🚀 go-pugleaf

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!).