This weekend is the Foresight Institute's annual conference, about the connections between molecular manufacturing, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence. There's still time to register, but if you can't attend in person, they'll be Webcasting the event. (The live video will be low-res due to the conference hotel's bandwidth, but they hope to post high-res video later on.) From the Foresight Institute:
Several rapidly-developing technologies have the potential to undergo an exponential takeoff in the next few decades, causing as much of an impact on economy and society as the computer and networking did in the past few. Chief among these are molecular manufacturing and artificial general intelligence (AGI). Key in the takeoff phenomenon will be the establishment of strong positive feedback loops within and between the technologies. Positive feedback loops leading to exponential growth are nothing new to economic systems. At issue is the value of the exponent: since the Industrial Revolution, economies have expanded at rates of up to 7% per year; however, computing capability has been expanding at rates up to 70% per year, in accordance with Moore's Law. If manufacturing and intellectual work shifted into this mode, the impact on the economy and society would be profound. The purpose of this symposium is to examine the mechanisms by which this might happen, and its likely effects.
"Foresight 2010: the Synergy of Molecular Manufacturing and AGI"
