Economist Robin Hanson and futurist Brian Wang join us as we continue our special series leading up Foresight 2010. The conference, January 16-17 in Palo Alto, California, provides a unique opportunity to explore the convergence of nanotechnology and artificial intelligence and to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the founding of the Foresight Institute.

Robin Hanson is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University, a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University, and chief scientist at Consensus Point. Robin is a pioneer in the field of prediction markets, also known as information markets or idea futures. He was a principal architect of the first internal corporate markets, as well as the Foresight Exchange beginning in 1994, and of DARPA's Policy Analysis Market, from 2001 to 2003. Robin has diverse research interests everything from health incentive contracts, to Bayesian classification, agreeing to disagree, self-deception in disagreement, to growth given machine intelligence, and interstellar colonization. He blogs at Overcoming Bias.

Brian Wang is a futurist

who blogs about all things future-related at NextBigFuture.

He is the Director of Research for the Lifeboat Foundation and a member

of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology Task Force.