Videos From the Foresight 2010 Conference

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The Foresight 2010 Conference was hosted by the Foresight Institute back in January:

Foresight Institute is a leading think tank and public interest organization focused on transformative future technologies. Founded in 1986, its mission is to discover and promote the upsides, and help avoid the dangers, of nanotechnology, AI, biotech, and similar life-changing developments. ... Several rapidly-developing technologies have the potential to undergo an exponential takeoff in the next few decades, causing as much of an impact on economy and society as the computer and networking did in the past few. Chief among these are molecular manufacturing and artificial general intelligence (AGI).

For those of us who like to think about the biotechnologies that lie beyond present day development cycles, progress towards molecular manufacturing is of great interest:

If you have the technology base to build a nanoforge to assemble a brick, then you also have the technology base capable of simultaneously assembling and controlling a hundred million medical nanorobots of arbitrary design and programming. Or an artifical lung better than the real thing, or replacements for immune cells that never get old or worn. You get the idea. A brick is just as complex as any portion of the human body if you have to build the thing molecule by molecule; more fault-tolerant, but just as complex.
The open question, while we work away at early healthy life extension technologies like SENS during the next few decades - taking advantage of the biological nanomachines all around us, learning how to better repair, use and engineer them to extend our lives - is how close molecular manufacturing is to reality and then maturity. How long does it take to go from simple nanoforge and a proof-of-principle gram of assembled brick to the understanding needed to build a blood substitute a hundred times better than the old human 1.0 version and invulnerable to disease? What are the steps along the way? What will the business cycles and industries look like?

Allow me to direct your attention to a collection of video presentations from the Foresight 2010 Conference, which include a couple that are relevant to the future of longevity science:

You certainly should take a look at Freitas' website; there is a lot of fascinating material there on the future course of nanoscale medical robotics and nanotechnology in general.