There is a new site online for transhumanist-oriented videos. It’s Thoughtware.tv.

Thorium gets coverage on a leading investment website.

Peter Turney, who works for the Interactive Information Group at the Institute for Information Technology in Ottawa, blogs about my remarks on Friendly AI, and lists several interesting papers that discuss Friendly AI in academia, including one he wrote in 1991, entitled “Controlling super-intelligent machines”. If any of these papers are half as insightful as the work of the Singularity Institute, the insights therein could contribute significant value to the push towards benevolent superintelligence. I’ll be printing out and reading the papers Turney referenced.

Our good friends Clarke, Kurzweil, and Dr. J have been quoted in an article by San Jose’s very own Mercury News. They’ve all published transhumanist-oriented books in the last two years. I’ll be reading Breakpoint soon and letting you know what I think.

CRN’s development scenario project, conducted the weekend before last, was a great success. Jamais Cascio, who conducted the project, has a post on it. It mainly involved chatting on the phone for 7 hours over two days, using Google docs and a chatroom/whiteboard to moderate and take minutes. We talked about over a hundred variables of potential relevance to the development of molecular manufacturing. If you visit the first link in this paragraph, you can also vote on the IEET poll which asks, “What do you think about the utopian impulse?” A good question. My own opinion is both that utopian energies drive human aspirations for betterment, and that these impulses turn out to be premonitions of a successful future where scarcity, disease and violence are fully eliminated.

Peter Pesti is working on a detailed roadmap of the future. He combines predictions from Ian Pearson, Ray Kurzweil, and Aubrey de Grey, among many others. The point is not to argue that all these predictions will come true exactly on schedule, but to have a unified roadmap that records all the predictions and lets us cross-reference and compare them.

Our missile defense shield is now working! This is excellent news. People speak very negatively about the billions of dollars being spent on the military (and indeed, it’s probably too much), but sometimes these projects pay off. A missile defense system is a tremendous technological achievement that will be used to protect lives rather than take them.

Joe Stewart, author of several books on cybersecurity, joins the Lifeboat Foundation and founds our cybercrime/malcode board, an important new addition to the growing effort to fight catastrophic risks. I encourage you to subscribe to our news and blog feeds to keep up to date with this organization’s important work.