Toroidal Colony

The pictured colony is certainly a big one. Kalpana One is currently my favorite space colony design, in terms of relative feasibility and usefulness. One might ask, “what’s the point of spending tons of money on building a space colony when Friendly AI could build us one for free, and when unFriendly AI could easily take down such a colony?” The reasons are, 1) governments will spend money on space colonization whether we want them to or not, so we might as well keep an eye on the field, 2) space colonies are an insurance policy against pre-AI disasters, 3) the prospect is inspiring in general, and even if such colonies are never produced en masse in the real world, they’ll still be featured in the fictional worlds we choose to inhabit.

The pictured colony looks really, really huge. Probably would weigh trillions of tons. Seems to be about 50km across at the torus, maybe 1000km across total.

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1,000,000 Views

Earlier today, this blog had its 1,000,000th view. This is out of approximately 300,000 unique visitors since it was started on November 9th, 2005. Unsurprisingly, the top referrers have been StumbleUpon, Reddit, and Digg. I really appreciate everyone who has taken the time to see what I have to say. I will keep blogging for as long as I have a computer and and Internet connection!

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The Psychology of Security

Although this may be old hat to some of you already familiar with heuristics and biases, an excellent article by Bruce Schneier on the psychology of security is available here. It starts as follows:

Security is both a feeling and a reality. And they’re not the same.

The reality of security is mathematical, based on the probability of different risks and the effectiveness of different countermeasures. We can calculate how secure your home is from burglary, based on such factors as the crime rate in the neighborhood you live in and your door-locking habits. We can calculate how likely it is for you to be murdered, either on the streets by a stranger or in your home by a family member. Or how likely you are to be the victim of identity theft. Given a large enough set of statistics on criminal acts, it’s not even hard; insurance companies do it all the time.

We can also calculate how much more secure a burglar alarm will make your home, or how well a credit freeze …

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Bite-Size Molecular Nanotech Glossary

Programmable positional assembly: The ability to place individual atoms precisely and in a reprogrammable way is the gateway to super low-cost and high performance manufacturing. This method of manufacturing is frequently referred to as “bottom-up”, because it would build products from the bottom up, as opposed to “top-down”, the traditional way of manufacturing products.

Molecular assembler: This is the machine that does the positional assembly. Think robot arm, but made out of somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000,000 atoms. Very few engineers or scientists have looked into molecular assembler designs. The most famous are Eric Drexler, Ralph Merkle, and Robert Freitas. Parallel assembly: Because assemblers would be extremely small, you’d need billions and billions of them to build human-sized products in a reasonable timeframe. In parallel assembly, numerous assemblers would cooperate with one another to build useful products. They would all need to be programmed to work together in an organized way.

Diamondoid mechanosynthesis: Abbreviated as DMS, diamondoid mechanosynthesis refers to the chemical synthesis of diamondoid nanostructures based on positional assembly. One of the challenges of DMS would …

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Toy Goal Systems for Friendly AI

Say that some group of researchers truly understands the processes necessary for intelligence and is able to use their theory to build a seed AI in the next month. Let us say further that the researchers have cracked the basic requirements of Friendly AI, that is, as the AI gets smarter, it maintains an abstract invariant in its goal system that causes it to have a reliable philosophical thrust (but not monomaniacal tendencies) in its actions. I use “philosophical thrust” here in extremely loose terms – I’m not talking about anthropocentric human philosophical belief systems, but simply a set of differential desirabilities that are generated and updated in a nonrandom way. We can further say that the programmers building the AI have solved most of the problems of “structural Friendliness”, that is, trivial subgoal stomp scenarios, like the AI trying to convert the Earth into computronium, are no longer the prime threat.

The challenge at this point is “what to wish for” – the Friendliness content instead of the Friendliness structure. And just as the saying …

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Specific Power Graph

This is a graph I just drew. What does it mean? I’m not exactly sure. But it may be important. The topic under consideration is specific power. The dots indicate a possible wall of maximum cooling capacity for stable products.

The cosmic objects and physics experiments aren’t really products, they’re just there for reference. Note that as size increases linearly, the volume – and therefore total possible power – increases cubically.

I know the graph is not perfectly accurate because I just made it up as a thought experiment. But I’d like to make it more accurate with your feedback.

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Impressive Recent Progress in Nanotechnology

A better atomic force microscope from Japan:

Credit: Oscar Custance, Osaka University

“A new type of atomic force microscope (AFM) has been developed that can “fingerprint” the chemical identity of individual atoms on a material’s surface. This is one step ahead of existing AFMs, which can only detect the position of atoms. The device determines local composition and structure using a precise calibration method, and can even be used to manipulate specific atomic species. The team demonstrated their “fingerprinting” technique by using an atomic force microscope (AFM) to distinguish atoms of tin (blue) and lead (green) deposited on a silicon substrate (red).”

Here is the associated article (subscription req’d).

Here’s the graphene transistor everyone’s been talking about:

One atom thick, 50 atoms wide. Here is an article going over the advance. It states that the transistors are not likely to be completely ready until 2025, but this estimate seems conservative. (People are afraid of the stigma surrounding “nanohype”.)

Scientists from Duke recently achieved the new size record for a programmable synthetic nanostructure:

These …

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Nick Bostrom’s “Plastic World”

Despite being a transhumanist who wants to transcend my boundaries, I agree strongly with the need for limits and constraints as we move towards increasingly transformative technologies. For some, “no limits, yay!” is the rallying call, but I look at the situation from a thermodynamic, not political, perspective.

In Nick Bostrom’s “Dignity and Enhancement”, commissioned for The President’s Council on Bioethics, he writes:

Let us make a leap into an imaginary future posthuman world, in which technology has reached its logical limits. The superintelligent inhabitants of this world are autopotent, meaning that they have complete power over and operational understanding of themselves, so that they are able to remold themselves at will and assume any internal state they choose. An autopotent being could, for example, easily transform itself into the shape of a woman, a man, or a tree. Such a being could also easily enter any subjective state it wants to be in, such as state of pleasure or indignation, or a state of experiencing the visual and tactile sensations of a dolphin swimming …

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CRN Science Essay: Practical Skepticism

In this month’s feature essay, Chris Phoenix, CRN‘s Director of Research, makes an analogy between the hypothetical rejection of a computer chip from today by engineers in 1957, comparing it to today’s rejection of the concept of a molecular manufacturing device. The comparison is apt, and he uses numerous examples to make his point. The essay begins as follows:

Engineers occasionally daydream about being able to take some favorite piece of technology, or the knowledge to build it, back in time with them. Some of them even write fiction about it. For this month’s essay, I’ll daydream about taking a bottomless box of modern computer chips back in time five decades.

In 1957, computers were just starting to be built out of transistors. They had some memory, a central processor, and various other circuits for getting data in and out — much like today’s computers, but with many orders of magnitude less capability. Computers were also extremely expensive. Only six years earlier, Prof. Douglas Hartree, a computer expert, had declared that three computers would suffice for England’s computing …

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