Christine Peterson is the founder and vice president of public policy for the Foresight Institute and co-chair of the Convergence 08 Unconference. For the February 13, 2008 lecture for the Stanford Law, Science and Technology Colloquium at Stanford University, she presented on the long-term potentials and unprecedented challenges inherent in nanotechnology.
Convergence08, the interdisciplinary unconference, continued with a panel discussion on life extension. Moderated by Christine Peterson of Foresight Nanotech Institute, the group of biotechnology and health experts included Aubrey de Grey of the Methuselah Foundation, Terry Grossman of the Frontier Medical Institute, Bruce Ames of the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute, and Gregory Benford of Genescient Corporation.
The Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems charts a path beginning with current nanotechnology capabilities to advanced molecularly-precise systems. Christine Peterson, co-founder of the Foresight Nanotech Institute, spoke on the organization’s attempts to lay out a step-by-step course of development for molecular nanotechnology at a Stanford graduate class in technology forecasting in January. After outlining near and mid-term projections for nanoscale technologies, she introduced the future objective of establishing open source physical security, a means to broadly protect both privacy and safety in a society empowered with sophisticated surveillance technologies.
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.”
Attempting to take action now to get ready for a world with strong AI is a highly daunting task. In a world of powerful entities, how can individuals be protected? The open source software experience inspires us to look for ways to transfer the advantages of that process to the physical world. At the 2007 Singularity Summit, Christine Peterson, Founder and Vice President of Foresight Nanotech Institute, discussed the prospects for making physical security “bottom-up”, decentralized, collaborative, and transparent. Read the rest of this entry »
Christine Peterson writes, lectures, and briefs the media on coming powerful technologies, including nanotechnology and life extension. She is Founder and Vice President, Public Policy, of Foresight Nanotech Institute, the leading nanotech public interest group. In 1991 she coauthored Unbounding the Future: the Nanotechnology Revolution (Morrow, full text online), which sketches nanotechnology’s potential environmental and medical benefits as well as possible abuses.
She serves on the Advisory Board of the International Council on Nanotechnology, the Editorial Advisory Board of NASA’s Nanotech Briefs, and on California’s Blue Ribbon Task Force on Nanotechnology. For years she directed the Foresight Conferences on Molecular Nanotechnology, organized the Foresight Institute Feynman Prizes, and chaired the Foresight Vision Weekends. Her presentation at the 7th Alcor Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona focused on longevity research relating to her new life extension website Healthactivator.com.
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