The International Herald Tribune's Business of Green Blog wonders if we are ready for Full speed ahead for nanotechnology? The blog post briefly notes both the dangers posed by nanotech and the potential rewards, but doesn't really give us much more than that.
In keeping with the last post, I think I'll stay with the nanotech theme. Here's a recent report that examines the dangers of nanotech (AlterNet - Nanotech: Why Something So Small Can Be So Dangerous):
But nanomaterials also pose possible serious risks to the environment and human health -- risks that researchers have barely begun to probe, and regulators have barely begun to regulate. What's more, the potential damage could take years or even decades to surface. So these tiny particles could soon become the next big thing -- only to turn into the next big disaster.
I think it's important to check our enthusiasm for technology with such sober thoughts, we really do need to give careful thought to what we are doing, and what our technology can do to us and our environment.
The SciGuy reports (Dr. Black strikes back: Now creating self-assembling gold) on a development in adaptive nanotech:
Anyway, Ajayan -- whom I shall call Dr. Black -- has done it again. This time, in a paper to be published next month in Nano Letters, his research team reports that nano-sized building blocks can sense changes in environmental conditions and use them as cues to assemble into giant structures. [...] The future development of nanomachines, from labs-on-a-chip to nanorobotics will require tiny nanomaterials to "self assemble" in this fashion.
No indication on how far off this may be, but as he notes, it's a step in that direction.
The AP is reporting that the military is going to invest in binoculars that connect to the brain (Military funds development of brainwave binoculars):
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known as DARPA, is betting that intelligent binoculars can tap into the brain's ability to spot patterns and movement and help soldiers detect threats from miles farther away than they can with traditional binoculars. Electrodes on the scalp inside a helmet will record the user's brain activity as it processes information about high-resolution images produced by wide-angle military binoculars. Those responses will train the binoculars over time to recognize threats.
Perhaps this will allow for greater accuracy in ground/airstrikes and lessen incidents of friendly-fire.
Imagine a future (dystopian?) in which surveillance cameras can not only watch you but also listen, and thanks to AI, they may also start to understand a bit of what they overhear (BBC News - CCTV cameras 'taught to listen'):
"The longer artificial intelligence is in the software the more it learns." He added: "Later versions will get cleverer as time goes on, perhaps eventually being able to identify specific words being said or violent sounds. [...] By the end of the study, the researchers hope to have generated algorithms - a mathematical formula for solving problems - that can be used inside existing CCTV software. Then each successive generation of algorithms would become more sophisticated as they "learn" what they are looking and listening out for.
I wonder if this would mean that law-abiding citizens would then have to engage in self-censorship while talking in public for fear of saying a suspicious word within earshot of a smartcam?
Wired News ponders what the Petabyte Age will mean for us (The Petabyte Age: Because More Isn't Just More — More Is Different):
Sensors everywhere. Infinite storage. Clouds of processors. Our ability to capture, warehouse, and understand massive amounts of data is changing science, medicine, business, and technology. As our collection of facts and figures grows, so will the opportunity to find answers to fundamental questions. Because in the era of big data, more isn't just more. More is different.
Except for that silliness about the end of the scientific method, I found the issue to be well done and very thought provoking. Get ready for some really accelerated change!
The DVICE blog has posted a video of an underwater snake robot. Put a cam on this thing and assorted sensors and the applications seem endless. Just think of what these could do for search and rescue efforts, environmental surveillance, to say nothing of military applications. Then again, maybe it's just a nifty way to keep the water in your pool circulating.
And if you haven't heard already (and I'm late reporting this, sorry), IEEE Spectrum has a special report on the singularity. Some of the notable features include: Waiting for the Rapture, Signs of the Singularity (be Vernor Vinge), and The Singularity Who's Who.
Here is a news report that suggests the Pentagon is worried about the threat potential posed by neurotech in the wrong hands (Wired News - Top Pentagon Scientists Fear Brain-Modified Foes):
The Pentagon's most-prestigious scientific advisory panel is spooked about "enemy activities in sleep research," neuro-pharmaceutical performance enhancement, "brain-computer interfaces," and other ways adversaries could "exploit advances in Human Performance Modification, and thus create a threat to national security."
So I guess we are moving from IEDs to INTDs. Scary.
A very important milestone in the development of computers is being reported today: the petaflop barrier has been conquered by a Los Alamos National Laboratory and IBM supercomputer (AP - Scientists develop fastest computer):
Scientists unveiled the world's fastest supercomputer on Monday, a $100 million machine that for the first time has performed 1,000 trillion calculations per second in a sustained exercise. [...] The computer, named Roadrunner, is twice as fast as IBM's Blue Gene system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which itself is three times faster than any of the world's other supercomputers, according to IBM.
You know that the singularity as a concept is starting to gain some traction when it starts encountering vocal resistance, as in this criticism from Warren Ellis (The NerdGod Delusion):
The Singularity is the last trench of the religious impulse in the technocratic community. The Singularity has been denigrated as "The Rapture For Nerds," and not without cause. It's pretty much indivisible from the religious faith in describing the desire to be saved by something that isn't there (or even the desire to be destroyed by something that isn't there) and throws off no evidence of its ever intending to exist. It's a new faith for people who think they're otherwise much too evolved to believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster or any other idiot back-brain cult you care to suggest.
If the concept of the singularity is getting the same dismissive criticism from People Who Know Better that religious faith now receives, is that necessarily a bad thing? After all, the singularity is about accelerating change, and change has been a constant in human history, as has the religious impulse. I think this kind of criticism says more about the people making it than it does about the singularity.
HT: Sentient Developments
The Brain Waves blog is supporting a national political action plan to support the National Neurotechnology Initiative (NNTI) Act that is pending in both the House and the Senate.
Ray Kurzweil did some cheerleading for the singularity last week at the World Science Festival (The New York Times - The Future Is Now? Pretty Soon, at Least):
Now, he sees biology, medicine, energy and other fields being revolutionized by information technology. His graphs already show the beginning of exponential progress in nanotechnology, in the ease of gene sequencing, in the resolution of brain scans. With these new tools, he says, by the 2020s we’ll be adding computers to our brains and building machines as smart as ourselves.
Overall, the is a positive portrayal of science and the singularity from the old Gray Lady.
Two scientist working in the field of nanoscience were among seven scientists who recently won the first Kavli Prizes (Wired News - Inaugural Million-Dollar Kavli Prizes Awarded) at a ceremony in Oslo, Norway. Louis E. Brus and Sumio Iijima were honored for their work with quantum dots and carbon nanotubes.
Is Hollywood undermining the spirit of science and discovery? Do our movies and TV shows instill an irrational fear of murderous clones, rampaging mutants, and killer AI? These are the questions to ponder as you read this post (Posthumans, Rise Up And Destroy Hollywood!) on the io9 blog. The post is entertaining, but these are serious questions worthy of some good discussion. So, what do you think? When was the last time you saw a positive portrayal of artificial intelligence in a movie or TV series?
Some remarkable advances are being made in the field of neuroscience, specifically how brain signals can be interfaced with a computer to control the movement of objects in the physical world. This report was featured tonight on NBC Nightly News (Video - No Monkeying Around in Paralysis Research) in which a monkey controls a prosthetic arm with thought power:
How much would it cost today to make the first cyborg, TV's Six Million Dollar Man, in inflation-adjusted dollars? CNN-Money is on the case (What would the $6 Million Man cost today?):
Today, we might call him the Twenty-Six Million Dollar Man. That's the value of $6 million in 1974 dollars when adjusted for inflation using tools from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But the real cost of a modern-day cyborg in 2008 would be quite different [...] research and development costs to design a bionic man would be $50 million to $100 million today. But with a completed design, production costs would only be several hundred thousand dollars per person, he said, but they'd lack Austin's super powers.
The study notes that such cybernetic technology is not available yet, but that we are getting there..slowly. I thought this report was interesting because it allows us to think about how far along bionic technology has come since those days in the 1970s when this was all still very much in the realm of science fiction.
The Pentagon has redefined cyberspace to better fit the military missions of the 21st Century (Danger Room - 26 Years After Gibson, Pentagon Defines 'Cyberspace'):
"More than two decades after novelist William Gibson coined the term cyberspace as a 'consensual hallucination' of data... the Pentagon has come up with its own definition," Inside Defense reports. "A May 12 'for official use only' memo signed by Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England... offers a 28-word meaning for the term." It is decidedly "less poetic" than Gibson's. It is different from previous military definitions. And it doesn't exactly square with how the Air Force's new "Cyberspace Command" sees this emerging battlefield.
Cyberspace, England writes, is “a global domain within the information environment consisting of the interdependent network of information technology infrastructures, including the Internet, telecommunications networks, computer systems, and embedded processors and controllers.”
Well, there you go, cyberspace is the global network of interconnected hardware and software which the modern military stands ready to defend and/or attack. What have they omitted from their definition? The wetware - the human mind.
A new kind of flash memory could revolutionize data storage and bring us into the age of ubiquitous computing (Phoenix Business Journal - Nanotechnology could offer jolt to memory chips):
Michael Kozicki wants to make sure people can have all of their information at their fingertips any time, anywhere. The technology he is working on may do just that, allowing users to carry a terabyte of data in the palm of their hand. That's 1,000 gigabytes, four to eight times the capacity of a common personal computer hard drive.
[...]
His device is called programmable metallization cell memory, or PMC. Like flash memory, it is nonvolatile, which means it can hold data even when it is not hooked up to a power source. Where PMC differs from flash memory is its structure. Kozicki's memory cell is based on nanoionics, a science that allows ion bridges to be formed in the memory cells that hold the data. Because the memory is working on a scale of nanometers, which are the equivalent of one-billionth of a meter, the chip can hold significantly more information than flash drives, he said. "We could easily see a terabyte or more in the future," he said.
I mentioned before the possibility that virtual environments like Second Life may provide the perfect testing ground for human-AI interaction, and it looks like there has been some progress in this area (AP - Researchers teach 'Second Life' avatar to think):
Edd is a creation of artificial intelligence, or AI, by researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who endowed him with a limited ability to converse and reason. It turns out "Second Life" is more than a place where pixelated avatars chat, interact and fly about. It's also a frontier in AI research because it's a controllable environment where testing intelligent creations is easier. [...] "Second Life" is attractive to researchers in part because virtual reality is less messy than plain-old reality. Researchers don't have to worry about wind, rain or coffee spills. And virtual worlds can push along AI research without forcing scientists to solve the most difficult problems - like, say, creating a virtual human - right away, said Michael Mateas, a computer science professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
So, will the Turing Test finally be passed in Second Life? Stay tuned.
There seems to be a good bit of interest in exoskeletons lately, perhaps because of the Ironman movie, but that's not to say it's all in the realm of fantasy. This news report (AP - Robotic suit could usher in super soldier era) demonstrates the military applications for the latest generation of exoskeletons:
The suit works by sensing every movement the wearer makes and almost instantly amplifying it. The Army believes soldiers may someday wear the suits in combat, but it's focusing for now on applications such as loading cargo or repairing heavy equipment. Sarcos is developing the technology under a two-year contract worth up to $10 million, and the Army plans initial field tests next year.
Ok, now let's add an onboard AI system so that when the soldier is incapacitated on the battlefield, his suite can fight on, accomplish the mission, and deliver him back to the medbots. Just an idea.
It is something of a paradox that humans are attempting to design artificial intelligence based on the pattern of human intelligence, which (intelligent design theory to the contrary) was not purposively designed. Gary Marcus, author of Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind, New York University, argues that the mind is a "kluge" - a clumsy, cobbled-together contraption. In this video presentation, Marcus discusses the accidents of evolution that caused this structure and what we can do about it.
Here is a technical advance in chip construction that will enable the design of smart nanoscale devices made without excess heat buildup (PC World - HP Researchers Build Intelligent Memory):
Researchers at Hewlett-Packard have developed a working unit of a memory circuit that has existed in theory for 37 years, which could ultimately replace RAM and make computers more intelligent by tracking data it has retained. The technology, called memristor, could allow computers to make decisions by understanding past patterns of data it has collected, similar to human brains collecting and understanding a series of events. [...] A memristor circuit requires lower voltage and less time to turn on than competitive memory like DRAM and flash, Williams said. "Because it [uses] less voltage and less time, of course, it uses much less power," Williams said. Denser cells also allow memristor circuits to store more data than flash memory.
This will eventually mean smaller and faster computers with that "instant on" feature we have all been longing for.
The Eureka Alert asks: Are nanobots on their way?
The first real steps towards building a microscopic device that can construct nano machines have been taken by US researchers. Writing in the peer-reviewed publication, International Journal of Nanomanufacturing from Inderscience Publishers, researchers describe an early prototype for a nanoassembler.
The report makes clear that progress in building a nanoassembler has been very slow, but that that ultimate payoff will be huge.
A bar owner in Atlanta is using a remote controlled robot sentry to patrol his neighborhood (AP - Robotic vigilante: Homemade 'Bum Bot' patrols in Atlanta). The robot, called the Bum Bot, is used to scare away vagrants and this is prompting a clash with advocates for the homeless (as well as homeless advocates), who are apparently enraged that the bot can capture videotape of the vagrants non-civic minded streetside activities. At least, reading between the lines, that is what I gather. It's an interesting development that raises the question: Will a society with more robots be less people-friendly?
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