Accelerating Future

The Thiel Foundation recently formally announced the “20 Under 20″ initiative:

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 29 /PRNewswire/ — Warning that America’s long-term economic prospects are uncertain without radical innovation in technology, Peter Thiel this week launched the Thiel Fellowship to foster the next generation of tech visionaries.

“Our world needs more breakthrough technologies,” said Thiel. “From Facebook to SpaceX to Halcyon Molecular, some of the world’s most transformational technologies were created by people who stopped out of school because they had ideas that couldn’t wait until graduation. This fellowship will encourage the most brilliant and promising young people not to wait on their ideas, either. The Thiel Fellows will change the world and call it a senior thesis.”

The Thiel Foundation will award 20 people under 20 years old cash grants of $100,000 to further their innovative scientific and technical ideas. In addition, over a two year period, Peter Thiel’s network of tech entrepreneurs and philanthropists—drawn from PayPal, Facebook, Palantir Technologies, Founders Fund, the Singularity Institute, and others—will teach the recipients about creating disruptive technologies and offer mentorship, employment opportunities, support, and training.

Young geniuses — that’s where it’s at! Untie their hands financially and academically, and they will do great things.

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Here’s the program. Take pictures, please!

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From TechCrunch:

Thiel is starting a new initiative that will offer grants of up to $100,000 for kids to drop out of school. Yes, you read that right. Though that’s not how Thiel puts it. Instead, he calls it “stopping out of school.”

The basic gist is that he will fund up to 20 kids under the age of 20 who apply for this grant. His hope, obviously, isn’t to ruin their lives, but instead to find the best minds thinking about big things early in life. This is where true disruption comes from, Thiel believes.

And it also solves another problem that many young people face today: crippling debt. Because going to college is so much more expensive than it was even when Thiel was in school, he notes that a lot of kids come out of school having to worry about debt rather than just focusing on doing great things. Thiel hopes to change that.

He’ll be accepting applications for this grant through the end of the year for enrollment in 2011.

The problem with age is that people often become more materialistic, less idealistic, and more conformist. The average 24 bright year old is much more intellectually conformist than the average bright 19 year old. The slightly older folks see the existing systems, they fight against them a bit, then give up. With huge debt, they have no choice but to play it safe in work and life. True independent thought is lost.

What courage Thiel is displaying, going against an established order that makes it seem as if no one can accomplish anything without a degree.

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Eucrio will officially launch on Friday, October 1st.

From the website:

The Company

EUCRIO is an organization that specializes in providing state-of-the-art standby, stabilization, and transport procedures for cryonicists in the European Union. EUCRIO is pleased to assist members of the three main cryonics storage provider organizations.

The People

EUCRIO employs a wide variety of professionals: including physicians, perfusionists, emergency medical technicians, engineers and scientists, throughout the European Union. EUCRIO has staff members ready to intervene across the European Union and all are ready to respond to clients at all times (24 hours a day, 7 days per week).

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To quote Reason, “Signing up for cryonic suspension at the present time is less like buying an invitation to an event, and more like agreeing to help organize an event.” The world cryonics infrastructure is hardly perfect, so to ensure you actually make it into the freezer, all sorts of measures have to be taken. The room for improvement is vast. Initiative must be taken!

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I prefer the term “cybernetics” myself. Here’s the video:

More is available at VICE, the original source.

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Here’s the link. Hello Americans — this means that Russia is just as pissed off about American hegemony as Iran is. We think we’ve invulnerable, but we’re not.

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More info on Stephen, thank you commenter Bettina:

Stephen Omohundro http://selfawaresystems.com/

Via Wikipedia:

He graduated from Stanford University with degrees in Physics and Mathematics. He received a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley and published the book Geometric Perturbation Theory in Physics based on his thesis.

At Thinking Machines Corporation, he developed Star Lisp, the first programming language for the Connection Machine, with Cliff Lasser. From 1986 to 1988, he was an Assistant Professor of Computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and cofounder of the Center for Complex Systems Research.
He subsequently joined the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) in Berkeley, California, where he led the development of the object-oriented programming language Sather in 1990 and developed novel neural network and machine learning algorithms. He subsequently was a Research scientist at the NEC Research Institute, working on machine learning and computer vision, and was a co-inventor of U.S. Patent 5,696,964, “Multimedia Database Retrieval System Which Maintains a Posterior Probability Distribution That Each Item in the Database is a Target of a Search”

He then started the consultancy OLO Software, and is now President of Self-Aware Systems in Palo Alto, California. He has been an advisor to the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence since April 2007.

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In a recent blog post, father of nanotechnology Eric Drexler quotes a historian who wrote in to correct mistakes in a Nature article that claimed that the NNI (National Nanotechnology Initiative) caused enthusiasm in nanotechnology, rather than the other way around. He also explains why he loathes the term “Drexlerian”.

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I like Jamais Cascio. I think he’s funny. I completely disagree with many of his ideas, but at least he’s a futurist with personality.

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A recent post on Next Big Future responding to Scott Locklin’s recent nanotech-smearing piece, Brian Wang explains why there has been almost no progress on molecular nanotechnology throughout the last 25 years — it hasn’t been funded:

Again there are people complaining that the vision of Eric Drexler was not realized after 25 years since he wrote Engines of Creation and other research papers on molecular nanotechnology.

However, almost no money was spent funding the research and development of molecular nanotechnology. Significant amounts of money were devoted to mostly relabeled chemistry starting in November, 2003.

Locklin (link to his site removed, since he is a flamebaiting troll) gets facts wrong and the target of his outrage is totally misdirected. The billions for NNI were hijacked for the falsely labeled nanotech starting in 2003. It is idiotic to blame Drexler, Merkle, Freitas when they did not get the money.

Locklin and people like him ignored what has been happening for eight years and allowed the funding to be hijacked for what they do not believe is nanotechnology. Now they have stain proof pants buyers remorse and are not satisfied with carbon nanotubes and the other non-molecular nanotech research. The proper response is to write to congressmen and senators to direct NNI appropriations into an actual effort to develop molecular nanotechnology. If after actually getting funding and work for 10-25 years, then there could be some comparison of progress expected versus results delivered. For now the results match the effort that has been performed. There are very little results from almost no societal effort. Your team did not do any laps in the Daytona 500 because you did not buy a car for your team or pay for an entry fee. Whining about it now, makes me ask – Where the hell have you been for the last eight years ? When you buy your SUV from Ford Motors do you send your complaints to Porsche or DeLorean about the race car you did not buy ?

Read the rest here.

I love when Brian Wang gets worked up about something, because the knowledge base he brings to bear in any rebuttal is really huge. All science and futurist sites of similar quality and quantity of information to his are run by teams, not a single individual.

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Fab Lab bill before Congress
Full-bore transhumanist advocacy for brain implants in MIT Technology Review
Current decisions shape your future preferences
Lifelong exercising yields sensational results
Nano antenna increases light capacity 1000 fold
Technology Review: Artificial Ovary Could Help Infertile Women
Technology in the extreme — radio transmitters that can survive 900 °C (1652 °F)
Carbon nanotubes twice as strong as once thought

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PhysOrg:

(PhysOrg.com) — Biomedical researchers at the University at Buffalo have engineered adult stem cells that scientists can grow continuously in culture, a discovery that could speed development of cost-effective treatments for diseases including heart disease, diabetes, immune disorders and neurodegenerative diseases.

UB scientists created the new cell lines – named “MSC Universal” – by genetically altering mesenchymal stem cells, which are found in bone marrow and can differentiate into cell types including bone, cartilage, muscle, fat, and beta-pancreatic islet cells.

The researchers say the breakthrough overcomes a frustrating barrier to progress in the field of regenerative medicine: The difficulty of growing adult stem cells for clinical applications.

Because mesenchymal stem cells have a limited life span in laboratory cultures, scientists and doctors who use the cells in research and treatments must continuously obtain fresh samples from bone marrow donors, a process both expensive and time-consuming. In addition, mesenchymal stem cells from different donors can vary in performance.

The cells that UB researchers modified show no signs of aging in culture, but otherwise appear to function as regular mesenchymal stem cells do – including by conferring therapeutic benefits in an animal study of heart disease. Despite their propensity to proliferate in the laboratory, MSC-Universal cells did not form tumors in animal testing.

Fantastic.

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