From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Wed Mar 20 2002 - 13:56:54 MST
Harvey wrote:
> Assuming that we can agree on what the singularity is, I will bet $10,000 US
> dollars that it will not occur by Jan. 1, 2010. I will make such bets with
> as many people who want to bet. This could be my new retirement plan.
There is a claim on the Foresight Exchange about the winning of the
Feynman Grand Prize, http://www.ideosphere.com/fx-bin/Claim?claim=FyGP.
This requires assembling many copies of two extremely ambitious nanotech
devices: a robot arm capable of 1000 positioning motions/sec with 0.1
nanometer accuracy(!) anywhere in a 50 nm side cube, said arm fitting
entirely within a 100 nm cube; also, an 8 bit binary adder fitting
within a 50 nm cube which produces its outputs as raised bumps on a
smooth surface.
I suspect that it will take nearly Singularity level technology to
produce these devices, or alternatively that producing them means that
we are so far along the nanotech development path that the Singularity
is just around the corner.
The claim is designed to produce an estimate of the date at which
this prize will be awarded. I created it in 1996, and for the first
couple of years the date was in the late 2020's to the 2030 time frame.
Since 1999 it has stabilized around 2020 or a year or two earlier.
Currently it is at 2018.
I believe Drexler's Foresight Institute was running some kind of betting
pool about nanotech, but I couldn't find any information on their web
site. Does anyone have information on what kinds of dates it predicted?
Hal
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