markfinnern@... (markfinnern) writes:
>P.P.S. To everyone who is going. Can you write us a run down of what
>was great this year? Or point us to others that have written about
>it? Thanks.

Foresight's Gatherings are officially off the record, so I'm hesitant
to report much.

Here are two surprising claims that I heard at the Gathering that are
being publicized on the web:
<a href="http://www.gen.cam.ac.uk/sens/">Strategies for Engineered Negligible
Senescence</a>
Aubrey de Grey outlined a plan to produce cures for human aging in 10 years at
a cost of about a billion dollars. He then explained why it wasn't very likely
that that much money would soon be devoted to an engineering approach to aging,
and described how lower funding levels could be used to demonstrate results
in mice that would convince people to fund the research needed to treat
humans. I think he exaggerated a little, but he generally seemed very
reasonable and well informed.

<a href="http://www.arraycomm.com/Technology/coopers_law.html">Cooper's Law</a>
This law has been summarized as "spectral efficiency doubles every 2.5 years".
When I first read Lessig's argument that communications frequencies should
be a commons, I assumed that it would result in bandwidth being "used up"
soon. Cooper's Law seems to say that such a problem would be quickly fixed
by better hardware, at least for the near future.

One request that emerged during questions after Brad Templeton's speech
(probably from a question that was also influenced by Lessig's talk a few
hours before) was the need for a term to replace the phrase "intellectual
property". The word property in that term concedes a presumption of
monopoly control, which may be why we lost the Eldred case.
--
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