Hired by Halcyon Molecular

A minor personal announcement — I’ve been hired to work half-time for Halcyon Molecular in Redwood City. I’m mostly going to be working on improving their website content. Halcyon was founded by Michael and William Andregg, who I originally met in Tucson at a Center for Responsible Nanotechnology conference in 2007.

Halcyon is developing a technology to sequence genetic material at orders of magnitude faster than anything on the market or in the pipeline. Their technology and approach, which uses electron microscopy, is really unique. I’m happy I finally get to talk about the company and technology a bit in public because I’ve been excited about them in private for a long time.

You can read more about Halcyon at their website or at this TechCrunch article.

Also keep in mind that Halcyon is actively looking for new researchers.

Read More →

Thorium: the Only Practical Way to Go Beyond Fossil Fuels

The UK Telegraph has a nice new article on thorium, the energy source that provides a practical alternative to fossil fuels, unlike pipe dreams of wind or solar scaling up fast enough to save us.

Obama could kill fossil fuels overnight with a nuclear dash for thorium

If Barack Obama were to marshal America’s vast scientific and strategic resources behind a new Manhattan Project, he might reasonably hope to reinvent the global energy landscape and sketch an end to our dependence on fossil fuels within three to five years.

We could then stop arguing about wind mills, deepwater drilling, IPCC hockey sticks, or strategic reliance on the Kremlin. History will move on fast.

Muddling on with the status quo is not a grown-up policy. The International Energy Agency says the world must invest $26 trillion (£16.7 trillion) over the next 20 years to avert an energy shock. The scramble for scarce fuel is already leading to friction between China, India, and the West.

Kirk Sorensen, the former NASA engineer that writes the excellent Energy from Thorium …

Read More →

WSJ: Gains in Bioscience Cause Terror Fears

From The Wall Street Journal:

Rapid advances in bioscience are raising alarms among terrorism experts that amateur scientists will soon be able to gin up deadly pathogens for nefarious uses.

Fears of bioterror have been on the rise since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, stoking tens of billions of dollars of government spending on defenses, and the White House and Congress continue to push for new measures.

But the fear of a mass-casualty terrorist attack using bioweapons has always been tempered by a single fact: Of the scores of plots uncovered during the past decade, none have featured biological weapons. Indeed, many experts doubt terrorists even have the technical capability to acquire and weaponize deadly bugs.

The new fear, though, is that scientific advances that enable amateur scientists to carry out once-exotic experiments, such as DNA cloning, could be put to criminal use. Many well-known figures are sounding the alarm over the revolution in biological science, which amounts to a proliferation of know-how—if not the actual pathogens.

Another bit later in the article:

All the government attention comes …

Read More →

Geomagnetic Solar Storms and EMP

I wish to qualify my statement in the previous post where I wrote, ” I currently think that EMP attack is the second greatest risk we face, right behind a genetically engineered superplague.”

What I should really say is that I think that any electromagnetic event that wrecks havoc on electronics is the second greatest risk, and that includes geomagnetic storms as well as EMP. I don’t want the particularly vivid risk of EMP attack to distract attention from the fundamental point that the most critical nodes in our power grids simply need to be more protected.

EMP attack is controversial. The experts are divided. Scientists can agree, however, that a solar maximum is on the way for 2013, and it could rival the Carrington Event of 1858 in its intensity.

The Space Review has an article that argues that EMP attack is unlikely while geomagnetic storms are the real threat.

Read More →

Welcome to 1850: The Risk of EMP Attack

I am concerned about the PR aspects of the EMP attack risk communication over the last couple years. Awareness of the EMP risk has spread much faster among the extreme right than any other portion of the political spectrum. This is already making it highly unfashionable.

Given the year (2010), I currently think that EMP attack is the second greatest risk we face, right behind a genetically engineered superplague. A small EMP-optimized nuke launched from a container ship in the Gulf of Mexico could take out the power grid of the entire continental United States. The same thing could be done anywhere, like Europe or Japan.

The facts are available from the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack. No one cares except the Fox News crowd. It wasn’t like this only a few years ago: EMP attack was primarily a topic limited to analysts and sci-fi TV show writers. Obama seems concerned about nukes in general (which presumably includes the EMP risk that emanates from them), …

Read More →

2010 Humanity Plus Board Elections: Concluded

Congratulations to Max More, Howard Blume, and Tom McCabe for winning the Humanity+ board elections.

Howard Blume is the newcomer. You may remember him as author of The Lucifer Principle. I don’t know a lot more about him other than that, but I welcome him to transhumanism.

Tom and Max More, of course, have been around for some time. Max More is the father of modern transhumanism. Tom McCabe is a young genius, but I’m biased, because I frequently get to chat with him at the SIAI offices.

Organized transhumanism… can it exist? That is the premise of Humanity+.

Read More →

George Dvorsky: “It’s not all about Ray: There’s more to Singularity studies than Kurzweil”

Great post by George Dvorsky lamenting how Ray-hatred is turning off people to the rich intellectual tapestry of non-Ray-related Singularity ideas. He provides a short list of non-Ray Singularity thinkers dating back half a century and their contributions to this emerging and confusing field: von Neumann, Good, Minsky, Vinge, Moravec, Hanson, Bostrom, Yudkowsky, and Chalmers.

The post also includes an image of George’s impressive recent painting, “Singularity”.

Read More →

Michael Vassar’s Google TechTalk

Over at Singularity Hub, Aaron Saenz is gushing over Michael Vassar’s Google TechTalk.

Aaron said:

Vassar is the president of the Singularity Institute and a prominent advocate for the belief that technologies may develop exponentially in the future.

Not really… my understanding is that the reason that Michael V. talks about the Enlightenment a lot is that he thinks that was the last major boost in human understanding and reason. He tends to focus more on human thinking than on our technologies, and sees the latter as an outgrowth of the former. That’s the primary idea behind the Vingean Singularity as well. (Remember that one?)

One of the apparent purposes of Less Wrong is to start a new Enlightenment. The jury’s still out on that one, but it doesn’t hurt to try.

Read More →

Al Fin: Neither Ray Kurzweil nor PZ Myers Understand the Brain

Al Fin’s comments on the PZ Myers/Kurzweil tiff:

Lost in all the ballyhoo is the obvious fact that in reality, neither Kurzweil nor Myers understand very much about the brain. But is that clear fact of mutual brain ignorance relevant to the underlying issue — Kurzweil’s claim that science will be able to “reverse-engineer” the human brain within 20 years? In other words, Ray Kurzweil expects humans to build a brain-functional machine in the next 2 decades based largely upon concepts learned from studying how brains/minds think.

Clearly Kurzweil is not claiming that he will be able to understand human brains down to the most intricate detail, nor is he claiming that his new machine brain will emulate the brain down to its cell signaling proteins, receptors, gene expression, and organelles. Myers seems to become a bit bogged down in the details of his own objections to his misconceptions of what Kurzweil is claiming, and loses the thread of his argument — which can be summed up by Myers’ claim that Kurzweil is a “kook.”

But Kurzweil’s amazing …

Read More →

Singularity Summit 2010 Tweets and Links

@RachelHaywire The Singularity Summit is intimidating. It makes SXSW seem like grade school. I like that. #SS2010

@GregKellogg #ss2010 Singularity Summit: like TED, for at a fraction of the price.

@phoo: Registration for Singularity Summit 2010? $485. Getting a hug from James Randi? Priceless! #ss2010 #jamesrandi

@jref James Randi and the technological singularity: http://bit.ly/aeb5ru #ss2010 #skeptic

@ian_g Steve Mann wins Singularity Summit “weird prize” (in a good way) http://bit.ly/daFZEZ #ss2010

@mtraven: My review of best and worst talks at #ss2010 http://bit.ly/daFZEZ

@ifcthegrid Watching James Randi speak at #ss2010: wonderful. Standing next to James Randi at a urinal at #ss2010: priceless.

SF Weekly’s roundup — fantastic!

WeBlogTheWorld’s roundup, with some great pictures. downtheavenue also has coverage.

Singularity Hub’s review.

WIRED’s Gadget Lab has a couple posts.

An article from a Palm …

Read More →

Plastination and Cryonics

At the ASIM workshop yesterday, there was a talk by Ken Hayworth that discussed the goal of full-brain chemical preservation, most likely to be achieved through some form of plastination. The Brain Preservation Foundation was founded with this in mind.

Sometime in the next decade or so, plastination may become a method of post-deanimation information preservation preferable to cryonics. If so, it seems sensible to include a proviso in cryonics contracts that gives the cryonics company the legal right to plastinate frozen brains, or even heat up brains and plastinate them, if there is a general consensus among the relevant experts that this is better for information preservation over the longer term. Otherwise you could end up storing your neural patterns in an obsolete storage technology.

Read More →

When Machines Outsmart Humans / Taking Intelligent Machines Seriously

Two short papers from Nick Bostrom: When Machines Outsmart Humans and Taking Intelligent Machines Seriously: Reply to Critics. Here’s the abstract of the first one:

Artificial intelligence is a possibility that should not be ignored in any serious thinking about the future, and it raises many profound issues for ethics and public policy that philosophers ought to start thinking about. This article outlines the case for thinking that human-level machine intelligence might well appear within the next half century. It then explains four immediate consequences of such a development, and argues that machine intelligence would have a revolutionary impact on a wide range of the social, political, economic, commercial, technological, scientific and environmental issues that humanity will face over the coming decades.

The papers make a lot of good, and basic, points.

Read More →
← Older Entries