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Its been a constant discussion on how will they make nanoparticles. Well a huge step that will allow us to do that very thing has been published so I thought I would post it here.
This is from The Harvard Crimson:
Researchers at Harvard Medical School, MIT, and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have discovered a new synthetic process to construct 3D metal nanoparticles using DNA as a mold, according to a study published in Science earlier this month.
By enabling the construction of nanoparticles in user-specified shapes out of materials like silver or gold, the breakthrough offers a range of applications in solar cells, disease detection, and laser technology.
“Using DNA as a nano-foundry, you can fabricate nanomaterials, 4,000 times smaller than a tiny paper sheet, as simple as growing something in your garden,” said lead author Wei Sun, a postdoctoral scholar in the Wyss' Molecular Systems Lab.
According to the Wyss Institute press release, the particles created were as small as 25 nanometers. A sheet of paper is approximately 100,000 nanometers thick.
DNA has garnered attention for its potential as a programmable material platform that could spawn entire new and revolutionary nanodevices in computer science, microscopy, biology, and more. Researchers have been working to master the ability to coax DNA molecules to self assemble into the precise shapes and sizes needed in order to fully realize these nanotechnology dreams.
The nano particle article is impressive, I have the feeling that predictions about (real APM or Replicators or Molecular Manufacturing) nanotech always have been very careful as it would be such a huge game changer but that actually it might become a reality in the next 5-10-15 years.
I stumbled on this article about (maybe) "the beginning of the golden age of stem cell therapeutics"
The nano particle article is impressive, I have the feeling that predictions about (real APM or Replicators or Molecular Manufacturing) nanotech always have been very careful as it would be such a huge game changer but that actually it might become a reality in the next 5-10-15 years.
I stumbled on this article about (maybe) "the beginning of the golden age of stem cell therapeutics"
TL;DR: a company will start clinical human trials in a couple of weeks using stem cell therapy. Expected result: Curing Diabetes 1 in a few months.
I have read something about that as well.
The thing is since we are the knee of the curve things that seem like decades away are only a few years away. Why the kind of changes we will see in the next 5-15 years will be impressive to say the least.
You bet the changes we'll see in the next 5-10 years will change life as we know it. But there are these times, isn't anybody just a little bit pessimistic about the singularity sometimes? It otherwise sounds like an exciting time, but I want some reassurance from my buddies.
You bet the changes we'll see in the next 5-10 years will change life as we know it. But there are these times, isn't anybody just a little bit pessimistic about the singularity sometimes? It otherwise sounds like an exciting time, but I want some reassurance from my buddies.
Change is always hard and I would be lying if I said I was not nervous but I am more excited then I am nervous and the more I study and learn the more excited I become.
A lot of those issues will be solved once we reverse engineer the brain and that should happen by 2020, give or take a year. That is why people like Ray Kurzweil say we will have consciousness in AI 5-10 years after we successfully reverse engineer the brain and that will be around 2030.
I hope you are right. Barring disaster, I might live to see 2030, and I'd love to how it all plays out. I still suspect, however, that the creation of conscious machines might require more than purely technical/engineering concepts (the "easy problems" in the lingo of David Chalmers, who has sparked endless philosophical debates over the past couple of decades over the claim that there is a metaphysically baffling "hard problem" in addition to the engineering problems). It is possible that, even if there is a "hard problem," we might not need to solve it before we can build conscious machines, in which case 2030 might be realistic. But since we do not, at the moment, know how to address the hard problem, I'd say that we are left which a huge hole in our understanding that might or might not get in the way of our ability to build conscious machines. I'm not convinced that we have a credible basis for making predictions at this point (our current predictions could be about as meaningful as trying to predict the local whether).
We are probably in a situation similar to pre-Darwinian biologists trying to understand the diversity of living organisms - gathering vast amounts of taxonomical data and descriptions of patterns, but lacking the particular insight that helps us explain how the data fits together and why the patterns exist. I'm not sure that we can realistically predict insights of this magnitude on the order of decades. Honestly, I believe that we WILL have this insight by 2020 (indeed, I am trying my best contribute to this insight myself), and thus 2030 seems very plausible to me, but I see this as being an intuitive hunch rather than anything I would try to defend logically.
My own approach, at the moment, is to re-think the concept of "physical" and the notion of "natural laws." Specifically, I'm exploring the idea that energy might be essentially qualitative. Even more specifically: it may be this qualitative aspect of energy that underscores the dynamics of physical systems. This gets into some outrageously complex, speculative, vague, and controversial philosophical territory, but the bottom line is that (according to me) if we can somehow find a way to model the qualitative nature of energy, we may achieve the insight that allows us to understand why/how some material systems find themselves subjects of qualitative experience - true consciousness or "agent causation", in contrast to systems that behave in complex ways due to complex input/output processing. Think roughly of the "meaning" of the sentence "I love you" when spoken by one person to another, verses the meaning of this same sentence when it is spoken by, say, a computer-generated character in a computer game. In one case the behavior is motivated by qualitative subjective feelings, whereas in the other case it is just the output of complex if/then circuitry. Is there any deeply significant difference? I think there is, but I cannot yet prove it.
I'm fairly confident that one of the keys to conscious "agent causation" will be the principles of self-organization in the context of system self-preservation and growth/learning ("metabolism" in a generic sense) counterbalancing the thermodynamic trend toward higher entropy. I cannot yet specify why this context-sensitive self-organization is the "magical key" to qualitative experience, but I think I'm waving my hands in roughly the right direction.
The good news is that, even without a theory of mind, we are moving in the direction of developing these types of systems. Just this morning I came across this article:
You bet the changes we'll see in the next 5-10 years will change life as we know it. But there are these times, isn't anybody just a little bit pessimistic about the singularity sometimes? It otherwise sounds like an exciting time, but I want some reassurance from my buddies.
Just hanging around here and I don't know what to say except everything is accelerating, the devil is in the details people says but maybe the details are what we should check out too!
Went on holidays last week and rented an AirBnB in Barcelona (3 years ago you'd go through some quirky weird unknown site, paying in cash), obviously we had an internet connection in the apartment so the kids could watch some films in the evening streamed from youtube (where did that come from?) and the wifi worked flawlessly (I remember the buzz about wifi in the early 2000 IIRC and it like never even worked) so the laptop and our smartphones could be online for free.
Hope it makes you feel a bit better even if it isn't what some people would say groundbreaking technology but the tech is getting everywhere and we doesn't even notice (sometimes)!
On another note, this site might be interesting to follow (smart rich guy investiong in 'creating th OS of life')
I hope you are right. Barring disaster, I might live to see 2030, and I'd love to how it all plays out. I still suspect, however, that the creation of conscious machines might require more than purely technical/engineering concepts (the "easy problems" in the lingo of David Chalmers, who has sparked endless philosophical debates over the past couple of decades over the claim that there is a metaphysically baffling "hard problem" in addition to the engineering problems). It is possible that, even if there is a "hard problem," we might not need to solve it before we can build conscious machines, in which case 2030 might be realistic. But since we do not, at the moment, know how to address the hard problem, I'd say that we are left which a huge hole in our understanding that might or might not get in the way of our ability to build conscious machines. I'm not convinced that we have a credible basis for making predictions at this point (our current predictions could be about as meaningful as trying to predict the local whether).
We are probably in a situation similar to pre-Darwinian biologists trying to understand the diversity of living organisms - gathering vast amounts of taxonomical data and descriptions of patterns, but lacking the particular insight that helps us explain how the data fits together and why the patterns exist. I'm not sure that we can realistically predict insights of this magnitude on the order of decades. Honestly, I believe that we WILL have this insight by 2020 (indeed, I am trying my best contribute to this insight myself), and thus 2030 seems very plausible to me, but I see this as being an intuitive hunch rather than anything I would try to defend logically.
My own approach, at the moment, is to re-think the concept of "physical" and the notion of "natural laws." Specifically, I'm exploring the idea that energy might be essentially qualitative. Even more specifically: it may be this qualitative aspect of energy that underscores the dynamics of physical systems. This gets into some outrageously complex, speculative, vague, and controversial philosophical territory, but the bottom line is that (according to me) if we can somehow find a way to model the qualitative nature of energy, we may achieve the insight that allows us to understand why/how some material systems find themselves subjects of qualitative experience - true consciousness or "agent causation", in contrast to systems that behave in complex ways due to complex input/output processing. Think roughly of the "meaning" of the sentence "I love you" when spoken by one person to another, verses the meaning of this same sentence when it is spoken by, say, a computer-generated character in a computer game. In one case the behavior is motivated by qualitative subjective feelings, whereas in the other case it is just the output of complex if/then circuitry. Is there any deeply significant difference? I think there is, but I cannot yet prove it.
I'm fairly confident that one of the keys to conscious "agent causation" will be the principles of self-organization in the context of system self-preservation and growth/learning ("metabolism" in a generic sense) counterbalancing the thermodynamic trend toward higher entropy. I cannot yet specify why this context-sensitive self-organization is the "magical key" to qualitative experience, but I think I'm waving my hands in roughly the right direction.
The good news is that, even without a theory of mind, we are moving in the direction of developing these types of systems. Just this morning I came across this article:
Your train of thoughts are very interesting (I'm just home from holidays, with kids, so it's not those relaxing ones) and I just want to ask a quick question
If there might not be concious machines (at all, say) wouldn't that only change the 'upload your brain to a (silicon) machine' problem?
If a machine think it is concious but isn't (...), wouldn't that make the machine non-concious but as productive as a human for example?
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