Jeez, not this again.

Eric Drexler's ex-wife, Christine Peterson, still has some leadership position with the Foresight Institute, which I consider ironically named, given that its history of nanotech advocacy should embarrass those people by now. I don't know if she has a regular job and just runs this dubious "institute" on the side. But I get the impression that she continues to drink the Nanotech Kool-Aid, especially after reading this announcement:

Foresight co-founder among panelists discussing role of technology in human existence

Foresight Institute Co-Founder and Past President Christine Peterson was among four panelists addressing the role of technology in human existence for a Stanford University Continuing Studies series. From a report in The Stanford Daily by Marshall Watkins “Bay Area thinkers ponder ‘life’“:

Christine Peterson, co-founder and president of The Foresight Institute, a public interest group seeking to educate the community on forthcoming technological advances, emphasized the increasingly prominent role that nanotechnology has come to play.

Peterson noted that nanotechnology has the potential to create new materials and make vast advances without the side effects, such as pollution, that would currently ensue. She allowed, however, that the near-invisible and highly sensitive technology might enable intrusions on privacy.

“We need to know what data is collected,” Peterson said, “how it is used and how long it is retained. We have those rights.”

Peterson highlighted the medical benefits of nanotechnology, noting, “The ability to control atoms and molecules would mean that there really isn’t a physical illness [that] we wouldn’t be able to address.”

The report quotes the moderator of the panel, author Piero Scaruffi, as stating that the four panelists were picked because “They discussed life as in the future, rather than life as in the past.” We can certainly expect that life after advanced nanotechnology has been developed will be fundamentally different from life up until that point.

Does Christine have a calendar? Doesn't she realize that we live in "the future of nanotechnology" that her ex-husband wrote about back in the 1980's, and that it simply doesn't exist? How much longer can she keep this up before people lose interest in these empty promises, stop inviting her to their conferences and stop donating to her "institute"?

Contrast this delusion with genomics over the past 20-25 years. In 2012 we can see that genome sequencing works; has gotten dramatically cheaper; generates real data; and has begun to transform our understanding of biology, evolutionary history and medicine.

In other words, we live in "the future of genomics" from the perspective of 1990 or so, and some of its potentials have started to pay off. It doesn't disappoint because it exists in the real 21st Century, not in the paleofuture 21st Century promoted by certain aging Baby Boomers, including a politician in the news lately who still thinks we live in "the space age."