The human brain has some capabilities that the brains of other animals lack. It is to these distinctive capabilities that our species owes its dominant position. Other animals have stronger muscles or sharper claws, but we have cleverer brains. If machine brains one day come to surpass human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become very powerful. As the fate of the gorillas now depends more on us humans than on the gorillas themselves, so the fate of our species then would come to depend on the actions of the machine superintelligence. But we have one advantage: we get to make the first move. Will it be possible to construct a seed AI or otherwise to engineer initial conditions so as to make an intelligence explosion survivable? How could one achieve a controlled detonation? To get closer to an answer to this question, we must make our way through a fascinating landscape of topics and considerations. Read the book and learn about oracles, genies, singletons; about boxing methods, tripwires, and mind crime; about humanity's cosmic endowment and differential technological development; indirect normativity, instrumental convergence, whole brain emulation and technology couplings; Malthusian economics and dystopian evolution; artificial intelligence, and biological cognitive enhancement, and collective intelligence. This profoundly ambitious and original book picks its way carefully through a vast tract of forbiddingly difficult intellectual terrain. Yet the writing is so lucid that it somehow makes it all seem easy. After an utterly engrossing journey that takes us to the frontiers of thinking about the human condition and the future of intelligent life, we find in Nick Bostrom's work nothing less than a reconceptualization of the essential task of our time.

Kinematic Self-Replicating Machines

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

This paper presents the results to date of the RepRap project ??? an ongoing project that has made and distributed freely a replicating rapid prototyper We give the background reasoning that led to the invention of the machine, the selection of the processes that we and others have used to implement it, the designs of key parts of the machine and how these have evolved from their initial concepts and experiments, and estimates of the machine's reproductive success out in the world up to the time of writing (about 4500 machines in two and a half years)

/pdf/reprap-the-replicating-rapid-prototyper-4qhadvdyj6.pdf

Reprap ??? the replicating rapid prototyper

Preface 1. The conceptual framework of the research on the origin of life on Earth 2. Approaches to the definitions of life 3. Selection in prebiotic chemistry - why this ... and not that? 4. The bottle neck - macromolecular sequences 5. Self-organization 6. Emergence and emergent properties 7. Self-replication and self-reproduction 8. Autopoiesis - the logic of cellular life 9. Compartments 10. Reactivity and transformation of vesicles 11. Approaches to the minimal cell Outlook Bibliography.

The Emergence of Life: From Chemical Origins to Synthetic Biology

background

What is nanomedicine

One of the major advances in medical science has been the development of antimicrobials; however, a consequence of their widespread use has been the emergence of drug-resistant populations of microorganisms. There is clearly a need for the development of new antimicrobials – but more importantly, there is the need for the development of new classes of antimicrobials, rather than drugs based upon analogues of known scaffolds. Due to the success of the platinum anticancer agents, there has been considerable interest in the development of therapeutic agents based upon other transition metals – and in particular ruthenium(II/III) complexes, due to their well known interaction with DNA. There have been many studies of the anticancer properties and cellular localisation of a range of ruthenium complexes in eukaryotic cells over the last decade. However, only very recently has there been significant interest in their antimicrobial properties. This review highlights the types of ruthenium complexes that have exhibited significant antimicrobial activity and discusses the relationship between chemical structure and biological processing – including site(s) of intracellular accumulation – of the ruthenium complexes in both bacterial and eukaryotic cells.

/pdf/ruthenium-complexes-as-antimicrobial-agents-3v8722a99n.pdf

Kinematic Self-Replicating Machines

Citations

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

Reprap ??? the replicating rapid prototyper

The Emergence of Life: From Chemical Origins to Synthetic Biology

What is nanomedicine

Ruthenium complexes as antimicrobial agents.

Related Papers (5)

Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata

Fifty years of research on self-replication: an overview

Robotics: self-reproducing machines.

Self-reproduction in cellular automata

Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation