Meeting notice: The 03.April.01 meeting will be held at 7:30 P.M. at the Royal East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block down from the corner of Main St. and Mass Ave. If you're new and can't recognize us, ask the manager. He'll probably know where we are. More details below. Suggested topic: The conflict of social dissatisfaction with the Singularity Social disatisfaction is to Homo sapiens what burrs are to burdock: the dispersal strategy of the species. The reason why we abandoned the relative utopia of the African savannah for niches as unappealling as the Arabian desert, the mountains of Peru, and the Arctic, not to mention LA, is because each new generation is genetically programmed to gaze on the achievements of its fathers and find them repressive and "inauthentic". Until recently these emotions were expressed by moving on physically. At least for the moment, the price of real estate being what it is, the impulse to make a clean slate has been channelled into the desire for social reform and/or technological change --- into migration through cultural space. Perhaps when the cost of colonizing orbital space falls sufficiently the drive to push on physically will return. On the other hand the ultimate target of technological progress appears to be a state in which all desires can be satisfied, instantly and for pennies. This raises the question -- what happens when a entity programmed to be unsatisfied runs into an environment competent to remedy any expressible wish? The name of this conflict is of course the Singularity. The SF writer Roger Williams, in his book "The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect" (available online at http://www.kuro5hin.org/prime- intellect), suggests that ultimately the instinct to be unsatisfied will embrace the enabling technology itself. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> In twenty years half the population of Europe will have visited the moon. -- Jules Verne, 1865 <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Announcement Archive: http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Legend: "NSG" expands to Nanotechnology Study Group. The Group meets on the first and third Tuesdays of each month at the above address, which refers to a restaurant located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The NSG mailing list carries announcements of these meetings and little else. If you wish to subscribe to this list (perhaps having received a sample via a forward) send the string 'subscribe nsg' to majordomo@world.std.com. Unsubs follow the same model. Discussion should be sent to nsg- d@world.std.com, which must be subscribed to separately. You must be subscribed to nsg-d to post to it and must post from the address from which you subscribed (An anti- spam thing). Comments, petitions, and suggestions re list management to: nsg@pobox.com.