I’m on break from the Convergence 08 conference , a conference on emerging technologies in Artificial Intelligence, Nanotechnology and Biotech.
It’s an interesting format for a conference: the morning has scheduled speakers, and the afternoons are in unconference format – if you want to present or discuss something, you show up, pick a time slot and put it on the board.
It’s crazy – there are 16 concurrent running sessions to choose from. How do you choose?
With difficulty, that’s how.
I had some reservations in regards to lumping all these different pursuits together. It seems overly pragmatic: after all, the common denominators of these emerging technologies isn’t a technical one. Artificial intelligence doesn’t (yet) have much to contribute to life extension or nanotechnology, and vice vera. The only real things these fields have in common is that they are speculative, have much less public and financial support than they deserve, and >eventually< hold promise for turning the world on it’s head – eventually.
However, so far, it has been a very good conferece, I’ve met lots of great people, and with so many different discussions set up there is plenty of opportunity for everyone to focus on whatever specific interests brought them here.
I’ll be writing up my notes at my other blog, when I have a moment to get them down.
