Over on his Metamodern blog, Eric Drexler has been describing how he thinks nanoscale manufacturing should be developed. For example, in a recent post, he makes a case for not using robotic machines to put molecules together, but instead, using special-purpose tools that move more efficiently. Over ...

Apocalyptic thinking is frequently found in certain future scenarios, especially when those scenarios are created by people concerned with military conflict, climate change, artificial intelligence, disease outbreaks, or other scary possibilities. CRN has ourselves participated in the making of such...

What if they gave a war and nobody came? That was a popular slogan for peace demonstrators of the Vietnam era (including me). It might be repeated, with a slight revision, at some point during this century: What if they gave a robot war and nobody came? Military robots already have been deployed by ...

It's another new year, and that means it is time once again for the Edge Annual Question. This year's question is: WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING? What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see? My initial reaction to their question, I'm sorry to say, is a...

3 5 0 James Hansen, NASA's chief climate scientist and the first to warn about global warming more than two decades ago, recently wrote: If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing cl...

Some say that once exponential general-purpose molecular manufacturing (MM) is achieved, our worries about global warming and climate change will be over. A relatively simple solution like tiny balloons fitted with adjustable mirrors could give us all the control we need to moderate warming and crea...

A hot topic of conversation at last week's CRN/IEET seminar on Global Catastrophic Risks was the whole issue of privacy, surveillance, security, and anonymity. In honor of that probably endless and always fascinating debate, I'm going to repost an entry we made here in 2006 that garnered a l...

Think of a futuristic war scenario where soldiers are firing smart weapons from the confines of their command centres. Weapons that are capable of intercepting and destroying virtually all enemy attack weapons and yet, they are fired from unmanned vehicles thereby minimising all possibilities of hum...

Superstruct is the world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game. It’s not just about envisioning the future—it’s about inventing the future. Everyone is welcome to join the game. If you enjoy exploring possible versions of our collective future through the scenario process...if you w...

I'm leaving tomorrow afternoon for Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, with a short stopover in Cairo, Egypt. It's not clear how much online access I'll have during the next week, or how much time I'll have for blogging. But I'll try to give updates when I can and perhaps also post some photos...