X-Message-Number: 5498
Date: Fri, 29 Dec 1995 22:15:49 -0800
From: John K Clark <>
Subject: In my lifetime?

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In  #5493  Peter Merel <> On Thu, 28 Dec 1995 Wrote: 


                >Drexler and Merkle paint a marvellous picture, but they
                
                >don't pretend to know how long it will take to produce
                                >working nanotech, do they? 


Eric Drexler has proven the logical feasibility of Nanotechnology, BUT 
he has not  proven when it will happen. Nevertheless he thinks he has a 
good idea when the Singularity will occur, it seems a tad optimistic to me, 
but on the other hand Drexler knows far more about it than me, hell he knows 
more about it  than anyone, so his views should be taken seriously.


"Steven C. Vetter" <> wrote about the 
October 21,  1994,  Foresight Institute  Senior Associate Gathering:
_____________________________________________________________________


"[...] On the issue of how long will it take, he [Drexler] talked 
about two "conservative" estimates.  If you want to rely
on it happening, it is conservative to plan on twenty years.  If
you are concerned the competition is going to get it first, it
is conservative to plan on ten years.

In answer to the often-asked question "will it happen in my lifetime?" 
Eric described the singularity concept, already discussed 
at length on the Internet.  We had bacteria billions
of years before we even got to "genuine sex."  This was followed
by mammals for hundreds of millions of years.  He continued this
list of powers of ten, up to "organized technology development"
during the last 100 years or so.  A possible conclusion is that
we are on a super-exponential acceleration that will lead to a
super-abrupt "singularity" of sorts.  

We aren't quite there yet, but Eric's answer to anyone who thinks 
we are still 100 years away is, "What do you think researchers 
will be doing between 2035 and 2045 that will be so difficult 
that it will leave more decades of work to reach NT?"  

He then asked how many people in  the audience had children under the age 
of five.  He pointed out that they were likely to be going through puberty 
and the  singularity at the same time (scary thought).

In answer to the skeptics who recalled the similar sounding
claims of artificial intelligence and fusion efforts, Eric
pointed out that those two fields had fundamental scientific
questions to be answered, such as "what is intelligence anyway?"
NT has no such fundamental questions outstanding.  It still
needs a lot of engineering work, but there aren't any gaping
holes in our knowledge of what the target may look like. [...]"


                                          John K Clark     

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