Boyle and Smith started their career together at Bell Labs, and in 1969, created the foundation of digital cameras. Utilizing the phenomena that won Albert Einstein his Nobel, Boyle and Smith devised a way to measure the electrons knocked lose when light strikes silicon. This essentially created the first digital camera pixel.

When Kao began working on fiber optics, the most advanced cables could only carry a light signal about 65 feet. By determining how the purity of the glass and the manufacturing methods influenced the transparency of a fiber optic cable, Kao laid down the principles that would lead to a half-mile-long cable within 4 years.

With these three wins, the number of American Nobel Laureates rises to a world-leading 76. Britain remains in second place with 21 wins. Which is to say, USA! USA! USA!

[via The New York Times]

But IBM hopes to change all that. IBM scientists have developed what they call a "DNA transistor". The transistor is a tube only a couple of atoms in diameter that pulls the DNA through, while sensors in the walls of the tube read the base pairs. This process simulates natural protein pores in cells that evolve specifically to read DNA strands. By running an entire genome through the tube, IBM hopes to lower the cost of sequencing an entire genome down to $1,000.

IBM, best known as a computer and industrial machine company, entered the field because of an emerging view of genetic medicine as a kind of information technology. IBM has a great deal of experience in information technology, and figures it could easily take the lead in this new market.

However, opposing the optimism about genetic medicine is increasing evidence that a genome itself does not control medical outcomes as much as previously thought. While genetics certainly plays an important role in determining susceptibility, more and more studies show that diet, environment, and even viruses have a dominant role in causing diseases like cancer and diabetes.

While the push and pull over the value of genetic medicine continues, reducing the the price of genome sequencing can only help bring the age of genetic medicine closer to fruition. After all, if genetic medicine turns out to provide very little help to doctors, it might still find its way into the ER if that help can be purchased for a very low price.

[via the BBC and The New York Times]

Reith, and his partner Gregor Grass from the University of Nebraska, discovered that the bacterium Cupriavidus metallidurans produces special enzymes that convert the gold in the surrounding environment from a form poisonous to the bacterium into the harmless, metallic variety. By placing genes that cause the bacterium to glow near the genes for the detoxifying enzyme, Reith and Grass created a modified bacterium that emits light when it finds gold.

A prospector can seed a claim with the modified bacteria, and trade in his screen-sieve and washpan for a photometer. If the photometer detects the glow from the bacteria, then there's gold in them thar hills.

[via New Scientist]

We asked an assortment of the Singularity Summit's brilliant minds how they're looking forward to a life merged with artificial intelligence

We asked them if they're looking forward to the Singularity's hypothesized robot takeover.

In addition to highlighting some of the people I met at the conference, I would also hope that you readers will take this opportunity yourselves to answer the questions I posed to the conference goers.

In the comment section, please feel free to share what excites you about the Singularity, what worries you about the coming man/machine merger, or any other opinions you might have about the ideas discussed in this, and previous, articles. I look forward to hearing what you all have to say.

Launch the gallery here, and see all of our coverage from the 2009 Singularity Summit here

Welcome to the main event.

At the end of a day filled with many interesting, thought provoking talks (and a few that gave me some much needed sleep), the audience at the Singularity Summit 2009 sat content but exhausted. After all, contemplating the future of humanity really takes it out of you.

Then came Kurzweil. He's the man everyone came to see, and they greeted him appropriately. After the standing ovation died down, the auditorium reached its quietest point yet, as the collected skeptics, crazies and disciples waited to hear from the first prophet of Singularity.

Kurzweil's demeanor did nothing to betray his position in that auditorium. This was his yearly Sinatra at Caesar's, state of the Singularity moment, but rather than fill up the room with his presence, he mumbled, looked at his shoes, and carried on in a polite, if tired, manner.

Before he started in on his talk, he produced a sheet from a yellow legal pad that he had periodically scribbled on all day. It was his own reflections on the summit's previous talks. Kurzweil then proceeded to comment on them all, admitting some theories into the canon of Singularity, and relegating others to the apocrypha.

I don't think Kurzweil thought he was personally ruling on the validity of theories, but that's how many in the audience took it. After all, his final talk wasn't about introducing new theories or dissecting his previous mistakes. It was about shoring up the faithful, calming any doubts they had about the sheer ambition of his claims, and presenting even stronger evidence that the Singularity is inevitable and impending.

The blatant clarity and simplicity of his argument and evidence left no doubts about Kurzweil's profound intellect. He could have simply shown one slide, pointed to it, and walked away with everyone in the audience convinced the Singularity was on its way.

The slide showed computing power, starting with the first punch card machine designed for the 1890 US Census, and ending with today's most powerful chip. Since 1890, computing power has become a trillion times more powerful, and a billion times more powerful in the last 25 years. The computer I used at the beginning of college had 10 times less power and half the storage space of the one I used as a senior. With the human brain able to hold only about 2 petabytes of information,a single computer will equal the storage capacity and speed of the human brain by around 2029.

And once a computer can map out every single neuron, connection, and firing of a brain, someone will make a digital version. Looking at Kurzweil's graph, all the data lined up so elegantly, I became convinced that a computer will simulate a human brain in my lifetime.

However, once that happens, all bets are off. For all Kurzweil did to convince me that a digital brain will arrive sooner rather than later, he didn't convince me that a digital brain will spontaneously assume human-like consciousness and self-awareness. In fact, he didn't convince me that anyone had even the slightest clue as to what will really happen once we cross that threshold.

I was reminded of the Human Genome Project, which assumed that once every gene got mapped out, it would be easy to put a person together from scratch. As we've since learned about the impact of gene/protein interaction in development, the many previously unimagined roles played RNA, and the various chemical feedback loops that regulate every living cell, the simple theory of DNA codes, RNA prints, protein acts seems increasingly simplistic and naive.

I left with the feeling that neuroscience will soon start revealing similar complexities in the brain. And as the process of conscious proves more and more intricate, the computing power needed to reproduce it will rise and rise, pushing back the date of the Singularity.

Kurzweil's presentation left me with no doubt that he was on to something. But he, and everyone else who spoke at the conference, also left me with a strong belief that no knows what that something is, or when it will really be here.

All I know is that when it does get here, I hope it doesn't run on Windows.

Tomorrow, I'll wrap up with my final thoughts on the conference, and let some of the conference attendees tell you what they think about the Singularity.

Even before Stephen Wolfram took the stage, he evoked the largest applause of the conference so far. As the creator of Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha, and author of A New Kind of Science, Wolfram stands almost as tall as Kurzweil himself in the eyes of the audience. His pronouncements carry more weight than most of the conference's other speakers, which is why I felt relieved when Wolfram disregarded worry about our extinction at the hands of sentient robots, and instead focused on a very different concept of what role AI will play in our future.

Wolfram belongs to a set of mathematicians who believe that fundamental programs, like the instructions for different fractals or the Fibonacci sequence, underlie all the behavior in our universe, as well as many phenomena that don't exist in a universe with our physics. Unlike mathematical equations, a significant portion of which humans derived simply to explain the narrow set of observations made in the last couple of thousand years, these computations that Wolfram identifies as embedded in reality exist independently of our observation.

He calls the total set of all possible programs the "Computational Universe". By running mathematical experiments, examining the natural world and decoding the behavior of reality, mathematicians and scientists explore this universe, uncovering programs new to humanity, but not new to the universe.

In this intellectual construct, humans don't write new programs (like, say, a method for generating random numbers), they merely uncover programs that have always existed.

"Mathematicians are more like photographers than painters," said Wolfram. "They frame observations, rather than building things up one brush stroke at a time."

These programs, the majority of which remain undiscovered, provide the raw material for new computer software and new technology. Wolfram likened these programs to minerals like crystals and magnetic metals. They always existed in the Earth, but only recently did humans begin extracting them and integrating them into their technology.

Wolfram described a world where scientists and mathematicians mine the Computational Universe for new programs, with their experiments serving as the test wells for this new, intellectual resource. Until, of course, we reach the limits of our feeble biological brains.

Just as the mining industry needed to switch from pick-ax swinging Cornishmen to steam powered digging machines, so too will the computational wild catters design computers to mine the universe for programs beyond human understanding.

This perfectly mirrors Salamon's description of the rise of AI from earlier. And Wolfram agrees, identifying the switch to computerized computational mining as the catalyst for the emergence of artificial intelligence.

However, unlike most of the other speakers, Wolfram isn't really concerned that this AI will immediately threaten our extinction. After all, the program only exists to find new knowledge. How could killing us help in that goal? In Wolfram's vision of the future, artificial intelligence is the ultimate nerd, staying inside and studying all the time rather than going out, getting drunk and causing various mayhem.

Not everyone at the conference bought this idea of a benign artificial intelligence, and people hounded Wolfram after his talk, demanding to know what he's doing to ensure that the AI he's helping create won't kill us all. In the face of such extreme paranoia, I began to wonder whether this pervasive fear of AI-led extermination reflects human intelligence's own inability to imagine a consciousness without the aggressive need to destroy humanity displays, rather than a genuine, logical fear that technology may outpace our ability to control it.

Or maybe its both, and our pervasive fear is the best example of why we should be so worried.

Next up, the Don himself.

Since I got here, I've been wondering what exactly the Singularity's going to look like. How are we going to create artificial intelligence, and when we do, how are we going to integrate ourselves with this advanced technology? Luckily, NYU philosopher David Chalmers was there to break it all down.

Contradicting this morning's talks, and solving the problem of complications due to personality quirks from a copied brain, Chalmers rejected the idea of brain emulation as the path to super intelligent AI. Instead, Chalmers thinks that we have to evolve artificial intelligence by planting computer programs in a simulated environment and selecting the smartest bots. Basically, set up the Matrix, but with only artificial inhabitants. The process may take a while, but he stressed that human intelligence serves as proof of concept.

To ensure that the resultant AI adheres to pro-human values, we would have to set up a "leak-proof" world where we control what goes in, and can prevent any of the artificial consciousness from becoming aware of us too early and escaping (essentially, no red pill). We could then adjust this world to favor pro-human traits while routing anti-human tendencies towards extinction.

As Chalmers sees it, the second the artificial personalities become as smart as us, they will emulate our leap by creating AI even smarter than themselves inside their simulated world. Essentially, they will undergo their own, digital Singularity.

This will start a chain reaction that quickly leads to a digital intelligence far greater than anything we ever imagined. Unless, of course, the first AI more intelligent than us uses that additional foresight to realize creating intelligence greater than itself is a bad idea, and cuts off the entire process.

But assuming that AI does manage to get smarter than us, we will have to either integrate with it, coexist with it as a lower form of life, or pull the plug (which may or may not be genocide). Since mass murder is generally frowned upon, and no one wants to be pets to a machine, Chalmers sees integration as the only way to go. Of course, no higher intelligence would willingly integrate with a lower one (humans don't forsake language and bipedalism to live with wolves), so Chalmers said we'll have to computerize ourselves to meld with the AI system.

To sustain consciousness, he advocates physically replacing one neuron at a time with a digital equivalent, while the person is awake, so as to retain continuity of personality.

What Chalmers did not address, however, is whether or not the AI would want to meld with a warmongering, greedy, sex obsessed inferior intelligence like ourselves. If the AI is really that much smarter than us, it might be more like George Wallace than the Borg, insisting on human segregation now, tomorrow and forever rather than total assimilation. Prejudice computers leads right back to Salamon's prediction of extinction at the hands of our creations.

Can't we all just get along!

According to Anna Salamon, a former NASA researcher who now works for the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence that hosts the conference, artificial intelligence greater than our own is inevitable and dangerous. Salamon argued that biological brains have finite intellectual capacity. Just as a goldfish can't appreciate opera and a cat can't learn quantum mechanics, so too will humans soon confront problems beyond the comprehension of our slimy, mortal brains.

She believes we will create super computers to solve those problems for us. Just as relatively weak human muscles can work together to create stronger lifting machines like cranes, relatively stupid human brains can design vastly more powerful computers minds. Unfortunately, Salamon worries that if humans and AI have divergent goals, we could find ourselves in competition with the AI for resources to achieve those different goals. And when you compete with something vastly smarter than yourself, you lose. She stressed that assuring humanity and AI have the same goals requires a level of care and responsibility greater than even our stewardship of nuclear weapons technology.

To head off the Skynet take over, Salamon advocates starting now to ensure that positive, human assisting missions get hardwired into the basic architecture of artificial intelligence.

But according philosopher Anders Sandberg, the nature of artificial intelligence development may complicate the embedding of those fail-safes. Sandberg believes that engineers have to base their first attempts at AI on the only current example of natural intelligence: the human brain.

And if the first artificial intelligence has to take the form of a human brain, it has to take the form of a particular human brain. Sandberg noted that the first artificial brain, as copy of a specific human brain, would necessarily contain elements of the personality of the test subject that the artificial brain copied. Personality traits that could become locked into all artificial intelligence as the initial AI software proliferates.

Based on my experience with people who volunteer for scientific tests, this means the first artificial intelligence will most likely have the personality of a half stoned, cash-strapped, college student. So if both Salamon and Sandberg prove right, I think avoiding destruction at the hands of artificial intelligence could mean convincing a computer hardwired for a love of Asher Roth, keg stands and pornography to concentrate on helping mankind.

Take home message: as long as we keep letting our robot overlord beat us at beer pong, we just might make it out of the Singularity alive.

And remember to check back soon for more Singularity Conference 2009 updates.

We'll be blogging live from the Singularity Summit this weekend

In 2006, a year after the book came out, Kurzweil began hosting a yearly conference to mark how the past year brought us closer to the Singularity, and to debate the complex philosophical ramifications of the melding of technology and biology. And this year, this reporter will be there to cover it.

Over the weekend, I will post a number of blog entries detailing the profound, the important, and the just plain wacky ideas thrown about with abandon by intellectual heavyweights like Stephen Wolfram, David Chalmers and Kurzweil himself. Then on Monday, I'll break it all down with a larger summary of what I've learned, where we're going as a species, and which nanobots all the cool kids will compose their cells out of.

You can check out the complete conference program here, and learn a bit more about Kurzweil and the Singularity in this Vice Magazine interview from earlier in the year.

See you at the Singularity.

No response yet from Shaq or Kanye

The Court issued an injunction against an unknown Twitter member who used the name and likeness of a law firm owner (poor choice of victim) to spread conservative messages. The Court decided that the user had unlawfully impersonated the lawyer, one Donal Blaney, and that since the defendant was unknown, Twitter would be the best way to notify the criminal.

This case sets a profound precedent of how and when people can be served with legal documents. In the US, the law varies from state to state, with some states demanding that documents be hand-delivered by a process server, while others allow notification by mail. In the US, no one has thus far been served with any legal document through blogs or Twitter.

[via Reuters]