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pitfalls of the immune system, such as autoimmune reactions. Unlike your biological immune system, if you don’t like what the nanobots are doing, you can tell them to do something different.
But whatever biotechnology doesn’t get around to accomplishing, we’ll have the means to do with nanotechnology.
nanotechnology—typically starts with a period of unrealistic expectations based on a lack of understanding of all the enabling factors required.
Bayesian Nets. Over the last decade a technique called Bayesian logic has created a robust mathematical foundation for combining thousands or even millions of such probabilistic rules in what are called “belief networks” or Bayesian nets. Originally devised by English mathematician Thomas Bayes and published posthumously in 1763, the approach is intended to determine the likelihood of future events based on similar occurrences in the past.168 Many expert systems based on Bayesian techniques gather data from experience in an ongoing fashion, thereby continually learning and improving their
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Markov Models.
The 2002 military campaign in Afghanistan saw the debut of the armed Predator, an unmanned robotic flying fighter. Although the air force’s Predator had been under development for many years, arming it with army-supplied missiles was a last-minute improvisation that proved remarkably successful.
Moving Object and Transient Event Search System (MOTESS), has identified on its own 180 new asteroids and several comets during its
Current satellite technology is capable of observing ground-level features about an inch in size and is not affected by bad weather, clouds, or darkness.188
Men with elevated prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels typically undergo surgical biopsy, but about 75 percent of these men do not have prostate cancer.
The best contemporary test for ovarian cancer, called CA-125, employed in combination with ultrasound, misses almost all early-stage tumors.
In an evaluation involving hundreds of blood samples, the test was, according to Petricoin, “an astonishing 100% accurate in detecting cancer, even at the earliest stages.”194
The experiments designed by the robot scientist were three times less expensive than those designed by human scientists.
conjecture
2005 the Acura RL and Honda Odyssey will be offering a system from IBM that allows users to converse with their cars.208
rote,”
visceral
Turing
For the most part, we engage in sexual activity for intimate communication and sensual pleasure, not reproduction. Conversely, we have devised multiple methods for creating babies without physical sex, albeit most reproduction does still derive from the sex act.
extrication
respirocytes
“foglets”
MP3 player that vibrates your skull to play music that only you can hear.29
This suggests to me that it is not at all inevitable and that it is only a matter of time before the biologists discover what it is that is causing us the trouble and that this terrible universal disease or temporariness of the human’s body will be cured. —RICHARD FEYNMAN
The trend toward unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which started with the armed Predator in the recent Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns, will accelerate. Army research includes the development of micro-UAVs the size of birds that will be fast, accurate, and capable of performing both reconnaissance and combat missions.
Even smaller UAVs the size of bumblebees are envisioned.
MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative has been a leader in this effort. MIT offers nine hundred of its courses—half of all its course offerings—for free on the Web.56 These have already had a major impact on education around the world.
ubiquitous
Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. —HELEN KELLER
salient
SETI
blinkered
anthropic principle
inexorable
procreate.
Substrate is morally irrelevant, assuming it doesn’t affect functionality or consciousness. It doesn’t matter, from a moral point of view, whether somebody runs on silicon or biological neurons (just as it doesn’t matter whether you have dark or pale skin). On the same grounds, that we reject racism and speciesism, we should also reject carbon-chauvinism, or bioism. —NICK BOSTROM, “ETHICS FOR INTELLIGENT MACHINES: A PROPOSAL, 2001”
apocalyptic,
myriad
Right, our morality and legal system are based on respect for the consciousness of others. If I hurt another person, that’s considered immoral, and probably illegal, because I have caused suffering to another conscious person. If I destroy property, it’s generally okay if it’s my property, and the primary reason it’s immoral and illegal if it’s someone else’s property is because I have caused suffering not to the property but to the person owning it. BILL: And the secular principle?
meme.
RAY: It’s not possible to believe all these things: God is an all-powerful conscious person looking over us, making deals, and getting angry quite a bit. Or He—It—is a pervasive life force underlying all beauty and creativity. Or God created everything and then stepped back….
“existential risks,”
malevolently
sanguine
The hydrogen bomb, which is thousands of times more powerful than an atomic bomb, is based on interactions involving an even smaller scale: small atoms. Although this insight does not necessarily imply the existence of yet more powerful destructive chain reactions by manipulating subatomic particles, it does make the conjecture plausible.
plausible.
pestilence.
malevolent
panoply
pernicious
But there is no purely technical strategy that is workable in this area, because greater intelligence will always find a way to circumvent measures that are the product of a lesser intelligence.
