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Moravec pretty much said what he's been saying for years. The significant thing is that he's been publishing charts of CPU power vs time for over a decade, and results are tracking his predictions. This is what's starting to get people worried; we seem to be on track for human-level CPU power in a decade or two. He's a robot vision guy, and robot vision has always been compute-limited. At long last, it's starting to work, not because we're any smarter, but because throwing enough MIPS at dumb algorithms works for vision. This, I think, colors Moravec's view of AI.

Joy makes an important point, that we may get nanotechnology before AI, implying the ability to create self-replicating, dumb, troublesome systems. That, I think, is the real issue.

This does not, by the way, mean that Joy is a complete crackpot. It just means that he's advocating "solutions" that other people have already thought about, and pretty much proved to themselves won't work.

To get access to the 15-year tradition Merkle is working from, hook up with the Foresight Institute at http://www.foresight.org.

Eric Raymond, hemos, Tim O'Reilly, Marvin Minsky, Eric Drexler, Bill Joy and many others will be discussing this topic at a conference May 19-21 in Palo Alto called Confronting Singularity.

Apologies in advance for those who cannot afford to attend this meeting. We hope later to have one that is more affordable.

I, my mother, my sister, and my father all regularly put our laptops (unless my sister steals mine to play Civ:CTP or HoMM3 or dad and I use his to look up flight charts) in the nose storage of a plane that flies at about 30,000 feet. No pressurization, no heat. And my laptop still works fine, thankee very much, sir (actually I'm looking at selling one of em if someone wants a TP 570 -- works great, almost new). I believe that heat is another matter, but I've had some laptops that get hot enough that the manual specifically states that you should never, ever put it on your lap (which is where I have it), and the hard drive works just fine.

Another point is that this is self-assembling magnetic storage. I was at the last Foresight Convention on Nanotechnology, and for all the amazing and interesting things people had done or were trying to do, the real roadblock was self-assembly. building a motor with an AFM is not exactly practical.

Offtopic: why can't we make players that read/write MD media, and play MP3's? Now that is something I would buy instantly. (or when I have enough PointClick dollars to get one -- really offtopic: why doesn't PointClick let you use Mozilla, dammit?)

Lea

The Foresight Institute has full texts of 'Engines of Creation' and 'Unbounding the future' online.

The problems mentioned by Bill Joy in his interview point out how poorly informed he is. Anyone who has been in the computer industry as long as he has, should know enough to "read the manual(s)" before offering uninformed opinions. The problems regarding nanotechnology run amok have been discussed for many years in the sci.nanotech newsgroups as well as at conferences for the Foresight Institute's Senior Associates. The basic solutions involve making "safe" (e.g. reviewed, open source) designs available while at the same time developing defenses against nanotech run amok. The Extropy Institute's Mailing List Archives, for example, contains recent discussions about encouraging the availability of "almost anything" manufacturing boxes (similar to Star Trek "replicators"), while discouraging the availability of "everything" boxes.

Diamondoid or saphire based molecularly assembled nanobots used in medical applications will greatly exceed the capabilities in of "biobots" built on existing genetic machines (DNA, enzymes, bacteria, cells, etc.) because they are stronger, can pack the "code" more densely, and can have more complex programs than the rather "ad hoc" designs that nature has provided us with. Most of the first volume of Nanomedicine is devoted to determining exactly what the physical limits will be on power, communication, mobility, etc. Most of the applications will be discussed in Volumes II and III.

Joy may be right that the technology poses a threat to the "human species", but that begs the question of "Why would you want to run on obsolete hardware?". Anyone who understands even a little astronomy knows that galactic hazards doom biological human forms to death at some point. Only those humans who choose to upload have any hope of living the trillion or so years that seems quite feasible. So while the hopes for biochemical humans are rather dismal even with Nanomedicine, the long term prospects for humanity, based on what nanotechnology allows are quite good indeed.

As far as nanotechnology background material goes, the best (nontechnical) source is Engines of Creation. Other references can be found in Eric Drexler's CV.

The problems mentioned by Bill Joy in his interview point out how poorly informed he is. Anyone who has been in the computer industry as long as he has, should know enough to "read the manual(s)" before offering uninformed opinions. The problems regarding nanotechnology run amok have been discussed for many years in the sci.nanotech newsgroups as well as at conferences for the Foresight Institute's Senior Associates. The basic solutions involve making "safe" (e.g. reviewed, open source) designs available while at the same time developing defenses against nanotech run amok. The Extropy Institute's Mailing List Archives, for example, contains recent discussions about encouraging the availability of "almost anything" manufacturing boxes (similar to Star Trek "replicators"), while discouraging the availability of "everything" boxes.

Diamondoid or saphire based molecularly assembled nanobots used in medical applications will greatly exceed the capabilities in of "biobots" built on existing genetic machines (DNA, enzymes, bacteria, cells, etc.) because they are stronger, can pack the "code" more densely, and can have more complex programs than the rather "ad hoc" designs that nature has provided us with. Most of the first volume of Nanomedicine is devoted to determining exactly what the physical limits will be on power, communication, mobility, etc. Most of the applications will be discussed in Volumes II and III.

Joy may be right that the technology poses a threat to the "human species", but that begs the question of "Why would you want to run on obsolete hardware?". Anyone who understands even a little astronomy knows that galactic hazards doom biological human forms to death at some point. Only those humans who choose to upload have any hope of living the trillion or so years that seems quite feasible. So while the hopes for biochemical humans are rather dismal even with Nanomedicine, the long term prospects for humanity, based on what nanotechnology allows are quite good indeed.

As far as nanotechnology background material goes, the best (nontechnical) source is Engines of Creation. Other references can be found in Eric Drexler's CV.

The problems mentioned by Bill Joy in his interview point out how poorly informed he is. Anyone who has been in the computer industry as long as he has, should know enough to "read the manual(s)" before offering uninformed opinions. The problems regarding nanotechnology run amok have been discussed for many years in the sci.nanotech newsgroups as well as at conferences for the Foresight Institute's Senior Associates. The basic solutions involve making "safe" (e.g. reviewed, open source) designs available while at the same time developing defenses against nanotech run amok. The Extropy Institute's Mailing List Archives, for example, contains recent discussions about encouraging the availability of "almost anything" manufacturing boxes (similar to Star Trek "replicators"), while discouraging the availability of "everything" boxes.

Diamondoid or saphire based molecularly assembled nanobots used in medical applications will greatly exceed the capabilities in of "biobots" built on existing genetic machines (DNA, enzymes, bacteria, cells, etc.) because they are stronger, can pack the "code" more densely, and can have more complex programs than the rather "ad hoc" designs that nature has provided us with. Most of the first volume of Nanomedicine is devoted to determining exactly what the physical limits will be on power, communication, mobility, etc. Most of the applications will be discussed in Volumes II and III.

Joy may be right that the technology poses a threat to the "human species", but that begs the question of "Why would you want to run on obsolete hardware?". Anyone who understands even a little astronomy knows that galactic hazards doom biological human forms to death at some point. Only those humans who choose to upload have any hope of living the trillion or so years that seems quite feasible. So while the hopes for biochemical humans are rather dismal even with Nanomedicine, the long term prospects for humanity, based on what nanotechnology allows are quite good indeed.

As far as nanotechnology background material goes, the best (nontechnical) source is Engines of Creation. Other references can be found in Eric Drexler's CV.

The problems mentioned by Bill Joy in his interview point out how poorly informed he is. Anyone who has been in the computer industry as long as he has, should know enough to "read the manual(s)" before offering uninformed opinions. The problems regarding nanotechnology run amok have been discussed for many years in the sci.nanotech newsgroups as well as at conferences for the Foresight Institute's Senior Associates. The basic solutions involve making "safe" (e.g. reviewed, open source) designs available while at the same time developing defenses against nanotech run amok. The Extropy Institute's Mailing List Archives, for example, contains recent discussions about encouraging the availability of "almost anything" manufacturing boxes (similar to Star Trek "replicators"), while discouraging the availability of "everything" boxes.

Diamondoid or saphire based molecularly assembled nanobots used in medical applications will greatly exceed the capabilities in of "biobots" built on existing genetic machines (DNA, enzymes, bacteria, cells, etc.) because they are stronger, can pack the "code" more densely, and can have more complex programs than the rather "ad hoc" designs that nature has provided us with. Most of the first volume of Nanomedicine is devoted to determining exactly what the physical limits will be on power, communication, mobility, etc. Most of the applications will be discussed in Volumes II and III.

Joy may be right that the technology poses a threat to the "human species", but that begs the question of "Why would you want to run on obsolete hardware?". Anyone who understands even a little astronomy knows that galactic hazards doom biological human forms to death at some point. Only those humans who choose to upload have any hope of living the trillion or so years that seems quite feasible. So while the hopes for biochemical humans are rather dismal even with Nanomedicine, the long term prospects for humanity, based on what nanotechnology allows are quite good indeed.

As far as nanotechnology background material goes, the best (nontechnical) source is Engines of Creation. Other references can be found in Eric Drexler's CV.

Neal Stephenson gets it, and from the Washington Post article it would appear Bill Joy does as well (his comment "That creates the possibility of empowering individuals for extreme evil").

One ray of hope is that we'll potentially be able to download ourselves into tougher "survival machines"; the human body is an amazing but still pretty fragile thing. For those of you who'd like to know what all the fuss about nanotechnology is, check out the Foresight Institute.

If that seems a bit indirect to you, then I'd strongly urge that you put the money toward legal and political efforts, like the aforementioned EFF or its European counterpart(s). I know that certain elements in the EU are pushing for a U.S.-style patent system, which would be a disaster. Find out who's opposing it and give them a hand.

If that seems a bit indirect to you, then I'd strongly urge that you put the money toward legal and political efforts, like the aforementioned EFF or its European counterpart(s). I know that certain elements in the EU are pushing for a U.S.-style patent system, which would be a disaster. Find out who's opposing it and give them a hand.

A gentler intro to nanomedicine is available here, in an earlier book.

One of the interesting ideas from Freitas's book is the respirocyte, an artificial red blood cell with a much higher oxygen-carrying capacity than the biological version. A person with respirocytes in his bloodstream could sit on the bottom of a swimming pool for nearly four hours.

A gentler intro to nanomedicine is available here, in an earlier book.

One of the interesting ideas from Freitas's book is the respirocyte, an artificial red blood cell with a much higher oxygen-carrying capacity than the biological version. A person with respirocytes in his bloodstream could sit on the bottom of a swimming pool for nearly four hours.

A gentler intro to nanomedicine is available here, in an earlier book.

One of the interesting ideas from Freitas's book is the respirocyte, an artificial red blood cell with a much higher oxygen-carrying capacity than the biological version. A person with respirocytes in his bloodstream could sit on the bottom of a swimming pool for nearly four hours.

A gentler intro to nanomedicine is available here, in an earlier book.

One of the interesting ideas from Freitas's book is the respirocyte, an artificial red blood cell with a much higher oxygen-carrying capacity than the biological version. A person with respirocytes in his bloodstream could sit on the bottom of a swimming pool for nearly four hours.

Chris Peterson of the Foresight Institute did a projection a couple of years ago using Moore's Law.

She found that computing elements should be at the sub-nanometer scale by 2015. This implies that molecular nanotechnology should be coming online about the same time, since we will be fabricating logic elements at the molecular level.

This assumes quite a bit, but seems reasonable given the growing levels of research into nanoscale chemistry, molecular biology, and custom molecular synthesis.

IV

While commenting on some problems regarding SETI searches, I provide a discussion of how O'Neill's colonies might be updated using biotechnology and nanotechnology. Steel and aluminium are terrible structural materials compared with diamond, buckytubes and sapphire. The combination of the short replicating times allowed by nanoscale self-replicating systems and the material properties of the strongest materials will allow us to rapidly go far beyond O'Neill's vision -- to the point of dismantling entire planets.

Government support or programs is not required to do this. Molecular Nanotechnology of the type being developed by Zyvex is required. In addition, we need the designs for the nanobots to take apart the asteroids or planets, construct the mass drivers and solar arrays, etc. The lack of molecular designs, is discussed in the Nano@Home proposal. Because we will be able to do the designs at home, a small dedicated group will eventually be able to bootstrap the development of space and achieve the vision O'Neill described. Because of the rapid increase in the available resources (matter and energy) per person, the large number of people living in poverty should disappear as well. The only potential problem I see is if Mind Uploading becomes feasible (or real AIs are developed) and unlimited copying of such entitites is allowed. This has been explored in more detail by Robin Hanson in If Uploads Come First.

Gibson's got nothing. More like Engines of Creation.

Try reading Engines of Creation by Eric Drexler. Then you'll know where Neal Stephenson got his material.

Or take a look at the website for Zyvex, "the first molecular nanotechnology development company".

There are actually free HTML versions of both Engines of Creation and Unbounding the Future available on the Foresight web site, here.

I own this book, and while I've started to read it, I've realized that it is probably not the best book to read as an introduction into nanotechnology. I've seen a number of others available at The Foresight Institute that appear to be better ones to start out with, and I plan to purchase those before coming back to this one.

It's more technical, and definately a good one for people who have more than just a passing interest in molecular nanotechnology, but not the one you'll try and get your friends and family to read.

Anyone know the names of some better introductory ones? I think there are two or three mentioned in the review, but I believe there are more than that available.
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Anybody interested in this topic can join the Foresight Institute, which is dedicated to nanotechnology. They hold several conferences during the year, where you can meet Drexler and other luminaries in the field.

-stern

Pop over to http://www.foresight.org and check out Robert Freitas' work on nanomedicine in the "what's new". Having processing power like that in a watch will be childs play. You could have them replacing your red blood cells, and still doing better at oxygen and CO2 transport than the original blood by an order of magnitude. I have artwork on my high-bandwidth homepage of nanotech bloodcells at work.

Vik :v)

Yet again, an article in which people talk about the wonderful (and terrible) things that nanotechnology has in store for us. These people don't seem to have any idea about the massive scale we're looking at here.

The dangers of Nanotechnology as both a weapon and the potential commercial misuse are staggering. Journalists are right to question the potential outcomes of this technology, just as they were right to question the justifications of molecular biology advances back in the late '70s. That journalists printed many mistaken ideas and displayed the ignorance of a layperson, compared to the knowledge of a scientist on the inside, doesn't disqualify them from printing valuable stories in order to inform the public.

I don't want to be a killjoy, but we're still taking the very, very first few step. The equivalent of looking at Hero's engine and talking about spaceships.

I don't understand the reference to Hero... Sorry. But I think you would find K. Eric Drexler, and the folks at the Foresight Institute might disagree on your timetable. The point they make, and one which I agree, is that the critical threshold discovery for viable molecular manufacturing is Self Replication. Once we can build a robot which can replicate itself using ambient atoms, we can actually begin manufacturing materials on a large scale. You might argue that this manufacturing process is fraught with the perils of complexity for which we can't plan. And you might be right... but I suspect that this kind of manufacturing is highly parallelizeable, hence the success of biological organisms, and we're going to find that a few fairly simple rules will allow us to build very complex three dimensional systems just like biological organisms.

Nanotech will be very very useful for certain things, but I suspect it will be a niche product for a long time, happily taking one very simple thing and turning it into another simple thing.

You've got to be kidding me. Nanotech represents the biggest (smallest) manufacturing shift ever. It's weapons potential make it a sure bet for NSF/DARPA funding for some time to come. And with funding on that scale, expect returns. How long did the government seed molecular biology research before it turned commercial? And before it turned commercial, how long was that research providing useful products to the military?

Remember, we still know very, very little about how our own cells are constructed. Trying to create a nanobot than can go in there and create new ones is a great idea, but it's not going to be here next week (or next year, or maybe not next century).

Nitpick: I hate it when people tell me to remember a point they're trying to present forcefully. As a reader, it's not my job to remember your stated position before it's even been written! :-) But that's not a fair complaint against your argument. We know a hell of a lot more about cell development and its molecular mechanisms today than thirty years ago. We actually know enough to create entirely new forms of bacteria. We have the general idea for how all the mechanisms work, even if some mysteries (such as protein folding) persist. This is after thirty years... and many technologies created researching molecular biology will be transferable over to molecular nanotechnology... we have a hell of a head start with this endevour compared to researchers in the sixties. I think you're a bit too skeptical here...

I suspect that our only hopy will be developing AI powerful enough to do all the hard work for us... (and that's another really big job)

Wow... now developing real AI is a seriously tough job which requires major new scientific discoveries before we can even begin thinking about a timetable. Nanotech almost just an engineering problem at this point... I don't think we'll need any form of self aware machine in order to resolve the parallelizeable problems of complex 3D manufacturing that Nanotech implies. And honestly, given the strategic nature of this technology, we're going to see nanotech advances a hell of a lot faster than you're predicting.

But I hope not... Humanity is less ready for Nanotechnology than discovering Atomic Bomb. And we still haven't figured a way out of that mess yet.

Check out Foresight.

Start with the Foresight Institute .
Make sure you read the Nanotech Study Guide .
Then go to the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing .
Also look at Zyvex , a company founded to develop molecular nanotechnology.
For fun, read Neal Stephenson's DIAMOND AGE and Michael Flynn's NANOTECH CHRONICLES .

Good luck.

Start with the Foresight Institute .
Make sure you read the Nanotech Study Guide .
Then go to the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing .
Also look at Zyvex , a company founded to develop molecular nanotechnology.
For fun, read Neal Stephenson's DIAMOND AGE and Michael Flynn's NANOTECH CHRONICLES .

Good luck.

More amazingly people hope to use them as a magic glue to rapidly (vs. slow STM/AFM) place oriented arrays of objects on surfaces with some ~10's nm accuracy (www-chem.harvard.edu/GeorgeWhites ides). One can imagine perfect self-assembled molecular switches which have ideal (no "statistically variant" 100 atom problems, etc.) circuit switching behavior (assuming interface doesn't have worse problems)being implanted into future semiconductor devices.

See www.foresight.org/NanoRev/ for an overview of the nanomolecular playground.

That was announced in July '97 and the guitar was made with what is now an old manufacturing process, limited to 3 layers of silicon.

The latest red-hot technology is 5-layer silicon, which allows the manufacture of far more complex machines - including machines which can errect themselves into structures out of the plane of the manufactured silicon.

HP are now making 2 nanometer wires - much smaller than the 40nm wires used on the nanoguitar - to join up their molecular logic gates with. In about 8 years time the first "molecular chips" will start to appear, and my guess is that the next 5 will see the advent of the first nanotech assembler. (see http://www.foresight.org)

Vik :v)

The technical book on the real discipline of nanotech is Nanosystems, by father of the field Eric Drexler. While Engines of Creation explores the vision, Nanosystems explores how we'll really get there.

The technical book on the real discipline of nanotech is Nanosystems, by father of the field Eric Drexler. While Engines of Creation explores the vision, Nanosystems explores how we'll really get there.

...the technical book on the real discipline: Nanosystems, by father of the field Eric Drexler. While Engines of Creation explores the vision, Nanosystems explores how we'll really get there.

...the technical book on the real discipline: Nanosystems, by father of the field Eric Drexler. While Engines of Creation explores the vision, Nanosystems explores how we'll really get there.

I've read both Diamond Age and Snow Crash. Both books had great beginnings, but both books ended up meandering off into a very speculative (credulity-straining) endings.

While I haven't read Snow Crash, I did really feel that way about The Diamond Age. The first half to three-quarters of the book was incredible. I was so addicted to it that I had trouble putting it down to even get some sleep. So I guess I sort of read the ending just to finish it and out of inertia, since it got really, well, off. Didn't seem to fit the rest of the book, and in many ways was a let-down.

The whole topic of the book however was so exciting. I've always had an interest in nanotechnology, but the amount he got into shows that he put a lot of thought and effort into trying to come up with something believable and realistic, based on what we know know.

This book in a way pushed me even more into thinking about nanotech. Enough so as to do other reading on the web (such as checking out The Foresight Institute, and seriously considering doing more studying and going back to school to try and get into the nanotech field - instead of waiting and hoping, I think I'd much prefer to help make it happen in my lifetime.
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Combine a little AFM with massively paralleled MEMS robotics, and you have your nanotech assembler.

Do it using balls instead of wafers, and you could (in theory) build an entire microfab into a rod, say 5ft high, 2" diameter. But I digress... ;-)

I met Ted Nelson a few months back and, like nanotechnologist Eric Drexler who documented the effort in a chapter of "Engines of Creation", he's a fascinating guy - neural connections just chaotic enough to create something like this.

What I really want to know, though, is will it layer well over the web infrastructure? Its technical superiority won't win it users; it's not enough of a paradigm shift on its own. Let's hope it plugs into today's web and lets the networked society truly get a grip.


>>>>>>>>>
Read a Linux newbie's musings in The Microsoft Matrix.

read Eric Drexler's "Engines of Creation" (full text online)

build a nanocomputer ... and you're no less prone to bugs and viruses

I might be wrong about that. I went to a talk on reversible computing, which you'd think would have relevance only at the lowest levels of abstraction. It ends up having ramifications all the way up, if you want to implement reversibility completely. (We can probably get almost all the benefit of reversibility with incomplete implementations.)

read Eric Drexler's "Engines of Creation" (full text online)

build a nanocomputer ... and you're no less prone to bugs and viruses

I might be wrong about that. I went to a talk on reversible computing, which you'd think would have relevance only at the lowest levels of abstraction. It ends up having ramifications all the way up, if you want to implement reversibility completely. (We can probably get almost all the benefit of reversibility with incomplete implementations.)

If money were dangled in front, like maybe the bounty-ware approach, we might see this happening...

If money were dangled in front, like maybe the bounty-ware approach, we might see this happening...

how can you make a robot smaller than the smallest possible computer core?

Maybe you can find something better than circuits etched on silicon surfaces. Tom Knight at MIT is looking at how to get bacteria to perform useful computations, using genetic engineering methods that have become well understood. You can mail-order custom DNA sequences, graft them into cells, and get the ribosomes to synthesize the proteins you want, if you're smart enough to design proteins. Eric Drexler, generally recognized as the guy who formulated the concept of nanotech, wrote one of his early papers on the possibility of engineering proteins as a step to a more complete form of nanotechnology.

The nanotechnology literature (see Engines of Creation and Unbounding the Future) talks about placing atoms at specific locations as you build up a molecular machine incrementally, in a process called mechanosynthesis. If this works (and I'm not aware of any technically sound arguments that it wouldn't), it might become possible to build almost any object whose existence doesn't violate the laws of physics. At least, it would become possible to build a lot of different things we can't build today.

how the hell do you tell them what to do? ...

how big are these things going to have to start out, since the first generation must contain all sets of code for all generations of nanomachines?

There is a lot of excellent information about nanotechnology at Ralph Merkle's site at Xerox PARC.

how can you make a robot smaller than the smallest possible computer core?

Maybe you can find something better than circuits etched on silicon surfaces. Tom Knight at MIT is looking at how to get bacteria to perform useful computations, using genetic engineering methods that have become well understood. You can mail-order custom DNA sequences, graft them into cells, and get the ribosomes to synthesize the proteins you want, if you're smart enough to design proteins. Eric Drexler, generally recognized as the guy who formulated the concept of nanotech, wrote one of his early papers on the possibility of engineering proteins as a step to a more complete form of nanotechnology.

The nanotechnology literature (see Engines of Creation and Unbounding the Future) talks about placing atoms at specific locations as you build up a molecular machine incrementally, in a process called mechanosynthesis. If this works (and I'm not aware of any technically sound arguments that it wouldn't), it might become possible to build almost any object whose existence doesn't violate the laws of physics. At least, it would become possible to build a lot of different things we can't build today.

how the hell do you tell them what to do? ...

how big are these things going to have to start out, since the first generation must contain all sets of code for all generations of nanomachines?

There is a lot of excellent information about nanotechnology at Ralph Merkle's site at Xerox PARC.

A lot of people have put a lot of thought into this one. Early nanotools will be externally driven, possibly by pressure-activated pistons. Nano-scale computers will eventually replace these early, externally-driven devices.
There are plausible, if unproven, designs for nano-scale computers, including a variety of non-volatile RAM. It's likely to happen. See foresight for more details.

What I want to know is: What do you mean by "And how big are these things going to have to start out, since the first generation must contain all sets of code for all generations of nanomachines?"

Why? Please don't confuse the concept of self-replication with the fallacy that we have to figure everything out first and turn it all over to the machines. Early nanotech will be macrocomputer-driven. It will, however, provide the tools to create nanocomputers. From there, it's still quite an engineering leap to get to fully self-replicating systems.

Never mind all the other goodies we could get with nano-machines! ;]

Herbert von Kammerstein