The fourth annual WIRED NextFest event begins today in Los Angeles, California. Running through Sunday, the event will feature technology exhibits and demonstrations. In addition, the X Prize Foundation will announce their new space prize.

Thursday is Education Day, with 4th through 12th graders and their teachers filling the LA Convention Center for an early peak at the technology goodness. There will be robots and consumer electronics, new medical gear, transportation advances, interactive demonstrations, and much more.

The morning begins with an opening ceremony followed by the X Prize press conference. Frontier Channel will be attending both events as well as a taking a sneak peek tour of the exhibits.

Paul Saffo from Stanford University is a forecaster and essayist. He explored AGI at the Singularity Summit 2007 in the context of popularization. Even as the public begins to join the AGI discussion, pessimism is popular right now. News reporting and commentary are lurid and pessimistic. Saffo suggested that what we need are positive and compelling visions of the future and AGI in popular fiction, but not by scientists turned writers. Poets, authors, artists, performance artists, and other creative individuals need to begin exploring the concept of AGI separately, just as previous technological breakthroughs have been explored in popular art.

In 1967 the poet Richard Brautigan self-published a book of poetry that included a positive vision of AGI. Entitled “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”, the poem is available here, and reprinted below:

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky. 

I like to think
      (right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms. 

I like to think
      (it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

Dr. Ben Goertzel is SIAI Director of Research and chief science officer and acting CEO of Novamente. He believes that with the right funding and capital, AGI could be developed in nine years. Novamente is approaching AGI development by focusing on virtual agents in virtual worlds like Second Life.

Goertzel defined AGI as “the ability to achieve complex goals in complex environments using limited computational resources.” AGI will require autonomy, practical understanding of self and others, and understanding “what the problem is” opposed to just rote problem solving.

Unlike some other speakers and AGI proponents, Goertzel does not believe that today’s narrow AI solutions necessarily suggest the right paths to AGI. He provided a list of items that will be necessary for developing AGI:

• AGI will not be created by generalizing narrow AI.
• Researchers need to go back to the basics; that is, by creating artificial babies and pets and allowing the technology to develop into more advanced entities.
• AI can be created in robots or in virtual reality. Robots are expensive and have high maintenance requirements and costs. Virtual reality allows for embodied agents will lower costs.
• Researchers should harness the wisdom of the crowds. Instead of only company-paid teachers, AI could learn from everyone who interact with them via virtual worlds. The populations of many of today’s virtual worlds suggests thousands to millions of users who can help.
• The particular model for minds used by Novamente was developed by Goertzel and described in his book The Hidden Pattern. Minds are patterns with pattern-recognition capabilities, including their own pattern and more complicated patterns of patterns.
• Goertzel believes a cognition engine based on the patternist philosophy will lead to the creation of AGI.
• Open-source AGI frameworks may prove to be useful and even necessary toward the development of true AGI.

Goertzel mentioned that there remain particular ethical issues. The creation of AGI presents dangers close at home, including to our loved ones and self. Determining how to create Friendly AI, more intelligent than us but with our best interests and values at heart, may be difficult.

Neil Jacobstein, chairman and CEO of Teknowledge Corporation, spoke in the afternoon of day one of the Singularity Summit 2007. He presented information about where we stand today with AI and where we might be heading in the medium term. Specialized AI applications have existed for a number of years and often outperform humans. Jacobstein did not think there was one true path to AGI.

The value in AI today consists of augmenting and replacing human skills. AI is often delivered with other components in a technology package, usually with a browser and/or Web 2.0 standards included. A study of AI solutions presented to date suggest a few things that have not worked so well with AI, including high maintenance requirements and costs, poor integration with mainstream applications (as opposed to the specialized nature of most AI packages today), and limited learning capability (most information must be entered by human operators.)

Some of the things that have worked with AI so far including real world testing and experimentation (these packages have moved out of the lab and into the real world), the ability to solve specific problems, and integration with statistics, optimization, and simulation solutions.

Today the web is undergoing evolution into Semantic Web Services, where common standards and applications provide an interface into AI. With this rise of the Semantic Web, Jacobstein sees the introduction of AI web agents and a shift from human-to-machine interactions to primarily machine-to-machine interactions.

[Commentary]

During the Singularity Summit 2007, one of the most unexpected moments came during a panel session on day one. Peter Voss and Dr. Stephen Omohundro sat down to answer questions from the audience after their own individual presentations. Voss had suggested during his talk that AGI could benefit health and longevity research. An audience member asked, with apparent anger and passion, why anyone would want to extend healthy lifespan and attempt to prevent death.

Voss seemed surprised by the question, and asked the audience if anyone really wanted to die. A significant minority raised their hands, cried out, and applauded.

A philosophical chasm was then suddenly laid bare, thought it appeared that neither side could wrap their heads around the alternative view. After Voss defended radical life extension, a larger portion of the crowd applauded.

Why would anyone defend death, especially with applause? I jotted down a few ideas, though no one in that camp expressed their opinions in any detail.

• Environmentalism? Some people might consider the Earth and its environment to be more important than human life if they believe, as scientific evidence suggests, humanity is responsible for global warming and other dire consequences of rapid technological progress. Worried about overpopulation, death may seem to be an appropriate release valve. However, this particular belief does not seem to consider the promise of upcoming technological solutions, the precipitous fall in birth rate in developed and some developing countries, off-world resources, and rapid efficiency gains that could herald an age of less consumption rather than more.
• Legacy? Some people might consider children a greater legacy than their own continued existence. Related to overpopulation and environmentalism concerns, some people believe they need to die to get out of the way of their children, in a cycle that will see immortality through descendants. Like these other concerns, however, legacy neglects important changes and paradigm-shifts occurring right now, while ignoring those who will not or cannot leave behind a genetics legacy.
• Religion? If existence is simply a test that separates good and evil humans upon their death and the afterlife exists to provide eternal reward or eternal damnation, then striving to continue mortal life may seem to be an affront to the supernatural. The afterlife becomes more important than mortal life, with checks-and-balances included in religious dogma to ensure people do not try to enter the afterlife too soon. This is not a concern for those who are not religious, who value current existence instead of a mythical promise of supernatural eternity.

While I would expect some critics at an event related to the Technological Singularity, I assume that the majority are at least receptive to the idea. It would be surprising to me then if some proponents otherwise still retain a deathist attitude. In fact, I was approached by someone during the evening reception who could not understand why the Singularity and radical life extension were intimately tied together. He wondered why people were discussing physical immortality when AGI would either kill us all or change the world so much that we would no longer be able to participate in progress. Why, he wondered, would anyone want to try to live forever in such a world? He and his friends then ridiculed calorie restriction by informing each other they were happily eating calories (the reception included finger foods.)

During day two, this same person asked Ray Kurzweil the same questions. Kurzweil said we will likely merge with our technology to become AGI, thus ensuring physical immortality through becoming transhuman and then posthuman. He also stated that our posthuman selves will find plenty to do, without the psychological problems a modern human faced with radical life extension might suffer. However, I was struck by how proponents of radical life extension do not seem to be well-equipped to answer such questions because they do not understand why anyone would want to die in the first place. I find myself in this camp, struggling to understand why a person would not want to hold onto this existence, no matter how painful or wonderful, because this existence is all that we have. Death, if it comes at all, should be by choice, and I should like to think that people would instead choose continued existence, with the myriad possibilities it presents, including solutions to whatever currently pains us.

But then I imagine those who applaud death cannot wrap their heads around this, just as we cannot their own ideas. Will these two philosophical camps always remain so opposed?

Let that be as it may. I just hope no one requires that I die at a particular time and date, should radical life extension otherwise become possible. I may shake my head in confusion at their beliefs today, but tomorrow I will defend myself by all means necessary.

Dr. J. Storrs Hall is an independent scientist, inventor, and author. His most recent books are Nanofutures and Beyond AI: Creating the Conscience of the Machine. Hall talked about what nanofactories could make.

Hall believes that just as computers are getting ever cheaper and smarter, nanotechnology will follow the same timeline and price improvement track. Nanofactories will make stuff out of raw materials such as the elements carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. These four elements make up approximately 96 percent of the human body along with a few other trace elements. Certainly ordinary objects are made out almost entirely of these four elements. Some of the items that could be build using nanofactories (fabrication machines) include:

• Consumer electronics like Apple’s iPods and iPhones. It is reasonably likely that we will be able to make electronics out of fabrication machines, though not from completely raw elements. However, there will be enough reconfigurable, low level stuff that could be synthesized as components.
• Bicycles, presumably using epoxy materials with nanotubes in it
• Cups of coffee and tea (like Captain Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation ordering “tea, earl grey, hot”) - This should be a very simple thing to do. Coffee, and food in general, would be made from specially prepared concoctions of amino acid, protein, and carbohydrate complexes. Unlinking and linking amino acids is easier than pure “from the ground up” synthesis.
• Diamonds
• Eggs - to eat but not to hatch or that are alive because there are a lot of protein tricks that we can get around. Producing livable creatures via synthesis is not foreseeable in the near future, but perhaps much, much later.
• Folding furniture - easily produced by a fabrication machine, and it will be expected that the thing comes out of the machine in a folded up form to be unfolded after purchase.
• Gadgets and Gizmos - Remarkably complicated circuitry is easy to manufacture within the gadget.
• Headphones - They are bulky right now, and could be made smaller
• Ice cream - Temperature regulation will be possible within the machine. Instead of synthesizing a steak and then cooking it on the stove, you would synthesize a steak that has already been cooked and is hot
• Jackets - A clothing producing synthesizer will look like a closet, not like a desktop machine. When you step into your closet, you will see a full length mirror, and as you chose the ones you like, an image of what you would look like in the clothing that you choose would show. Then you could choose what you like
• Knives - Home synthesized knives would be made out of ceramic since the metals that we use today are not going to be the materials of choice to use with synthesizers. It is very possible that we are moving towards a post-metallic world.
• Lights - Producing power handling material is getting easy to do and we will be able to do it in any shape and color.
• Money - How do you keep people from going off and just printing their own counterfeit money? It is not as bad a problem as one might think, since everything is going to be connected to a computer so that paper money will just become obsolete. Hall said we do not need to worry; the economy will not collapse.
• More Nanofactories! - This will be more of a social impact than the money thing. Hall thinks self-replicating technology is amazing!
• Office Supplies - virtual reality offices
• Perambulators - Good old fashion stuff will be easy to make. The only problem is that there were a lot of heavy metals in these objects, which the synthesizers will not use.
• Tennis racquets - We will be able to synthesize very nice looking fake wood.
• Utility Fog - changing shape mega structures of programmable material that may act like a gas. This a much longer term invention.
• Watches - contact lenses that are full function displays as well
• Voluntars - any kind of transportation device can be changed in your garage everyday
• Yurts - You could construct an abode with all the comforts of home when going camping with a fabricator on your back, with air conditioning and lighting. It would probably use cellulose from trees.
• No zircons though!

Tihamer Toth-Fejel is a senior research engineer at General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems, member of the advisory board for the Nanoethics Group, and a chair for the Society for Manufacturing Engineers Nanomanufacturing Technical Group.

Toth-Fejel stated that “if you can’t measure it, you can’t make it.” Nanotech needs to follow these guidelines:

• Accuracy
• Precision
• Reliability, repeatability, reproducibility
• Traceability
• Calibration
• Tolerance
• Quality

Trying to build independent chemical reactions and controlling where they are is very difficult to do. It is also very difficult to connect nanotubes together. Connecting them takes stepwise reactions, and there are a lot of them. We also need molecular actuators. In addition to using probes or tips, one could use pores to force DNA through to place atoms to make nanoactuators.

DNA origami is easy to do and is easily reproducible. The process uses DNA because it has such good molecular recognition properties. One is limited to 7000 base pairs when constructing molecular pictures. Helper strands have a self complimentary region that creates a bump in the strain, if you know the actual sequence of the DNA, and therefore one can write with the bumps to make pictures or words out of a few atoms. These same kinds of ideas can facilitate DNA mediated multistrand nanotube fabrication and metamaterials.

The ultimate goal of building nanomaterials is to build a desktop nanofactory appliance. What if you could “print” up a copy of your computer or another nanofactory? What if you could make diamonds quickly and cheaply and use these diamonds to build skyscrapers up to 300 km up for use as accelerators so you can get out of lower orbit?

Because there is a limited amount of carbon in the world, it is not feasible for everyone to make a nanofactory, especially if the primary source for carbon is CO₂ in the atmosphere, government intervention will be necessary. This could require the atmosphere becoming property to better manage this resource.

Dr. Ralph Merkle is a nanotechnology expert, Alcor Director, Zyvex Principal Fellow, and Foresight Institute adviser. He talked about health, wealth, and atoms.

If you shuffle around the same atoms found in coal, you could get a diamond. Arranging atoms allows for greater precision, diversity, and lower manufacturing costs. Suppose that you can build anything you want with the best materials, such as diamond? Diamond is:

• Strong
• Hard
• Not reactive
• Dense
• Impresses women

Diamond is an amazing material. It will allow us to build extremely small mechanisms such as joints, buckeyball bearings, tubes, planetary gears, and neon pumps that pump individual atoms.

Making diamond today involves taking hydrogen and carbon, adding energy, and creating highly reactive molecules that settle into a diamond film. There is very little control as to position of atoms. Molecular tools would enable us to synthesize stable diamond structures with atomic precision.

We will be able to make almost anything of high complexity. There are over 100 elements in the periodic table, which are over 100 tools we can use to enable a vast range of new activities. Of these 100 elements, three elements - hydrogen, carbon, and germanium - have been chosen by Merkle for specific utilization. Many things are made out of hydrogen and carbon and their structures can become quite rigid. Germanium is included in the mix to add some synthetic flexibility. Out of these materials, a series of nine molecular tools that have been theorized to work in real world situations via computational methods could be constructed. These tools have high accuracy positional control by rigidity and lowering the temperature for activity.

Before we create these tools, and without the guidance of further computational and theoretical work, Merkle stated that we will wander in a nanotechnologic desert for a long time.

James Von Ehr II is the founder and chairman of Zyvex Corporation. He is recognized as a respected leader in the nanotech industry and has received many awards.

Zyvex was created in 1997 to develop molecular technology and has now spun off into four different companies: Zyvex: Instruments, Performance Materials, Labs, and Asia. Zyvex is the leader in nanotechnology market with years of experience providing tools, instrumentation and applications to serve the semiconductor and advanced research markets. They now have 32-nm test chips. According to Von Ehr the company has been able to save its customers millions of dollars.

Carbon nanotubes are about 20 times stronger in tensile strength than stainless steel, and are the best heat and electrical conductors. Structures like houses, rafts, lever arms, and other useful devices can be built up out of carbon nanotubes, but even a single tube can be used to manipulate single atoms. The company has also found a way to solubize a bundle of nanotubes and process it into usable forms.

Zyvex’s first customer was Eastern Sports. Using Zyvex technology, Eastern Sports was able to give baseball bats and hockey sticks a 10 to 15% performance increase. Zyvex has since created a network of customers that includes Boeing.

The benefits of nanomaterials include building conventional items with the reinforcing structures nanotubes provide. NanoSolve Technology is able to apply the science to make bikes, baseball bats, and golf club shafts and more with carbon nanotube composites. A small increment in manufacturing means that the company is able to charge a large percentage more to increase revenue.

Von Ehr said “Molecular nanotech is the precise controlled rearrangement of atoms into higher value products,” for instance, huge perfect diamonds which may be used in a variety of ways including computer processing. Zyvex wishes to be able to lead the commercialization of adaptable, affordable, atomically-precise manufacturing. This step forward in manufacturing would mean that even the factory that is creating these materials is made in the same way that the products are. This concept is considered by Von Ehr to be Eric Drexler’s major conceptual breakthrough: the machine that is manipulating these atoms is also made out of atoms. Therefore one of the products that these machines should be able to make is more machines to make more product. Making physical objects by placing nearly every atom where it has been designed to go could mark the end of the industrial revolution and the beginning of a new one. We will then be able to create low cost factories, highly differentiated but low cost products, and faster time to market products. The long term environmental impact of molecular manufacturing is green and clean. One goal of the technology is to remove excess CO₂ from the atmosphere and actually use it to make products. The pollution of today may have economic value in the future.

Zyvex sees itself as the facilitator for creating everything that could possibly be made in the world, not by actually manufacturing the product itself, but rather by manufacturing the machines that make the product.

Dr. Nadrian Seeman received a B.S. in Biochemistry and a Ph.D. in Biological Crystallography. He has published over 200 papers. He presented a talk entitled “It’s more than the secret of life: Building with DNA”.

Seeman lamented that he is a working scientist, and therefore his work does not progress as fast as he would like it to. Some of the ideas he has had from the 1980’s still have not come to pass, but he is okay with that.

DNA is such great material that it has out-rivaled all the competition as the material used for genes. Reciprocal exchange, where DNA exchanges pieces of itself with another molecule in order to come up with a new strain takes place in the double helical context. Sequence symmetry is minimized through the use of branched junctions which can be used in 5, 6, 8, and 12 arm junctions. Twenty-seven years after the beginning of his work, Seeman is still working on a good crystal in order to use his theory regarding DNA crystallography. DNA comes with its own set of assembly instructions known as sticky end cohesion which utilizes hydrogen bonding. The structure of the molecule dictates where certain proteins are in the DNA. The central concept of structural DNA nanotechnology is combining branched DNA with sticky ends to make objects, lattices, and devices, using DNA as bricks and mortar or just as mortar. Seeman would like to be able to architecturally control scaffolding, as well as make nanotech devices. Currently crystallography is primarily guess work and is not as successful as it could be. If scientists could better organizing biological macromolecules they could create nano-electric components.

Why would we use DNA? The two key reasons are predictable molecular interactions and designing the shape by selecting a sequence. Seeman’s lab would like to control the structure of matter in 3D to the highest resolution possible so as to understand the ways that matter interacts with matter in the macro- and micro-scales

Xing Wang has come up with 8 and 12 arm junctions. These connected lattices may derive a variety of shapes. The requirements of lattice design components include:

• predictable interactions
• predicable local product structures
• structural integrity

Seeman has been able to create 2D, 2X arrays that look similar to rotini pasta. Robust arrays of DX triangles were devised by Boaquin Ding around 1996. When there are two of the arrays, they can be arranged to from large parallelograms and larger arrays in 2D. The lesson learned has been that DX cohesion is much more robust than a double sticky end. Many “wild” motifs can be configured this way in 2D.

Progress towards 3D arrays has advanced in the last few years. The best so far has been 3D trigonal DX lattices using X-ray diffraction in 10 angstrom resolution. The original tensegrity triangle shows an over-under motif, but the resolution is still along 10 angstroms although why this is the case is still unknown.

Chemistry can be diversified using nylon-DNA. The basic idea is using DNA to control molecular topography. The first base they made took about seven years to create and the second one took about four, so there is hope, Seeman said, that they may make the third one while he is still alive. The structure of the shortest piece of nylon is dictated by the DNA; two motifs can organize nanoparticles known as DNAzyme in 5 to 10 nm particles.

From genes to machines: using nano devices

A B-Z device has been configured using B and Z DNA, each of which is either left-handed or right-handed. However, the device does not take advantage of the strengths of DNA.

A sequence dependent device, on the other hand, does make use of the strengths of DNA when ordered in a particular sequence. This system is much more robust than the previously mentioned system. The device is connected to DNA trapezoid, and there is evidence for its viability by rearranging orientation.

Translation using nanomachinery in a ribosome like device

Translation introduced diversity into the RNA world, so DNA nanotech may make this a possibility in controlled conditions.

Conclusions

When in doubt, DNA is far more robust and better controlled than RNA. DNA, for many purposes, may also not be the best material to use, but it is great for prototyping these things to see if we can create these self assembly features anyway. DNA is still the easiest to use. It is easy to design and acquire, and the parameters are easier to maintain.