisians and the (evil) Eddorians.  When I listen to people who worry that we are about to create a superintelligence which will take over the world, I get the impression they’ve come from reading “Galactic Patrol” [...]

The debate held at Foresight 2010 between Robin Hanson and Mencius Moldbug on the subject of futarchy is now online at Vimeo. Watch it online or download it: 1. Get a vimeo account by registering. 2. Option-click on the download link close to the bottom right on the video’s page 3. Wait an hour It’s [...]

“It was a true solar-plexus blow, and completely knocked out, Perkins staggered back against the instrument-board. His outflung arm pushed the power-lever out to its last notch, throwing full current through the bar, which was pointed straight up as it had been when they made their landing.” My current research in AI, such as it [...]

Phaedon Avouris, winner of the Feynman Prize in 1999, is head of the nanoscale science and technology group At IBM, which has recently reported significant advances in synthesizing transistors from graphene using conventional lithography methods. IBM Demonstrates Graphene Transistor Twice as Fast as Silicon Graphene transistors promise 100GHz speeds Graphene Transistors that Can Work at [...]

The first AI blog was written by a major, highly respected figure in the field. It consisted, as a blog should, of a series of short essays on various subjects relating to the central topic. It appeared in the mid-80s, just as the ARPAnet was transforming over into the internet. The only little thing I [...]

So far, in making my case that AI is (a) possible and (b) likely in the next decade or two, I’ve focused on techniques which are or easily could be part of a generally intelligent system, and which will clearly be enhanced by the two orders of magnitude increase in processing power we expect from [...]

AI researchers in the 80s ran into a problem: the more their systems knew, the slower they ran.  Whereas we know that people who learn more tend to get faster (and better in other ways) at whatever it is they’re doing. The solution, of course, is: Duh. the brain doesn’t work like a von Neumann [...]

Bayer (the same company that makes the aspirin) is now beginning to manufacture multi-walled carbon nanotubes in industrial quantities.  The pilot plant will produce 200 tons per year, and the market is expected to grow at 25% per year. The MWCNTs are for materials use, meaning mostly fiber-reinforced composites, e.g. airplanes, tennis racquets, arrows, and [...]

So we will take it as given, or at least observed in some cases and reasonably likely in general, that AI can, at the current state of the programming art, handle any particular well-specified task, given enough (human) programming effort aimed at that one task. We can be a bit more specific about what “well-specified” [...]