Future Current

At the 2007 Foresight Vision Weekend, Ralph Merkle and Robert Freitas in a joint session discussed research toward diamond mechanosynthesis. The two co-founders of the Nanofactory Collaboration offered a preview their recently accepted paper “A minimal toolset for diamond mechanosynthesis” to be published in JCTN (Journal of Computational and Theoretical Nanoscience). The talk included a description of nine molecular tools and all reaction pathways involved in their synthesis from raw materials. This took the co-authors three years to finish, and they view it as the critical next step in developing molecular nanotechnology for atomically-precise manufacturing.

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Intuition is a vital component of intelligence; few of our daily activities actually require logic and we solve most of our daily problems using intuition-based methods. This includes body movement, understanding and using language, and learning new skills. Artificial Intuition may well be a stepping stone to full-blown AI, should be much easier to implement, and has many economically important applications. At the 2007 Foresight Vision Weekend, AI researcher Monica Anderson provided an analysis of the problem domains of Artificial Intelligence, and discussed the advantages and disadvantages of intuition based approaches.

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Historical progress isn’t inevitable – the pendulum of history doesn’t have a regular period. Sometimes you get a 500-year Dark Age.  Science fiction novelist, blogger and technology activist Cory Doctorow argued at the 2006 Singularity Summit at Stanford that whether a Singularity or Dark Age comes next is not preordained, but depends on our conscious effort.

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Will forty-five years of work and then centuries of leisure one day become the norm? Will we face mass unemployment, mass leisure or overpopulation? Sharing insights from his upcoming book Future Imperfect at the 6th Alcor Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, Dr. David Friedman navigated through the many potential consequences of an extended lifespan.

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The DARPA Grand Challenge race required robots to drive without human assistance along a 131-mile long course through the Mojave desert. The competition was won by the Stanford team led by Sebastian Thrun, having developed significant new AI technology for robot perception and decision making. At the 2006 Singularity Summit at Stanford he discussed how autonomous car capabilities compare with human-level cognition.

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Nature demonstrates that productive nanosystems can work cleanly and inexpensively, converting common materials into billions of tons per year of intricate, atomically precise structures. Progress in molecular and nanoscale technologies has laid the groundwork for engineering simple productive nanosystems. These will enable the development of more intricate and complex productive systems, creating a feedback loop that drives accelerating change. At the 2006 Singularity Summit at Stanford, K. Eric Drexler spoke on how advanced productive nanosystems will deliver unprecedented productivity.

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The anthropic principle tells us we should not be surprised to find that the laws of physics allow for life to exist, because here we are. In the same respect, for cryonics patients who are reanimated, there are a number of advanced technologies they should not be surprised to find in existence when they awake. J. Storrs Hall offered some predictions of what one could we expect to discover in such a historical context in his 2006 Alcor Conference presentation “A Door Into Summer.”

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Will artificial intelligence bring about a technological singularity in a soft take off? Ray Kurzweil at the 2006 Singularity Summit at Stanford gave an overview of smooth doubly exponential progressions that he believes could lead to such an outcome. While his projections are considered radical by some observers, it is often because they are thinking linearly and leave out the historically accurate exponential perspective.

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With advanced nanotechnology and machine intelligence on the horizon, we face a future of vast change in our physical world and the world of the mind. But we need not abandon efforts to steer this future toward one which will work for both humans and the biosphere. Christine Peterson identified certain ground conditions needed for such a success in the context of powerful technologies in her 2006 Singularity Summit at Stanford presentation entitlted “Bringing Humanity & the Biosphere Through the Singularity.”

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We know that highly intelligent people can make terrible decisions. The question therefore arises: Will our emotional, social, psychological, ethical intelligence and self-awareness keep up with our cognitive abilities? Max More offered his thoughts by outlining the goals of the proactionary principle at the 2006 Singularity Summit at Stanford.

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On November 4, 2007 at the Vision Weekend Unconference held by the Forsight Nanotech Institute, Ben Goertzel spoke on the subject of creating artificial general intelligence in virtual worlds. His company Novamente has partnered with the Electric Sheep Company to roll out virtual animals such as dogs and parrots in Second Life. He believes that gradually climbing the scale of behavioral and cognitive complexity, eventually it will be possible to create human-level virtual agents in online virtual worlds.

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Chris Phoenix is the co-founder and Director of Research of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology. From 1991-97 he worked as an embedded software engineer for electronics for imaging, after which he left the software field to concentrate on dyslexia correction research. Since 2000 he has been studying and writing about molecular manufacturing, and gave a talk on the history and future of molecular nanotechnology at the 2007 CRN conference entitled “The Future of Bio & Nano Technologies.”

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