All Graphite and Glitter

To BAFTA on Thursday evening for the 11th Annual Economist Innovation Awards. The actual awards, well compered by Tom Standage, were doled out before the dinner allowing the maximum amount for networking (and, even more important, drinking and eating) with the 200 (other) movers and shakers of the global innovation community. I work for Europe's leading science university. We ought to be a mover and shaker of the global innovation community. I had never been to a black tie event before. Perhaps I am finally living the life. At least I managed to tie my bow tie without any problems. I suppose, like learning to fall off a log, once you know how to do it, you never lose the knack. Both the canapes and the actual meal were delicious and my kind of food, although strictly that's my red meat ration used up for about a month. No Ronnie Corbett in the toilets though.   

I suppose if you are The Economist it might make sense to give awards to to recipients such as ESRI, Google and Elon Musk. Elon Musk isn't going to get any prizes for public speaking. I have seen him before speaking on a Tesla video. I don't suppose he'll be losing any sleep about that. You can't deny his energy or the impact he has made several disparate fields of business and technology. I do disagree though with his analysis of the three most important areas to focus research and development effort on. Of course, Musk has the advantage over most of us of being able to choose to spend his own money on whatever he wants to do, which in his case, are energy, networking technologies and space exploration. Personally, I'd choose A(G)I, life extension technologies and (molecular) nanotechnology. I see these as synergystic: life extension technologies, based perhaps on Aubrey de Grey's SENS, might give us the extra few years to crack A(G)I and MNT; MNT might give us nanomedical technologies and the nanocomputers (mechanical, electronic and quantum) needed to provide the raw computing grunt for A(G)I; for A(G)I ultraintelligences, solving the problems of MNT and life extension technologies might be a month's, morning's or moment's work. And, of course, MNT and A(G)I would be helpful in solving the outstanding many problems of sustainable energy, food and water, and space exploration.

I got the chance to chance to have a chat with Salim Ismail of the Singularity University. There is much to be said, from a number of different perspectives, about the Singularity University and the fact that their Global Ambassador was at an Economist event. I would love to get the chance to go to a SingularityU course. Perhaps one day, there will be an Institute of Singularity Studies at Imperial. I do hope that, in the not distant futures, that more funding does become available for singularity-enabling technology whether from high net worth individuals, large corporates, venture capitalists or government agencies. And the very existence of SingularityU might help contribute to bringing that about.

The Register must have been there and picked up on Musk's comments about Hyperloop. I do think that one day we might be able to use nanotechnology to do amazing things with tunnels. Presumably that isn't what Musk has in mind, but it'll be interesting to see exactly what he is proposing. The future might be vactrains and personal autogyros yet.