The newly relaunched Foresight Institute – now officially the Foresight Nanotech Institute, with a mission of “Advancing Beneficial Nanotechnology” – holds its annual conference from October 22 to 27th in San Francisco. I was very pleased to get an invitation to talk in the first part of the meeting – the Vision Weekend. I’ll be taking the opportunity to set out some of my more speculative thoughts about how we might learn lessons from nature to make a radical nanotechnology based on some of the design principles used by cell biology.
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I have the impression that the new FI is a little less oriented towards “radical” (i.e. Drexlerian) nanotech and is trying to get on the bandwagon for “incremental” and near-term nanotech. I’m not sure they’re quite ready to endorse nano-pants but still they seem to be accepting some of the modern day work as legitimate nanotech even though it is not Drexlerian.
For example http://foresight.org/challenges/energy001.html talks approvingly about companies making nanotech based solar cells today, like Konarka, Nanosolar, and Nanosys. I’m not up on the details of their technology but I assume no nanobots or utility fog are involved.