A Million New Everythings

by | Apr 14, 2024 | nanotechnology, singularity, transhumanism

If people like Altman, Musk, Kurzweil, Hassabis, Huang, etc, are correct, then in the next 5 years (and possibly much sooner) we will start to have AI agents that are smarter than any single qualified human expert in every domain – every branch of science, medicine, comp-sci, etc.

And one of the biggest implications of this, as Altman has been pointing out, is a world where we have a million new experts on every topic, available to analyse and interpret the results of existing experiments, to conceive of and run new virtual experiments and advise humans on how to run physical experiments in the lab, then analyse those results.

And yet, outside of the occasional article in the MSM and forums like reddit, I don’t think see much discussion about this potential reality.

What does the world’s response to climate change look like when we have a million new virtual climate scientists?

What does health care look like when we have a million new virtual doctors and lab technicians?

What does mental health care look like when we have a million new virtual therapists?

What does cold fusion research look like when we have a million new virtual scientists working on that?

What does AI look like when we have a million new virtual AI programmers working on that?

What does a million new experts mean for Nano tech?

For Space travel?

For Robotics?

For Education?

For inequality in capitalism and the future of money?

What happens if AI-jet-powered science quickly helps make K. Eric Drexler’s visions of nanotech come to reality and we have nanofabricators in every house and suburb to make most of our daily food and material needs from waste products, and robots, their components made in nanofabs, to make anything requiring large-scale assembly? What happens to the cost of productions when anyone can make their friend their own nanofab and robot assistant with their own nanofab and robot?

Where are the politicians, journalists and social scientists who are discussing this in the mainstream?

There is a lot of talk about the threat of AI, either by bad actors or it becoming sentient and going all HAL2000.

But what about the age of miracles? How are we preparing for that possible eventuality in the next decade?

Nanotechnology Mirage Effect

by | Nov 16, 2011 | nanotechnology

Researchers at the University of Texas Dallas recently demonstrated that transparent carbon nanotube sheets, which can have the density of air and the specific strength of steel, can be used to make objects invisible.

WOAH!!

This news is a couple of weeks old but somehow I must have missed it.

Their website goes on to say:

“This invisibility for light oblique to the nanotube sheets is caused by the mirage effect, in which a thermally generated refractive index gradient bends light array from a hidden object.”

Okay, so it only works on the oblique, so you’re not going to use this to sneak up on anyone anytime soon, but this still blows my mind.

Of course, the research is being funded by “Office of Naval Research, NASA, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research”. Uh huh. Invisible battleships, anyone? I hated playing BATTLESHIP as a kid.