merkle.pa@parc.xerox.com (Ralph Merkle) (12/22/89)
The January 1990 issue of Scientific American has a few columns dedicated to the recent Foresight Conference on Nanotechnology held near Stanford (pages 15 and 16). Titled "Nanofuture: How much fun would it be to live forever?" the column describes nanotechnology and gives a one or two paragraph summary of a few of the talks. The article asks the rhetorical question "Engineering projections, or science fiction?" and then offers opinions on both sides. No strong criticisms are expressed, but after giving "...Drexler's guess that an assembler might be built during the first third of the next century..." it quotes Michael Ward saying "He's definitely being overoptimistic," and Harold Craighead (who did not attend the conference) saying "It takes in general a complicated factory to make a complicated mechanical object, and it gets harder as the object gets smaller". Considering the sweeping nature of the claims, the doubts can only be described as remarkably muted, and are almost exclusively of the form "It will (might) take longer than X decades" with typical values of X being 5 or higher. No specific technical objections were raised. This issue of Scientific American also had two articles for those interested in the Nature of Consciousness. John R. Searle wrote "Is the Brain's Mind a Computer Program?" while Paul M. Churchland and Patricia Smith Churchland wrote "Could a Machine Think?" There is also an upcoming conference, "Study of Consciousness within Science," February 17-18 in San Francisco. Among others, John Eccles, A. G. Cairns-Smith, and John Searle will be talking. For more information on the conference, call 415-753-8647. E-mail is: bvi@cca.ucsf.edu. (This information came from the conference flyer. I have no other information on the conference, so this posting is not an endorsement.) There has also been a raging debate on immortality and uploading in alt.cyberpunk. (This is definitely not an endorsement!).