what tech do you think we humans use to build electronics and circuits so small?

take for example, fiber optics or tiny microprocessors that can fit into the eye of a needle, or nano machines…i mean -u dont assemble them with bare hands right? i m curious

Digital People: From Bionic Humans to Androids

Product Description
Robots, androids, and bionic people pervade popular culture, from classics like Frankenstein and R.U.R. to modern tales such as The Six Million Dollar Man, The Terminator, and A.I. Our fascination is obvious – and the technology is quickly moving from books and films to real life.

In a lab at MIT, scientists and technicians have created an artificial being named COG. To watch COG interact with the environment – to recognize that this machine has actual body language – is to experience a hair-raising, gut-level reaction. Because just as we connect to artificial people in fiction, the merest hint of human-like action or appearance invariably engages us.

Digital People examines the ways in which technology is inexorably driving us to a new and different level of humanity. As scientists draw on nanotechnology, molecular biology, artificial intelligence, and materials science, they are learning how to create beings that move, think, and look like people. Others are routinely using sophisticated surgical techniques to implant computer chips and drug-dispensing devices into our bodies, designing fully functional man-made body parts, and linking human brains with computers to make people healthier, smarter, and stronger.

In short, we are going beyond what was once only science fiction to create bionic people with fully integrated artificial components – and it will not be long before we reach the ultimate goal of constructing a completely synthetic human-like being.

It seems quintessentially human to look beyond our natural limitations. Science has long been the lens through which we squint to discern our future. Although we are rightfully fearful about manipulating the boundaries between animate and inanimate, the benefits are too great to ignore. This thoughtful and provocative book shows us just where technology is taking us, in directions both wonderful and terrible, to ponder what it means to be human.

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The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

Product Description
The great inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil is one of the best-known and most controversial advocates for the role of machines in the future of humanity. In his latest book, he envisions an event—the “singularity”—in which technological change becomes so rapid and so profound that our bodies and brains will merge with our machines.

The Singularity Is Near portrays what life will be like after this event— a human- machine civilization where our experiences shift from real reality to virtual reality and where our intelligence becomes nonbiological and trillions of times more powerful. In practical terms, this means that human aging and pollution will be reversed; world hunger will be solved; our bodies and environment transformed by nanotechnology to overcome the limitations of biology, including death; and virtually any physical product can be created from information alone. The Singularity Is Near also considers the social and philosophical ramifications of these changes, and is certain to be one of the most widely discussed and provocative books of 2005.

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Artificial Intelligence: Robots That Think Like Humans?

Within the next few decades having a robot psychologist will become popular predicts futurist James Canton (2007). Computers will be capable of making diagnoses of mental problems and issues of well­being. Others have predicted that robots will eventually be better at this than trained psychologists.

Canton is probably correct that computers will be able to diagnose many psychological problems, and even prescribe courses of treatment and medication. They will probably assume a certain segment of the work of psychologists. However they will not assume it all. How many people will want to sit in front of a machine for fifty minutes pouring their heart out? And how might that same machine detect the depths of the human psyche?

My conviction is that it simply will not be able to, because the robot shrink will be intelligent, but not conscious; at least not in the foreseeable future. Here lies the key distinction that I wish to make, and the one that many thinkers in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) field crucially fail to recognise.

It is one thing to say that computers are like brains, but are brains like computers?

Much of modern cognitive science is dominated by the computer metaphor. Brains can calculate and simulate and modulate. But just how much like a human mind is a computer? Could a computer ever really be said to be intelligent in the way that a person is? Could we ever empathise with such a “mind”? And if not, does it really matter?

The entire field of artificial intelligence is centered on this goal, this belief. Many, like futurists Ray Kurzweil, James Canton, and James Martin are convinced that not only will computers be intelligent like humans, they will soon be a hell of a lot more intelligent, including in non-human-like ways. The moment when computers surpass human intelligence and become the smartest thing on the planet is what Kurzweil calls “the Singularity”. If it occurs, it will be a defining moment in ‘evolution’ on this planet.

Artificial intelligence is not something to be dismissed lightly, simply because it seems incredible. The limits of computing technology are unknown, but undoubtedly vast, perhaps incomprehensible. AI optimist Ray Kuzweil points out the following staggering comparison between the human brain and an equivalent sized computer.

..an optimally organized 2.2-pound computer using reversible logic gates has about 10-25 atoms and can store about 10-27 bits. Just considering electromagnetic interactions between the particles, there are at least 10­15 state changes per bit per second that can be harnessed for computation, resulting in about 10-42 calculations per second in the ultimate “cold” 2.2-pound computer. This is about 10-16 times more powerful than all biological brains today. If we allow our ultimate computer to get hot, we can increase this further by as much as 10-8­fold. And we obviously won’t restrict our computational resources to one kilogram of matter but will ultimately deploy a significant fraction of the matter and energy on the Earth and in the solar system and then spread out from there (Kurzweil 2005 p 434).

 

And just in case you are not feeling threatened, futurist James Martin believes that the intelligence of computers will barely resemble that of humans. And they will be vastly more intelligent. He writes:

…the true computer revolution is yet to come – with ubiquitous censors, nanotechnology, global data warehouses and totally pervasive access to networks of extreme bandwidth. The main reason the true computer revolution is ahead of us is that machines will become intelligent. …Computers can be immensely more powerful than the human brain because their circuits are millions of times faster than the neurons and axons of the brain, and they can be designed to perform specific types of “thought” with great efficiency. Such computing will become an infrastructure that is everywhere, like the air we breathe, affecting almost every activity of humankind.” (Martin 2007: 207).

Martin’s conclusion that computers will be everywhere is a logical extrapolation drawn from current trends in computing. There is undoubtedly strong demand from the general populace, small businesses, corporations, education, institutions and governments to use them, so he is very likely correct.

Yet this does not change the fact that many of the arguments of AI proponents are deeply flawed. Consciousness and intelligence are fundamentally different concepts, as I shall argue in the second part of this article.

 

References

Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near. Penguin 2005

James Canton, The Extreme Future. Plume, 2007

James Martin, The Meaning of the Twenty-first Century. Riverhead 2007

 

You can read the second part of this article, and comment on it, on Dr. Marcus T. Anthony’s blog about the future, www.22cplusblogspot.com .

Caltech-led Team Provides Proof in Humans of RNA Interference Using Targeted Nanoparticles

Caltech-led Team Provides Proof in Humans of RNA Interference Using Targeted Nanoparticles
A Caltech-led team of researchers and clinicians has published the first proof that a targeted nanoparticleused as an experimental therapeutic and injected directly into a patient’s bloodstreamcan traffic into tumors, deliver double-stranded small interfering RNAs (siRNAs), and turn off an important cancer gene using a mechanism known as RNA interference (RNAi). Moreover, the team provided the …

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