Eric Drexler just pinged me to point out that what I usually refer to as “Drexlerians” do not speak for him. It reminds me of the scene in the Life of Brian where trying to dissuade his growing band of disciples from following him, Brian shouts “You don’t need to follow me. You don’t need to follow anybody! You’ve got …
Taking a Black & White View of a Technicolour World
Following on from the recent spat of name calling, there do seem to be opposing camps in the nanotech world, let’s call them the super optimists and the super pessimists. The super optimists, and here I include the folks at Foresight, Institute of Molecular Manufacturing etc, tend to be people who spend a lot of time sitting in front of …
The Nanotech Taliban Claim “Dexter Johnson is an ignoramus whose ignorance leads him to view optimists with contempt.”
My estwhile colleague Dexter Johnson who also blogs for IEEE Spectrum received a number of plaudits from readers of the Foresight Institutes Nanodot blog after daring to suggest that the sunny optimism of current President J Storrs Hall might be rather displaced and that the assertion nanobots will save us may be rather missing the point. Illustrating the difficullty of …
Hello Fleshy Ones!
The Foresight Institute are continuing their series on the Singularity – it’s fascinating stuff, it really is. I would guess — and this is blatantly a speculation, albeit a fairly well informed one, that the “secret trick” of AI will fall in the next decade. That means that the 20s will see robots not just as good as humans at …
Father 2.0 Recontructed Using Nanobots?
Is this nanobot week? Ray Kurzweil appears to be planning to use nanobots to bring his dead (since 1970) father to life according to this extract from a recent Rolling Stone interview reproduced at RoughType…. Using technology, he plans to bring his dead father back to life. Kurzweil reveals this to me near the end of our conversation … In …
What’s In A Word?
One of the oddest arguments of the molecular manufacturing community (the bunch that believe that nanofactories will lead to eternal life. personal freedom, and do away with the need for money, government, clothes and apparently, good manners or common sense) is their possessiveness of the term nanotechnology.This extract from a recent tirade is typical: By appropriating the term nanotechnology for …
“The diamondoid mechanosynthesis approach is only in the very early stages of computer simulation”
I’m always staggered by the progress being made in nanoscience, with tens of billions of dollars of global funding our understanding of the nanoscale is progressing in leaps and bounds. Perhaps more roadkill than tortoise to nanoscience’s hare is diamondoid mechanosynthesis, beloved of the Drexlerians, which doesn’t seem to have made any progress whatsoever, and increasingly resembles a cross between …