Category: Nanodot

from the synapse-crackle-pop dept.
An interdisciplinary team that includes electrical engineers, computer scientists, physicists and neuroscientists is using a hybrid analog-digital circuit design in an attempt to understand how biological neurons function and process information. A brief description of the research appeared in the New York Times on 29 June 2000, and was described in greater detail in a paper that appeared in the 22 June 2000 issue of the journal Nature.

from the when-Vernor-speaks-smart-people-listen dept.
From the SingularityWatch newsletter edited by Senior Associate John Smart: Vernor Vinge lives in San Diego, and is now retiring from his professorship to write science fiction full time (Congrats, Vernor!). An August 13th article from the San Diego Union-Tribune decided this was an appropriate time to discuss his interpretation of the Singularity. From the article itself: "In 20 years, superintelligent computers will outsmart humans and take over the world. Sounds ludicrous, the stuff of science fiction. So how come when Vernor Vinge makes the prediction, smart people listen?" Read more for John's comments.

from the we're-so-very-lonely dept.
A long article on SETI looks at "where are the aliens?", including the effect of nanotechnology on this question. The assumption seems to be that, given nanotechnology, the aliens exist but are hiding. Another possibility is that they just aren't there at all: Whatever superior intelligence emerges from human ingenuity will be the first that the Milky Way has seen, asserts physicist Frank J. Tipler of Tulane University. "Weíre it as far as intelligence, but one-cell organisms are probably all over the place in the solar system and possibly the entire spiral arm" of the galaxy in which Earth is situated.

A branch of the comments on this story was deleted due to pilot error. The deletion could also be credibly blamed on poor user interface design, or poor system documentation. I'm looking forward to being able to work on Nanodot and related stuff full-time to make such occurrences less likely. — Dave
The "pilot" was me; sorry. –ChrisPeterson

from the AI-in-action dept.

An early example of automated engineering guided by AI was reported in mid-June.

A press release decribes work using computer models developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that employ genetic algorithms to design high-performance deisel engines. The new designs simultaneously increase fuel efficiency and reduce pollution.

The development of automated engineering was anticipated by Eric Drexler in Engines of Creation (see "Automated Engineering" in the Glossary, for example).

from the but-how-do-I-know-what's-going-on-in-there dept.
Senior Associate Eliezer Yudkowsky forwards from Transdot: Aaron Davidson writes: "About 8 months or so ago, David Gobel & I formed a new company called Vastmind, as a result of discussions on the Extropians list and on Eliezer's Singularitarians list. It is our pleasure to debut the early beta version of Vastmind. What is Vastmind? It is a general purpose distributed computing service. With our system, people will be able to sell or donate spare computing resources to those that need it for large projects. If you are unfamiliar with the concept, read Egan's 'Permutation City', which discusses the potential of a planetary computing market."

from the software-immune-system dept.
JohnPierce reports on work at Sandia: "A thought-provoking article on software security agents. They are self-replicating, and work in a social structure. These may be precursors to AI and distributed control of swarms of nanomachines."

from the great-stuff dept.
Strongly recommended by Foresight chairman Eric Drexler is this paper by Senior Associate Josh Hall. Josh writes "The final version of my ethics for machines paper is now available. Thanks to all those at the "Confronting Singularity" Gathering who read the draft and discussed the ideas with me."Do you agree with Eric that this work is important and should be expanded into a book?

from the Moravec-as-religious?! dept.
Virtual reality pioneer/musician JaronLanier has published a Critique of Machine Intelligence. Excerpt: The culture of machine consciousness enthusiasts often includes the expressed hope that human death will be avoidable by actually enacting the first thought experiment above, of transferring the human brain into a machine. Hans Moravec is one researcher who explicitly hopes for this eventuality. If we can become machines we don't have to die, but only if we believe in machine consciousness. I don't think it's productive to argue about religion in the same way we argue about philosophy or science, but it is important to understand when religion is what we are talking about. Do you agree with Jaron that the uploading meme is a religious concept?

from the great-stuff dept.
If you missed the wonderful Spiritual Robots Symposium held at Stanford in April, featuring the best debate on machine intelligence seen in academia in years, you can now see it online courtesy of Dr Dobb's. Includes Frank Drake, Doug Hofstadter, John Holland, Bill Joy, Kevin Kelly, John Koza, Ray Kurzweil, Ralph Merkle and Hans Moravec.

from the Palm-Pilot-will-be-smarter-than-we-are dept.
Senior Associate Ka-Ping Yee (ping) writes "For a recent keynote talk i gave on the future of technology, i put together a chart of computing power based on the data in Ray Kurzweil's book, The Age of Spiritual Machines. I wasn't too happy with the readability of the chart in the book, so i asked myself "What would Tufte do?" and tried to design a clearer layout. A couple of things to note (if you have not already read Kurzweil's book):

• The vertical scale is a log scale, yet the best fit is not a straight line. It still curves upward slightly. (Try to fit a straight line and you'll see that it doesn't work.)
• We aren't just plotting maximum available computing power here — it's computing power available for a modest amount of money ($1000 in 1999 dollars).
• All the data, except for the last point (the Athlon) is taken from the book.

What do you think? Are we on schedule? Any bets for when the computational power of an affordable desktop machine will approach the computational power of a human brain? "