(Photo by Nasa, uploaded on Flickr by Jurvetson. See a high resolution version too!) The Phoenix interplanetary exploration vehicle landed on Mars. My name, David Orban, is on it, together with those of the other members* of Planetary Society. This is of course a rather indirect way of being on Mars, but for the moment [...]
Posts Tagged ‘science’
Nobel winning game theorists on change
April 2nd, 2008
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The mathematical field of game theory, explored by John Von Neumann in the ’40s, and broadened by John Nash in the late ’50s and beginning of the ’60s has been applied mainly to economics. To me it is interesting, because I view it as a discipline where the experimental subjects can, sometimes even must be [...]
Grand challenges for engineering in the next 100 years
February 12th, 2008
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On Feb 15 the voting for the ‘Grand Challenges For Engineering in the next 100 years‘ is going to start. This is the contribution I wrote for the discussion there: Atomic scale assembly, and programmable matter… A better understanding of quantum mechanics, and the software capable of exploiting it will give us unparalleled power over [...]
Planet ready to say killing and death are wrong?
November 16th, 2007
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Death is not the solution. Death is the problem. The UN has started the final procedures to put to a vote in front of the General Assembly a resolution for a universal moratorium on the death penalty. While not binding, the adoption of a resolution like this would be a further step towards an understanding [...]
Liveblogging the Singularity Summit 2007 – Day One – afternoon
September 8th, 2007
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15.00 Jamais Cascio – The Metaverse (is being skipped?! or maybe speaking later?) Actually looking through the Google Blogsearch links I myself provided in the previous post, I saw that Jamais has already posted the full text of his speech. I guess I will list just a few sentences here and there that strike me [...]
Liveblogging the Singularity Summit 2007 – Day One – morning
September 8th, 2007
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We got the power supply issues solved, and the wifi is also now working well thanks to the great help from the organizers. 09.40 Peter Thiel, Clarium Capital introducing the Summit: “The 21st Century is going to be far more greater, and/or far more terrible then the 20th Century. We are here to make sure [...]
Joining SIAI and participating in the Singularity Summit
August 29th, 2007
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Image by David Trowbridge This spring I joined the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI). After having followed Ray Kurzweil‘s, Eliezer Yudkowsky‘s, and Ben Goertzel‘s work for some time, it is my opinion that the institute that they are directing, together with Tyler Emerson, Bruce Klein, and others, is one of the most important today, [...]
The Trouble With Physics, and the end in sight?
July 24th, 2007
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“The Trouble With Physics” by Lee Smolin For hundreds of years science progressed, and physics was one of the main sciences following the method that having experiments and theories going hand in hand, could offer new and exciting interpretations for the worlds phenomena. This mechanism, giving the foundations of our agricultural, technological, and medical progress, [...]
Human speech is an important interface… for the future
June 4th, 2007
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I have been using (and selling) Dragon NaturallySpeaking for the last ten years, and love it. It has become exceptionally accurate and responsive in its various revisions, especially now, that it can swallow all the hardware power we can throw at it. However, current dictation software is only useful if you can’t use the computer [...]
Joining the Lifeboat Foundation Advisory Board
May 23rd, 2007
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I have been invited to join the Scientific Advisory Board of the Lifeboat Foundation. The Lifeboat Foundation is a nonprofit nongovernmental organization dedicated to encouraging scientific advancements while helping humanity survive existential risks and possible misuse of increasingly powerful technologies, including genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and robotics/AI, as we move towards a technological singularity. It will [...]
