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Human Body Version 2.0

In the coming decades, a radical upgrading of our body’s physical and mental systems, already underway, will use nanobots to augment and ultimately replace our organs. We already know how to prevent most degenerative disease through nutrition and supplementation; this will be a bridge to the emerging biotechnology revolution, which in turn will be a bridge to the nanotechnology revolution. By 2030, reverse-engineering of the human brain will have been completed and nonbiological intelligence will merge with our biological brains.… read more

Topics: Innovation/Entrepreneurship | Quantum

Top KurzweilAI.net News of 2002

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In its second year of operation, 2002, KurzweilAI.net continued to chronicle the most notable news stories on accelerating intelligence. We offer here our overview of the dramatic progress that the past year has brought. Following that, we selected just over half of the 823 news stories posted in 2002 to document key breakthroughs in the continued exponential growth of increasingly diverse information-based technologies; deepening understanding of the information basis of biological processes; the early contributions of nanotechnology, and a multiplicity of related topics.… read more

Topics: Innovation/Entrepreneurship | Quantum | Singularity/Futures | Social Networking/Web | Telepresence/Telemedicine/Online Education

Safe Utilization of Advanced Nanotechnology

The “gray goo” scenario and other dangers of advanced nanotechnology can be avoided with a centrally controlled, relatively large, self-contained nanofactory, administered by a central authority and with restricted-design software.… read more

Topics: Innovation/Entrepreneurship | Nanotech/Materials Science

Don’t let Crichton’s Prey scare you–the science isn’t real

A review of Michael Crichton’s Prey, a novel featuring out-of-control, self-replicating nanotechnology.… read more

Topics: Nanotech/Materials Science

Kurzweil responds to Edge challenge, advises Bush

In a hypothetical letter to President Bush, Ray Kurzweil advised him to accelerate FDA review of defensive solutions for bioengineered pathogens, fund a crash program for developing promising new methodologies for human somatic cell engineering, and perfect hydrogen fuel cells, which could have major implications for the economy, the environment, and the geopolitics of oil.… read more

Topics: Innovation/Entrepreneurship

The Cyclic Universe

Is the universe expanding indefinitely–the Big Bang model–or does it go through cycles of expansion and contraction? Paul Steinhardt, who is Albert Einstein Professor of Science at Princeton University and on the faculty of both the Department of Physics and the Department of Astrophysical Sciences, suggests a cyclic model that could successfully compete with the Big Bang model.… read more

Topics: Quantum | Singularity/Futures

Death is an Outrage

Each year, we allow a destruction of knowledge equivalent to three Libraries of Congress with an average value of about $2 million dollars for each human life lost. The solution: “dechronification”–nanomedicine tools that can arrest biological aging and reduce your biological age.… read more

Topics: Nanotech/Materials Science

Human Cloning is the Least Interesting Application of Cloning Technology

Cloning is an extremely important technology–not for cloning humans but for life extension: therapeutic cloning of one’s own organs, creating new tissues to replace defective tissues or organs, or replacing one’s organs and tissues with their “young” telomere-extended replacements without surgery. Cloning even offers a possible solution for world hunger: creating meat without animals.… read more

Topics: Biomed/Longevity

The Intelligent Universe

Within 25 years, we’ll reverse-engineer the brain and go on to develop superintelligence. Extrapolating the exponential growth of computational capacity (a factor of at least 1000 per decade), we’ll expand inward to the fine forces, such as strings and quarks, and outward. Assuming we could overcome the speed of light limitation, within 300 years we would saturate the whole universe with our intelligence.… read more

Topics: Quantum | Social Networking/Web

Dialogue between Ray Kurzweil, Eric Drexler, and Robert Bradbury

What would it take to achieve successful cryonics reanimation of a fully functioning human brain, with memories intact? A conversation at the recent Alcor Conference on Extreme Life Extension between Ray Kurzweil and Eric Drexler sparked an email discussion of this question. They agreed that despite the challenges, the brain’s functions and memories can be represented surprisingly compactly, suggesting that successful reanimation of the brain may be achievable.… read more

Topics: Nanotech/Materials Science | Quantum

The emotion universe

Why have we made limited progress in AI? Because we haven’t developed sophisticated models of thinking, we need better programming languages and architectures, and we haven’t focused on common sense problems that every normal child can solve.… read more

Topics: AI/Robotics | Quantum

The Alcor Conference on Extreme Life Extension

On November 15-17, 2002, leaders in life extension and cryonics came together to explore how the emerging technologies of biotechnology, nanotechnology, and cryonics will enable humans to halt and ultimately reverse aging and disease and live indefinitely.… read more

Topics: Nanotech/Materials Science | Quantum

The Computational Universe

The amount of information you could process if you were to use all the energy and matter of the universe is 10^90 bits and the number of elementary operations that it can have performed since the Big Bang is about 10^120 ops. Perhaps the universe is itself a computer and what it’s doing is performing a computation. If so, that’s why the universe is so complex and these numbers say how big that computation is. Also, that means Douglas Adams was right (the answer is “42″).… read more

Topics: AI/Robotics | Quantum

Whither Psychoanalysis in a Computer Culture?

In the early 1980s, MIT professor Sherry Turkle first called the computer a “second self.” With this essay, she presents a major new theory of “evocative objects”: Wearable computers, PDAs, online multiple identities, “companion species” (such as quasi-alive virtual pets, digital dolls, and robot nurses for the elderly), “affective computing” devices (such as the human-like Kismet robot), and the imminent age of machines designed as relational artifacts are causing us to see ourselves and our world differently. They call for a new generation of psychoanalytic self-psychology to explore the human response and the human vulnerability to these objects.… read more

Topics: Cognitive Science/Neuroscience | Innovation/Entrepreneurship

The Vasculoid Personal Appliance

Robert A. Freitas Jr. (author, “Nanomedicine”) visualizes a future “vasculoid” (vascular-like machine) that would replace human blood with some 500 trillion nanorobots distributed throughout the body’s vasculature as a coating. It could eradicate heart disease, stroke, and other vascular problems; remove parasites, bacteria, viruses, and metastasizing cancer cells to limit the spread of bloodborne disease; move lymphocytes faster to improve immune response; reduce susceptibility to chemical, biochemical, and parasitic poisons; improve physical endurance and stamina; and partially protect from various accidents and other physical harm.… read more

Topics: Biomed/Longevity

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