Robert A. Freitas Jr., J.D., published the first detailed technical design study of a medical nanorobot ever published in a peer-reviewed mainstream biomedical journal and is the author of Nanomedicine.

Nanomedicine is free to read online here,

http://www.foresight.org/Nanomedicine/

________

Ray and Jaron and.. differences.. that could be the same.. no? (nov 2014):

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2014/11/artificial-intelligence-singularity-theory

Duelling over the Singularity: Ray Kurzweil, who sees salvation in artificial intelligence; Jaron Lanier, a leading skeptic.

A technological singularity is a predicted point in the development of a civilization at which technological progress accelerates beyond the ability of present-day humans to fully comprehend or predict.”

In Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines there’s only a single footnote reference to the “Technological Singularity,” a term popularized a few years earlier by the computer scientist and science-fiction writer Vernor Vinge for the moment when machine intelligence surpasses the human kind. Vinge was deeply ambivalent about what he considered this inevitable near future. But Kurzweil was only excited, and determined to lead a movement to bring it on. He called his 2005 manifesto The Singularity Is Near and gave it a happy, triumphalist subtitle: When Humans Transcend Biology.

But the skeptics’ camp has grown. Its members include Jaron Lanier, the virtual-reality pioneer, who now works for Microsoft Research; Mitch Kapor, the early P.C.-software entrepreneur who co-founded the Electronic Frontier and Mozilla foundations and has bet Kurzweil $10,000 that no computer will pass for human before 2030; Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who has an eponymous neuroscience-research institute and picked a fight with Kurzweil and the Singularitarians, accusing them of vastly underestimating the brain’s complexity; Jaan Tallinn, the Estonian software engineer who helped create Kazaa and co-founded Skype, and who worries that “once technological development is yanked out of our hands”—with more autonomous and self-replicating computers—“it doesn’t have to continue to be beneficial to humans”; and Elon Musk, the co-founder of Tesla Motors and the founder of the commercial space-travel company

SpaceX, who says that “with artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon” and call A.I. probably “our biggest existential threat,” one that may well cause something “seriously dangerous” within a decade.

In addition to their certainty and optimism, Singularitarians place great faith in the power of unfettered individuals—that is, themselves—to usher in the amazing future.

so imagine leveraging 7 billion people to usher it in. that’s exponentiation. and equity. and humanity. and democracy. no?

Kurzweil and Kapor will need to live to 81 and 79, respectively, to see who wins their Turing-test bet, in 2029.

so what if that wasn’t our goal here… and what if it happened way sooner that 2029. document everything Ada style..

I told Ray I’d double or triple the bet. Human intelligence is a marvelous, subtle, and poorly understood phenomenon. There is no danger of duplicating it anytime soon.  – Mitch Kapor

Lanier gets peevish even being asked to identify a moment when machine intelligence might become convincingly human. “This idea of a certain year is ridiculous. It’s a cultural event. It’s a form of theater. It’s not science. There’s no rigor. It’s like saying, ‘When will hip-hop really be an art form?’ To take it seriously is to make yourself into a moron. It came from one of the most brilliant technical minds”—Turing—“so we give it credence.”

But still, I pressed him, during some of our lifetimes won’t computers be totally fluent in humanese—able to engage in any kind of conversation? Lanier concedes some ground. “It’s true, in

some far future situation, we’re going to transition. . . . I think it’s very hard to predict a year.” Approximately when? “I think we’re in pretty safe territory if we say it’s within this century.” Which is much sooner than I figured he’d meant by “far future.”

An unalloyed engineering paradigm, Lanier explained, assumes “a kind of a linear, clean quality to progress that’s just never true. Technologists tend to think of economics as unimportant because it always favors us. This idea that everything will become cheaper all at once is stupid.”

Kurzweil as much as admits he only deeply cares and knows about technology and its theoretical impacts, about political economy and human psychology not so much.

In his 2010 book, You Are Not a Gadget, Jaron Lanier made a cultural argument against our worshipful deference to computers. His most recent book, Who Owns the Future?, is all about politics, economics, power, jobs. It’s not sentient machine overlords enslaving us in 2040 that alarms him, but human overlords using computer technology to impoverish and disempower the middle and working classes, starting right now.

A.I. has turned into this way of masking human contributions..

if we’re entering an unprecedented new technological era we also need to create an unprecedented new political economy to cope.

indeed.. another way

_____

end of meaningless work april 2015:

http://singularityhub.com/2015/04/01/the-end-of-meaningless-jobs-is-a-win-for-us-all/