Using DNA to Build Really Tiny Things

Nanotech holds some of the most radical and far-reaching promise for creating a future we can only dream about now. But how do you actually build things that small? You can't shrink yourself down like in the movies, and you can't make the tiny tools unless you know how to build really tiny things, which is where we started this erudite discussion. It so happens that evolution has already discovered the means. After all, it's been building really tiny things for billions of years, and getting better at it every million years along the way. In a huge leap forward, researchers have been able to take advantage of this fact.

In an achievement some see as the "holy grail" of nanoscience, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have for the first time used DNA to guide the creation of three-dimensional, ordered, crystalline structures of nanoparticles (particles with dimensions measured in billionths of a meter). The ability to engineer such 3-D structures is essential to producing functional materials that take advantage of the unique properties that may exist at the nanoscale - for example, enhanced magnetism, improved catalytic activity, or new optical properties.

You don't have to understand the details to realize that we are moving very quickly now towards the technological singularity referred to in this blog's title. So hold on tight. It may be a bumpy ride, but it sure will be exciting.

Read the original article.

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Busting Through Moore's Law - Nanophotonics is Here!

This is a sharp stick in the eye for all the technological sticks-in-the-mud who prophesy an end to Moore's law.

FRANKFURT - IBM says it has made a breakthrough in converting electrical signals into light pulses that brings closer the day when supercomputing, which now requires huge machines, will be done on a single chip.

Picture it...today's supercomputer will be tomorrow's single chip. A computer that now requires enough power to run hundreds of homes will soon draw only enough to light up a single bulb.

Using light instead of wires to send information between the cores by using a silicon Mach-Zehnder electro-optic modulator can be as much as 100 times faster and use 10 times less power than wires, IBM says.

The new modulator IBM has developed is 100 to 1,000 times smaller than previously demonstrated comparable modulators, IBM said on Thursday, paving the way for significant reductions in cost, energy and heat while increasing bandwidth.

Things just keep getting more and more exciting, yes?

Original article.

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Visializing Atomic Interactions: Breakthroughs for Nanotech

A team of researchers from U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories, FEI Company (Nasdaq: FEIC) and CEOS GmbH, in Heidelberg, Germany, has succeeded in imaging below 0.5 angstroms using a new instrument.

To get a better idea how small 0.5 angstroms is, bear in mind that it is one-billions of 5 centimeters, the DNA helix is 20 angstroms in diameter, a carbon atom is about 2 angstroms, and the width of an average strand of hair ranges between 500,000 to 1,000,000 angstroms.

Electron microscopes can be used to observe fine details of the inner structure of materials. The ability to characterize the atomic-scale structure, chemistry, and dynamics of individual nanostructures makes this type of microscope a very powerful tool for scientists in all disciplines. With the extraordinary 'vision' of the special TEAM microscope it will become possible to study how atoms combine to form materials, how materials grow and how they respond to a variety of external factors. These constitute many of the most practical things that science needs to know about materials and will improve designs for everything from better, lighter, more efficient automobiles, to stronger buildings and new ways of harvesting energy.

It is not difficult to envision how this kind of development will enhance our ability to build structures with atomic precision, which is a significant aspect of the coming nanotech revolution. To see what is actually happening at this scale will enhance researchers' abilitiy to develop the means and methods of nanoscale design and manufacture.

Stay tuned!

Source article.

[via Advanced Nanotechnology]

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Confronting the Social Implications of the Singularity

Imagining the social implications and conundrums that humanity will be faced with in the coming decades with the development of machine consciousness and the uploading of human minds into machine substrates takes a special kind of mind. A mind like the one contained within the brain of Greg Egan.

Greg has both the technical knowledge, writing skills and penetrating imagination that, when combined, allow him to create fiction that examines many of the social dilemmas with which we will be confronted within a few tens of years. In his book of short stories, Axiomatic, Greg conceives some utterly captivating scenarios. Here are the gists of a few:

A ransom demand is made by a group that holds hostage a digital recreation of a man's wife. Does the virtual woman feel pain? Does she suffer? Should the man pay the ransom?

A man who has within his skull a "jewel" which has been matched with his own brain faces the prospect of turning over control of his body to the immortal jewel so that his biological brain can be disposed of. Is his consciousness that of the jewel, or the brain? When his brain is disconnected, will "he" die? Will the jewel be truly conscious, or will it be an imitation of consciousness? Is there a difference?

After an injury to his brain and its subsequent repair by nanobots, a man's perspective shifts to a position outside his body. Although he "knows" only that which his eyes can see, his mind builds a picture of reality as it might appear from a position a few feet above his physical body.

These are just a few of the stories within Axiomatic. If you want to think about what might actually happen when the singularity arrives, this book will certainly set you on the right path.

Axiomatic

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Future Technological Change: Evolutionary or Revolutionary?

Among the individuals making up the scientific community, according to Mike Treder of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, there are two competing schools of thought concerning the near-term future changes in technology. One group, the majority, believes in a continued gradual slope of change. The other, a much smaller set of scientists, is expecting a discontinuity to occur fairly soon. They anticipate a change so transformative that society will not be the same subsequent to it. This transformation may be the result of advances in on of three possible fields: artificial intelligence, bioengineering, or nanotechnology.

Mike makes a compelling case for the idea that we will see a combination of the two futures. He posits that we are really talking about two different kinds of change: Societal and Technological. Technology often changes society, but not always immediately upon its invention. For example, the Internet was created some years before the World Wide Web made it accessible to most people. So Mike introduces the following graph:



He proposes several possible scenarios that could cause the sudden societal transformation shown in his graph:

• Significant improvements in software development and sophisticated user interfaces could produce a level of virtual reality that is close to indistinguishable from the real world.
• A combination of advanced neurotechnology and powerful supercomputing conceivably could enable consciousness uploading, in which a replica of an individual human mind would be recapitulated in cyberspace.
• Breakthroughs in computer programming could give rise to true artificial intelligence; if one or more such systems are capable of recursive self-improvement, this could lead to a superintelligence far surpassing human comprehension.
• In nanotechnology, the long anticipated development of exponential general-purpose molecular manufacturing could present tremendous opportunities for societal benefits while simultaneously bringing grave dangers such as economic meltdown, environmental havoc, or an unstable arms race.

Admittedly, there is a chance that none of this will occur. However, I wouldn't bet on it.

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Precision Drug Delivery Achieved

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the key to nanotech's power is in its precision. Assembling structures one atom or molecule at a time, or delivering precise dosages of drugs to precise locations, it's about precision. Researchers at Iowa State University have made a major breakthrough in the latter by using nano-sized devices to "penetrate plant cell walls and simultaneously deliver a gene and a chemical that triggers its expression with controlled precision."

Currently, scientists can successfully introduce a gene into a plant cell. In a separate process, chemicals are used to activate the gene's function. The process is imprecise and the chemicals could be toxic to the plant.

"With the mesoporous nanoparticles, we can deliver two biogenic species at the same time," Wang said. "We can bring in a gene and induce it in a controlled manner at the same time and at the same location. That's never been done before."

The devices themselves are amazing creations in their own right:

It is a porous, silica nanoparticle system. Spherical in shape, the particles have arrays of independent porous channels. The channels form a honeycomb-like structure that can be filled with chemicals or molecules.

"One gram of this kind of material can have a total surface area of a football field, making it possible to carry a large payload," Trewyn said.

Lin's nanoparticle has a unique "capping" strategy that seals the chemical goods inside. In previous studies, his group successfully demonstrated that the caps can be chemically activated to pop open and release the cargo inside of animal cells. This unique feature provides total control for timing the delivery.

Very little imagination is required to see where this research can lead in terms of the ability to deliver medicines and gene-therapies to the specific cells that need them. Even further, we can envision the development of nano-devices that will repair damaged cells and clean up the toxic waste products that our bodies fail to deal with. Radical life-extension, here we come.

Source

[via Nanosingularity]

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Choose Your Pleasure: VR or AR?

Taking a glimpse into the near-term future, we can see the advents of both virtual reality (VR), and a subset of VR called augmented reality (AR). We have all heard of VR and seen a rudimentary version of it in the movie Disclosure. But virtual reality is headed in the direction of total immersion VR, which will take place at the level of your neurons themselves. Nanobots will stimulate your neurons directly so that you will not be able to tell the difference between real reality and the VR environment, except for some type of indicator inserted for safety reasons. Every one of your senses will be engaged, and your entire environment will be virtual.

So what is AR? AR is a mixture of the virtual and the real, sort of a virtual overlay that is superimposed upon real reality. This could also be activated at the neuronal level, or even projected onto your retinas by means of special contact lenses. Think of how much fun this would be, and how it could increase your productivity.

Imagine the fun part first. Think about people appearing as characters in a game, or dressing up the local environment to appear to be coming straight out of another world or another time. How cool would that be? As far as productivity, there could be educational or informational overlays on people and objects that would give you vital information about them. As you look at the person you're meeting for a business lunch, you see above their heads their name, company, position, etc. As you get started, you could bring up an agenda you had prepared earlier and either share it with your associate or view it privately, like a heads-up-display hanging in the air. The possibilities are virtually endless.

Talk about your killer apps. Let's see Apple and Microsoft battle it out in that arena! Stay tuned.

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Nanotechnology and All Things Precise

What is the big deal about nanotechnology. Why are really tiny machines better than regular-sized machines? And why are engineered drugs supposed to be so much better than the ones we came up with before? And what makes smart bombs so smart?

These are just some of the questions many people find themselves asking whenever these topics arise in the news. They are good questions, and they all have the same answer: Precision. Yes, folks, in each case it is about precision. Let me explain.

Hundred dollar bills

Imagine that you are a normal person, with a normal income and normal tastes in consumer goods. OK, got that? There is only one thing strange about you. It's your money. All you have are $100 bills. When you get paid, they round down. When you pay for goods and services, they round up. This means that your weekly salary of $1099 is rounded to $1000. You lose $99 every week. Too bad, so sad. When you buy a 25 cent pack of gum (if you are foolish enough to buy only that), you have to pay, $100. A dinner bill of $35 including tip costs you, you guessed it, $100.

Precision in fabrication

That would surely suck, wouldn't it? Well, we've been doing something like that for many thousands of years. How so? you ask. Well, whenever we build a widget, for example, we round up on the materials we use to build it, simply because our tools can't be any more precise about it. But what if we could build that widget atom by atom? We would use not one more atom than is necessary. With lots of widgets we could save a bundle.

Precision in medicine

How about drugs, the medicinal kind? First, instead of taking a bunch of ingredients, mixing them together and trying the concoction on test victims, I mean subjects, to see what, if any, therapeutic effects might result, we would be able to build a molecule or compound exactly to order, made from the start to do exactly what we want it to do. Second, rather than manufacturing one drug to treat every headache, we could design and create one that's just perfect for you, based on your specific genetic makeup.

Further, wouldn't it be nice if, instead of having to swallow a pill that has to be dissolved in your belly, then absorbed through the lining of your intestines, float around your bloodstream until most of the molecules find the right address, they could all be targeted and delivered precisely where they are needed? Not a molecule wasted?

Killing the right enemy

And smart bombs, well, we're talking about not killing 15 people when we only need to kill one. (I'm am optimistic about the future, but the idea that we won't have bombs or killing...come on.)

This idea of making things more precise through technology is affecting you right now. One reason why there's so little inflation, why prices of most things are stable or falling, is because of technology. The companies that make and process and package and deliver and sell the milk you buy are all using computers and sophisticated algorithms to make sure they aren't wasting a drop of milk or a second of time. Of course, they are wasting many drops and many seconds, because the technology available has lots of room for improvement. But we are learning the advantages of precision.

So, now you know. It's time to start cheering for technology, for artificial general intelligence, and the singularity.

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Singularity Will Be a Global Phenomenon

Living in the U.S. as I do, and perhaps as most of my readers do, it is easy for us to have a restricted view of where the singularity will occur. We tend to be America-centric, and therefore imagine that the advances in the fields that will bring on the singularity are happening in our nation and can therefore be controlled by U.S. legislation and regulation. That is a mistaken assumption.

As I scour the web for news relating to it, I find that the singularity is being pursued from points all across the globe. Research is being done in many countries, in the fields of AI, nanotechnology, robotics, computer technology and life-extension, in many cases ahead of domestic research.

What are the implications of the global reach of all this research and development? One implication is that the singularity seems to be more inevitable than ever. There is no single, regulated and controlled center of operations that can be scaled back or even slowed down. The pace of research is being driven faster and faster by an organic and chaotic momentum that will very probably lead to strong AI and radical life-extension far sooner than most people could imagine.

Another implication is that, rather than wishing it wouldn't happen, a more useful pursuit would be to attempt to guide the form of its eventual advent as much as possible. Saying it won't happen just isn't a productive expenditure of one's time or effort.

Remember these predictions?

“Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.”
Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949

“I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won’t last out the year.”
The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957

“But what … is it good for?”
Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip.

“This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.”
Western Union internal memo, 1876.

“Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.”
Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895.

“The bomb will never go off. I speak as an expert in explosives.”
Admiral William Leahy, US Atomic Bomb Project.

“Man will never reach the moon regardless of all future scientific advances.”
Dr. Lee De Forest, inventor of the vacuum tube and father of television.

“The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will forever be shut from the intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon.”
Sir John Eric Ericksen, British surgeon, appointed Surgeon-Extraordinary to Queen Victoria, 1873

Source: Thought Mechanics

Seems to me some folks can't wait to be added to this list.

The following story is only one of countless examples that demonstrate the global reach of research that will hasten the coming technological singularity:

China sees soaring development in nanotechnology: According to the meeting, China has poured about 1.5 billion yuan (about $197 million) into the research and development of nanoscience and nanotechnology over the past 15 years, achieving encouraging advances in this regard. For instance, the number of research papers published by Chinese scientists at the international journals in 2006 were on a par with those contributed by their US or Japanese colleagues. The number of patents they have filed for has increased from less than 1,000 in 2001 to more than 4,600 in March 2005.

Stay tuned.

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Want to Sound Like a Singularity Guru? Learn These Terms

George P. Dvorsky's blog, Sentient Developments, has an excellent list of "Must-Know" terms for the 21st century intelligentsia.

If you like to think of yourself as a knowledgeable person who is comfortable discussing the bleeding-edge developments of his or her day, you need to study this list. Here's a taste:

Artificial General Intelligence: This ain't your daddy's AI. Rather, AGI describes the kind of intelligence that you and I have -- the commonsense knowhow we have when we're put into unfamiliar situations. Once developed, artificial agents endowed with AGI will be non-specialized intelligent entities that will come to represent the bona fide synthetic equivalent to human intelligence, and then move beyond.

Cosmological Eschatology (aka physical eschatology): CE is the study of how the Universe develops, ages, and ultimately comes to an end. While hardly a new concept, what is new is the suggestion that advanced intelligence may play a role in the universe's life cycle. Given the radical potential for postbiological superintelligence, a number of thinkers have suggested that universe engineering is a likely activity for advanced civilizations. This has given rise to a number of theories, including the developmental singularity hypothesis and the selfish biocosm hypothesis.

Friendly AI: If we are going to survive the Singularity and the onset of greater-than-human AI, it had better be friendly. And if it turns out to be friendly, it won't be by accident. Computer science theorists such as Eliezer Yudkowsky and Ben Goertzel are already working on what may ultimately prove to be an intractable problem. A poorly programmed, malevolent, or misguided SAI could destroy all of humanity with a mere thought. Asimov's Three Laws will do little against incomprehensibly powerful autopotent entities (a term coined by Nick Bostrom indicating total self-awareness and ability to self-modify).

You don't want to be totally left behind, do you? Then get cracking!

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Forbes Investors' Report: Nano 101 - An Investor's Guide to the World of Nanotechnology

WHAT IS NANOTECHOLOGY? (and why you should care)

Until recently, Mother Nature has been the only governing force in controlling intervention and manipulation of atoms and molecules. But after three decades of research, scientists can now work at the nanoscale to manipulate atoms and molecules, and they are able to understand these building blocks of matter like never before. I define nanotechnology as the precision placement, measurement, manipulation and modeling of sub-100 nanometer-scale matter, or matter that consists of about 4 to 400 atoms. To put that in perspective, one nanometer—a billionth of a meter—is 1/75,000th the width of a human hair. The range below 100 nanometers is important because when we get down to this small size, the classical laws of physics change to give us novel properties that can allow scientists to produce new materials with the exact properties they desire: smaller, stronger, tougher than what we know now.

So why should you care? For starters, almost every industry will be affected by nanotechnology. In a recent study, fewer than 2% of 1,000 top executives were able to define “nanotechnology.” Less than 5% had even heard of the word. But once the term was explained, 80% agreed that nanotechnology was relevant to their particular industry. In some circles, it promises pre-programmable drug delivery robots swimming inside your bloodstream to battle cancer, the creation of pollution-free energy systems and eternal life. Others, at a more conservative end of the spectrum, say that nanotechnology will be used to create stronger materials, next generation computing, and benign, yet salient, advances predicated on real science. It is the mixture of materials science, engineering, physics, chemistry and biology. (Get the entire pdf report below.)

Forbes/Wolfe Nanotech 101 Report

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Transparent Transistors Invented

Picture this: Bright, high-resolution maps displayed on your car's windscreen. Roll-up, see-through computer screens. TV on the lenses of your eye-glasses.

All of these and more are possible with OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diodes) technology, which is already transparent and can be put on bendable materials. But until now, the transistors that control each display's OLED pixels, weren't. An article on Technology Review explains:

Researchers at Purdue University and Northwestern University have now made flexible, see-through transistors using zinc-oxide and indium-oxide nanowires. By contrast, the amorphous or polycrystalline silicon transistors used in existing displays are not transparent. The new transistors also perform better than their silicon counterparts and are easier to fabricate on flexible plastic.

Nanotechnology has again opened new avenues for our accelerating drive into the future.

The nanowire transistors have high electron mobility, which determines how fast the transistor can work and how much current it can carry. In fact, the mobility is a few hundred times better than it is for transistors made from amorphous silicon, which is widely used in the electronics for displays. Because of that, the transistors could be made smaller and faster, Janes says. More-compact transistors, he says, would mean an even larger pixel area. What's more, the nanowire transistors are much easier to make on plastic than silicon transistors are because they don't need high-temperature processing.

As always, stay tuned.

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Nerve Regeneration Through Nanotech

The holy grail of current medical science is nerve regeneration. Damaged neurons don't grow back, and this is a big problem for people who have suffered trauma that leaves many of them without the use of much of their bodies. Paraplegia and quadriplegia are terrible diagnoses that have no cure today because of the nerve regrowth problem.

A very recent article in Medical News Today describes two new methods, presented at the NSTI Nanotech 2007 Conference, for using nanotechnology to change the equation and promote the regeneration of neurons.

The first method, developed by researchers at the University of Miami, uses magnetic nanoparticles to "create mechanical tension that stimulates the growth and elongation of axons of the central nervous system neurons."

"By providing mechanical tension to the regrowing axon, we may be able to enhance the regenerative axon growth in vivo". This mechanically induced neurite outgrowth may provide a possible method for bypassing the inhibitory interface and the tissue beyond a CNS related injury. Using optic nerve and spinal cord tissues as in vivo models and dissociated retinal ganglion neurons as an in vitro model, De Silva and his colleagues are currently investigating how these magnetic nanoparticles can be incorporated into neurons and axons at the site of injury. Although, this study is at a very preliminary stage to explore the possibility of using magnetic nanoparticles for enhancing in vivo axon regeneration, this work may have significant implications for the treatment of spinal cord injuries, and is a vital "next step" in bringing this new technology to clinical use.

The second method, developed at the University of California, Berkeley, "uses aligned nanofibers containing one or more growth factors to provide a bioactive matrix where nerve cells can regrow."

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have developed a technology that has the potential to serve as a better alternative than currently available synthetic nerve grafts. The graft material is composed entirely of aligned nanoscale polymer fibers. These polymer fibers act as physical guides for regenerating nerve fibers. They have also developed a way to make these aligned nanofibers bioactive by attaching various biochemicals directly onto the surfaces of the nanofibers. Thus, the bioactive aligned nanofiber technology mimics the nerve autograft by providing both physical and biochemical cues to enhance and direct nerve growth.

This technology has been tested by culturing rat nerve tissue ex vivo on our bioactive aligned nanofiber scaffolds. When the nerve tissue was cultured on unaligned nanofibers there was no nerve fiber growth onto the scaffolds. However, on aligned nanofiber scaffolds, they not only observed nerve fibers growing from the tissue but the nerve fibers were aligned in the same orientation as the nanofibers. Furthermore, when there were biochemicals present on the nanofibers, the nerve fiber growth was enhanced 5 fold. In a matter of just 5 days, nerve fibers had extended 4 millimeters from the nerve tissue in a bipolar fashion on the bioactive aligned nanofiber scaffolds. Thus, this technology can induce, enhance and direct nerve fiber regeneration in a straight and organized manner.

One can only sit in wonder at the countless applications that are being discovered for using nanotech to improve human lives. Stay tuned.

(Via BetterHumans)

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Shrinking Big Energy to Digital-Size

No one who's in touch with the world of human events can be unaware of the issues the world is having with energy. No one disagrees with the proposition that we need to wean ourselves off the teat of fossil fuels. It's running out, it costs too much, and it's bad for the environment. That's where consensus ends.

Why does it seem an impossible task for us to find a solution to the energy problem. There's a short, simple answer about which no one in the mainstream media appears to have any understanding. Energy is still a centralized commodity that has not made the transition to the information age. As long as these factors remain in place, we will be energy poor and vulnerable to shortages caused by other nations and natural disasters.

In stark contrast to this state of affairs stands information technology, becoming more abundant, more efficient and less costly every day. Because the Internet is so distributed it is much more resistant to attack and disruption than our power grid, oil supply and refinement capacity.

How can energy production and distribution become digital? How can it become information technology? First, through the development of nanotech, much more efficient (read low-cost) solar panels can be manufactured, such that they will completely replace fossil fuels as the world's source of energy. As Ray Kurzweil points out, only one percent of the U.S.'s land, covered with efficient solar panels, could supply not just our current needs, but our future needs. When solar panels can be fabricated at the atomic level, they can be made this efficient.

Second, for storage of energy, nano-manufactured fuel cells would be feasibly installed in everything from our homes and cars to our cell phones and PDAs.

Each family could have their own energy source and storage systems, making us much less vulnerable to disruptions. It would then be a distributed energy system, rather than a cumbersome and stagnant one.

But how would it be digital? It would become an information technology because the the actual physical solar panels and fuel cells would be sold and design data. The manufacture of the systems from cheap raw materials could be performed virtually anywhere, once the design data is obtained. Improvements and upgrades would all be in the form of digital information and thus subject to the law of accelerating returns.

An overly optimistic view? We will know soon enough, so stay tuned.

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Implantable Biocomputers: Singularity is Nearer

No matter that I read up on new developments every day, I'm still awed by the accelerating pace of developments that bring the singularity nearer and nearer. The Harvard University Gazette Online brings news of a "crucial step toward building biological computers, tiny implantable devices that can monitor the activities and characteristics of human cells. The information provided by these 'molecular doctors,' constructed entirely of DNA, RNA, and proteins, could eventually revolutionize medicine by directing therapies only to diseased cells or tissues.

“Each human cell already has all of the tools required to build these biocomputers on its own,” says Harvard’s Yaakov “Kobi” Benenson, a Bauer Fellow in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ Center for Systems Biology. “All that must be provided is a genetic blueprint of the machine and our own biology will do the rest. Your cells will literally build these biocomputers for you.”

Evaluating Boolean logic equations inside cells, these molecular automata will detect anything from the presence of a mutated gene to the activity of genes within the cell. The biocomputers’ “input” is RNA, proteins and chemicals found in the cytoplasm; “output” molecules indicating the presence of the telltale signals are easily discernable with basic laboratory equipment.

“Currently, we have no tools for reading cellular signals,” Benenson says. “These biocomputers can translate complex cellular signatures, such as activities of multiple genes, into a readily observed output. They can even be programmed to automatically translate that output into a concrete action, meaning they could either be used to label a cell for a clinician to treat or they could trigger therapeutic action themselves.”

Source: Harvard University Gazette Online

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Ray Kurzweil Speaks! The Singularity Explained

I wish everyone would watch this presentation by Ray at the Killer App Expo in Fort Wayne, Indiana. There's a natural skepticism people feel when they first hear or read about the predictions made by Ray's Law of Accelerating Returns, but when you listen to him explain how it has worked and will work, you can't help but take him seriously. Ray is not a cockeyed optimist. He is a globally respected inventor, author and researcher. (Read more about his achievements here.)

The folks at Technology Evangelist attended the conference and recorded Ray's keynote presentation and were generous enough to share the recording with us. Please check it out below. It will be well worth your time, I promise.



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Grassroots Nanotech: Controlled Self-Assembly

Throughout our history, mankind has created tools the same way, essentially using the top-down approach. Think about it. In the stone age, a sharp cutting tool was fashioned by using a larger stone to chip away pieces until the cutting stone was sharp enough. Today, a computer chip is made by a large laser that etches the circuits into a piece of silicon.

Self-assembly is different in principle, in that nanocrystals are allowed to assemble themselves via the laws of physics into larger, more complex components. This is a "bottom-up," or what I call grassroots approach. The outcome, or product of this self-assembly, however, is not arbitrary, but controlled, as the title of this post suggests. It is controlled by the various properties of the nanocrystals used. As a recent article on Nanowerk tells us:

What makes nanocrystals so attractive to researchers is the fact that the properties essential to allow the arrangement process, including their size, shape, surface protection, stabilization and charge, can be controlled along with the electronic structure of each nanocrystal. As an example, we developed a "lab-in-a-drop" technique where a variety of nanostructures with desired properties may be produced.

It requires very little imagination to see the mammoth potential in this revolutionary method of fabrication . The article concludes:

We describe superstructures that extend over macroscopic dimensions. There is no principle upper limit for the area to be covered, making "lab-in-drop" a promising candidate for the fabrication of technological important materials.

Our future work will include development of new, self-healing polymers based on nanocrystal self-assembly, applications of designed nanostructures to biophotonics, and to engineering of energy-harvesting and energy -transfer nano-devices operating in a FRET (fluorescence resonance energy transfer) regime.

This article and many others like it, scattered about in technical publications and too little noticed by the popular press, are describing the inexorable assembly of the techniques and infrastructure of our future world. They are, in effect, sketching out the framework upon which the singularity will be built. It's fun to follow along and stay tuned.

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...You Might Be Wearing Nanotech

When it comes to nanotechnology, we've already pointed out that the public is blissfully unaware. I'm not sure why advertisers aren't making more of a fuss about it; perhaps they're wary of a negative reaction from consumers who may be a bit frightened by it. It's possible that people who would accept it, even welcome it, don't have as much money as the fraidy cats. But this is all speculation.

The point is nanotechnology is being incorporated into the products we use every day...about 475 of them at last count. Would you like to know what these products are?

The Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies has a nice list at this web site. From facial creams to automotive wax, from chinos to ice axes, nanotech is finding its way into everyday consumer products.

Many of them incorporate nano silver coating materials that can be applied on metal products such as water taps, door locks, knives, forks, scissors, trays, etc. The coatings provide the objects with a permanent antibacterial property.

Then there are clothes that are coated with nanospheres, making the materials non-staining and easy to clean. And don't miss out on the shaving razors with alpha diamond-coated blades that stay sharp, and tennis racquets made with a matrix of carbon fibers and a new crystalline metal alloy, allowing for a metal with a grain 1,000-times finer than normal.

These are all very nice applications of nanotech which make products, cleaner, tougher and lighter. The really mindblowing stuff is yet to come, however. When literally anything can be constructed a molecule at a time from inexpensive raw materials, we will be in Star Trek replicator territory. That will take a bit longer, so stay tuned.

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Boiling the Frog: Our Transition to Singularity

You've all heard the metaphor, right? Boiling a frog? Gradually increasing the temperature of the water so the frog gets used to it until it's hot enough to boil? Yes, that one. Apart from the sad conclusion of the analogy, the idea of gradual change not being very noticeable fits the way that accelerating technological change will be accepted by humans.

When you first hear the predictions that the singularity postulates, you are tempted to scoff. Human minds uploaded into a computer? Conscious machines blowing past human-levels of intelligence? Nanotech-augmented humans living indefinitely? Poppycock!

But consider how you would have responded 50 years ago to the idea of a global Internet connecting everyone instantly. Tivo. Google. iPods. You might have been tempted to scoff then, too. (Although society was a lot less jaded and a lot more credulous back then.)

My point is that we do not notice change when it happens gradually. And we should understand that the predictions of the singularity, although fast by today's standards, will arrive gradually, piece by piece, degree by degree, until we are happily boiling away in a delicious stew of transhumanism and computation. Let's look at a few examples.

Robotics: Rather than picture a world of intelligent androids a la I, Robot or Commander Data, think instead of robots being deployed in jobs that are too dangerous, difficult, unhealthy or boring for humans. That's already happening. Robots that drive carts around a Pittsburgh hospital, freeing up nurses to do more important things. Robots in Iraq that check out suspicious-looking objects that might be roadside bombs. We should see the development of robots doing mining operations and meat-packing. By taking on these jobs, robots improve the quality of human lives and make us more productive. As Rodney Brooks, Director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and CTO of iRobot, adds:

So, it's not going to take any jobs away from people who want them.

Brain surgery. These surgeons are now doing surgeries they wouldn't have contemplated before because they have much better tools of knowing where everything is and being able to know what's happening.

It's like, you know, computers didn't replace office workers or accountants. They have changed the nature of the work they did, increased their productivity...my reality meter says that it's much more a symbiosis, working together and the robots doing the easy cases of the easy tasks, etc.

What about fully-autonomous cars. Will we feel comfortable giving up control of a vehicle traveling a busy highway at 70 mph?

I think that willingness to give up control is going to be slow. The car companies aren't saying, 'let's build an autonomous car right now.' They're saying, 'let's build aids.' I think gradually over time people would become more accustomed to this and we'll see gradual shifts. The high-end Lexus self-parking, automatic lane changing, staying at a fixed distance from another car. That's going to continue, because these are safety issues, and the Japanese car manufacturers in particular and the Germans want safety.

Augmented Brains: This will also happen gradually, beginning with neural prosthetics, at first being medical in nature. Cochlear implants for people with no hearing, artificial retinas for the sightless. There will be memory implants for people who have lost memory-creation and -storage function in the hippocampus. But when these implants become less expensive and require less-invasive procedures, they will be offered commercially as enhancements to functioning brains as well.

Uploaded (Instantiated) Minds: A team of researchers at Stanford is working at designing computer chips that mimic the human brain:

The team is also in the process of developing other neuromorphic chips. Its latest project--and the most ambitious neuromorphic effort anywhere to date--is a model of the cortex, the most recently evolved part of our brain. The intricate structure of the cortex allows us to perform complex computational feats, such as understanding language, recognizing faces, and planning for the future. The model's first-generation design will consist of a circuit board with 16 chips, each containing a 256-by-256 array of silicon neurons.

As these designs begin to approximate the functioning of the brain, it is not difficult to imagine researchers uploading patterns gleaned from high-resolution scans of animal brains and then human brains into these computer substrates.

These are just a few examples of how gradually these developments will take place, so gradually that we don't notice. Unless we stay tuned.

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Going All-Virtual: The Desire to Leave Reality Behind

Considering the implications of the singularity is a fascinating exercise. We will be facing choices and available enhancements that require of us quite a bit of imagination if we are to even tentatively understand them. In this article I will raise an issue that I think will confront society at large and ourselves as individuals within the next few decades: Should I go virtual and leave reality behind?

When we hear the term "virtual reality," what may come to mind is the bulky helmet and treadmill setup worn by Michael Douglas in the movie Disclosure. No one would be fooled by that kind of simulation, because their senses would be only partially engaged. They would feel the helmet, they would smell the room they were in, they would always be aware that they were standing, they could not feel the touch of a virtual person or object. The entire experience would never be mistaken for reality.

Skip now to the singularity, when nanomachines in our blood and in our brains can cut off all the data coming from our sensory organs and replace them with virtual data. Every signal being processed by your brain could be coming from the nanomachines, rather than from the outside world. You would not feel the chair that you are sitting on, you would not feel the warmth of the air surrounding your body, or smell the smoke coming from the fire that was started when your lit cigarette fell from your slack fingers onto the flammable carpet.

You see, we would be so completely engaged in our virtual world that it would be very easy to lose track of anything happening on the outside. This possibility raises for me two issues in particular that will have to be addressed in the design of such a virtual reality system.

First, there would have to be some connection with real reality left open. It would have to be unobtrusive in order to avoid ruining the fantasy of the virtual world in which we are enmeshed. But it would have to be able to alert us to messages coming from the outside, to warn us of danger, to remind us that we need to eat, or attend to other bodily functions. (Although we will probably have other means of taking care of those things automatically.) I'm reminded of occasions when I am listening to music from my phone through my earbuds. If someone is calling, I'll hear the alert over the music, so I won't miss the call. Something similar would need to be involved with our future VR system.

Second, when it becomes a simple thing to create a virtual world that we actually prefer to the real one, there will be a very powerful motivation to move our minds into the virtual and abandon the physical body we once called home. Certainly many would choose not to do such a thing, for various reasons, nostalgi