Slashdot Mirror

Check out Matt Groves' visionary ideas for augmented reality in the future, including Virtual Gifts, personalized street signs, new sporting events, and my favorite, getting attacked by the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man as you're heading home from work.

Vernor Vinge's Hugo-nominated short story, Fast Times at Fairmont High, shows a our society becoming dominated by AR, 25 years in the future. People change their clothes, housing, decor just by updating the shared database. Kids even cover up their zits with AR rather than Clearasil. There are no more computer monitors because you can conjure up a virtual monitor and attach it to any surface or just let it hang in mid-air. It's an astonishing technology in Vinge's hands. (...more on the story's use of AR )

Then take a look at some current work in the field, with videos showing a small CG clock tower superimposed on a piece of cardboard being waved around. It jitters a little but overall it looks pretty good.

GREY GOO: Self-replicating (von Neumann) nanomachines spreading uncontrolably, building copies of themselves using all available material. This is a commonly mentioned nanotechnology disaster scenario, although it is rather unlikely due to energy constraints and elemental abundances. More probable disaster scenarios are the green goo, golden goo and red goo, khaki goo scenarios. As a protection blue goo has been proposed.

BLUE GOO: Nanomachines used as protection against grey goo and other destructive nanomachines, possibly even used for law-enforcement (nanarchy). According to the entry in the Jargon File, it is sometimes used to denote any form of benign nanotechnology in the environment.

RED GOO: Deliberately designed and released destructive nanotechnology, as opposed to accidentally created grey goo.

KHAKI GOO: Military nanotechnology; see grey goo.

GREEN GOO: Nanomachines or bio-engineered organisms used for population control of humans, either by governments or eco-terrorist groups. Would most probably work by sterilizing people through otherwise harmless infections. See Nick Szabo's essay Green Goo -- Life in the Era of Humane Genocide.

GOLDEN GOO: Another member of the grey goo family of nanotechnology disaster scenarios. The idea is to use nanomachines to filter gold from seawater. If this process got out of control we would get piles of golden goo (the "Wizard's Apprentice Problem"). This scenario demonstrates the need of keeping populations of self-replicating machines under control; it is much more likely than grey goo, but also more manageable. [Originated on sci.nanotech 1996]

PINK GOO (humorous) Humans (in analogy with grey goo). "Pink Goo to refer to Old Testament apes who see their purpose as being fruitful and multiplying, filling up of the cosmos with lots more such apes, unmodified." [Eric Watt Forste August 1997]

http://www.transhumanism.com/lexicon/

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Well, there isn't a platform per se. They're generally too busy to do things like run for office. However, here's a fairly representative smattering of sites, by no means complete:

• http://www.transhumanism.com/
• http://www.aleph.se/Trans/
• http://www.extropy.com/

Links to extropianism, transhumanism, etc.

Journal of Transhumanism

Extropy Institute

World Transhumanist Association

-- MotorMachineMercenary