Christine Peterson of Foresight mentioned a new report by the Joint Economic Committee(JEC) of the U.S. Congress titled:

Nanotechnology: The Future is Coming Sooner Than You Think (PDF)

I can’t believe this is from the government. This is actually a pretty damn big deal. So far The Singularity has been on the minds of only a handful of cutting-edge scientists, futurists, and super-geeks.

But this is different.

The Joint Economic Committee (JEC) is made up of 5 Republicans and 5 Democrats from both the House and Senate. They are in charge of producing the information that the U.S. government uses to make high-level economic decisions. They study taxation, IMF reform, Federal Reserve policy, federal expenditures, energy, etc.

Nanotechnology has been on their radar for a while, but here is the first paper I know of where the term ‘Singularity’ is used. It means that they are now taking a serious look at the issue of accelerating technology. They describe it very plainly:

“The economic pressures in the electronics industry have forced the development of new lithographic techniques that continue the steady reduction in feature size and cost.”

Yeah, Kurzweil could’ve told ‘em that a loooong time ago!

They also list a timetable of five distinct generations of nanotechnological development:
2000-2005: Passive Nanostructures
2005-2010: Active Nanostructures
2010-2015: Systems of Nanosystems
2015-2020: Molecular Nanosystems

and lastly:
2020 and Beyond: The Singularity – They state here that

“every exponential curve eventually reaches a point where the growth rate becomes almost infinite…If technology continues to advance at exponential rates, what happens after 2020?”

They then posit:

“…some observers forecast a period at which scientific advances aggressively assume their own momentum and accelerate at unprecedented levels…beyond the Singularity, human society is incomparably different from what it is today”

And what *really* sets this paper off is this:

“Whether or not one believes in the Singularity, it is difficult to overestimate nanotechnology’s likely implications for society. For one thing, advances in just the last five years have proceeded much faster than even the best experts had predicted.”

Government has a hard time looking past 5 minutes in front of it’s face. Technology is accelerating so fast that government, which isn’t designed to prepare far into future, is helpless in doing any planning at all. Of course, who 20 years ago could’ve really foreseen the impact of the internet…maybe, like, a handful of people could possibly even imagine, and it was a cloudy imaginable future to even them!

And just to finish up here, the best economic scientists working for the government of the United States of America just released a paper that states:

“Whether or not one believes in the Singularity, it is difficult to overestimate nanotechnology’s likely implications for society”

They use ‘belief’ only because its not fact *yet.* If I had any doubts about creating this blog when I launched it last week, they are gone now! It needs to be here and you need to learn as much about this concept as possible! Click HERE to buy Ray Kurzweils “The Singularity is Near” I’m outta here!

From Wired:

03.29.07 | 2:00 AM

Behind every Hasbro Butterscotch Robotic Pony and every NASA rover exploring Mars are teams of roboticists who’ve worked obsessively to bring their creations to life. In the book Almost Human: Making Robots Think, published this month, Lee Gutkind introduces us to some of the most prominent minds and memorable personalities among them. more>>>

ITconversations.com is a wonderful website featuring podcasts covering just about everything in the world of tech.

Be sure to check out Accelerating Change’s category, which hosts whopping 32 programs relating to accelerating change in technology! That’ll keep your iPod busy for a while! Click here to visit the Accelerating Change website.

Techno Tuesday

The Argus II bionic eye is currently undergoing trials in 50-75 patients in the US. The system uses a spectacle mounted camera that feeds visual information to 60 electrodes implanted in the retina.

President Slepitza of Avila University got me interested in this. Read below to see what it’s all about.

This network diagram represents the relationships between 1.6 million scientific articles. Each node represents scientific publications on a topic (more accurately called a paradigm). There are 776 nodes in all, distributed in this ring-like structure.

Data for this map is based on Thomson’s 2003 citation databases. The analytical procedure was hierarchical clustering using co-citation analysis. Visualization uses VxInsight, a proprietary software package from Sandia National Labs. more>>>

From Wired:

Indeed, the desktop is fading. Apps once came in shrink-wrapped boxes and ran on a local operating system; today they live increasingly on the Internet, where they run in a Web browser for a monthly fee — or for no charge at all. Online video archives, encyclopedias, photo managers, calendars, accounting programs, even online word processors and spreadsheets are becoming ubiquitous. more>>>

From The Mail On Sunday:

24th March 2007

Scientists have created the world’s first human-sheep chimera – which has the body of a sheep and half-human organs.

The sheep have 15 per cent human cells and 85 per cent animal cells – and their evolution brings the prospect of animal organs being transplanted into humans one step closer.

Professor Esmail Zanjani, of the University of Nevada, has spent seven years and £5million perfecting the technique, which involves injecting adult human cells into a sheep’s foetus. more>>>

On top of the great information you find here, you can find plenty of informative videos on YouTube!

Click HERE to visit the BloggingtheSingularity.com YouTube Group!

From Reuters:

Tue Feb 27, 2007 10:18AM EST

BEIJING (Reuters) – Scientists in eastern China say they have succeeded in controlling the flight of pigeons with micro electrodes planted in their brains, state media reported on Tuesday. more>>>

Audio from NPR’s Talk of the Nation:

March 21, 2007
Science fiction and pop culture have conspired to make most of us think of robots as something out of Terminator or I, Robot.

But after six years of behind-the-scenes reporting from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, Lee Gutkind knows better.

Gutkind, the founder and editor of the literary journal Creative Nonfiction, examines the subculture surrounding these mechanical creatures in a new book, Almost Human: Making Robots Think.

He found that today’s robots are more fun than ferocious, and scientists are making wires and chips increasingly human-like.

Gutkind talks with Neal Conan about the sensitive side of robots. more>>>

Listen to this insightful news podcast here. I’m listening right now and it’s pretty good.

IEET Reports:

2007-03-23

Attitudes in the US appear to be moving in a technoprogressive direction! In a new report the Pew Research Center finds that, since 1994, Americans have become more supportive of the social welfare safety net, more anti-corporate, less homophobic, sexist, racist and religious, and that the Democrats now have a wide lead over Republicans in party identification. More…

Click here to visit TEDtalks

Each year, TED hosts some of the world’s most fascinating people: Trusted voices and convention-breaking mavericks, icons and geniuses. The talks they deliver have had had such a great impact, we thought they deserved a wider audience. So now – with our sponsor BMW and production partner WNYC/New York Public Radio we’re sharing some of the most remarkable TED talks with the world at large. Each week, we’ll release a new talk, in audio and video, to download or watch online. For best effect, plan to listen to at least three, start to finish. They have a cumulative effect. More…