Slashdot Mirror

Read here a reference (to a paper in a scientific journal) to the work done well before 1994. Ehh...

Here is the USPTO listing for this thing. HP (and a few other groups) have been working on this kind of stuff for a long time.

Here

Nanotechnology is less than 20 years away.

He gets a lot of coverage on Nanodot as well. (4 of the front page articles are his.)

This article says 10^12 bits per cm^2. That would bring us to something like 116 GB per cm^2, unless my math is wrong, which it probably is, because that was off the top of my head. Anyway, I think it's more dense than what you estimated. As for hard drives, I don't know, but I have a drive with an areal density in the 34 GB / inch^2 realm, so if they're anywhere near that, this is a huge improvement.

Check out some of these sites:

Nano Dot Article
Tech Review
A neat simulation
WordIQ

These all do a good deal to help explain / show you some interesting things. Give them a look-see.

Back in 1999 the Foresight Institute released the first version of the Foresight Guidelines on Molecular Nanotechnology. . These guidelines, interestingly enough, ended up in the US Congresses' recent (2003) bill on Molecular manufacturing / nanontechnology studies.

One point that the F.I. makes that often gets missed in discussion of nano: molecular nanotechnology != self-replicating machines. As Eric Drexler writes: "Much has been made of a concern I raised in 1986, under the name "gray goo" -- a hypothetical scenario involving runaway replicators. Building fully self-replicating machines would be difficult, however, and building machines that could replicate without external help would be more difficult still. Current work in the field shows that it will be easier and more efficient to develop molecular manufacturing without building any self-replicating machines at all."

One measure of the existence or success of a field is the jobs available in it: jobs certainly exist in 2004. By 2014 it should be really interesting. Another measure is "does the field have its equivalent of Slashdot?" Yup, Nanodot.

The F.I.'s website has much good material: FAQs, Reviews of nano for the technical or non-technical reader, reviews of policy issues and more. In their policy section they discuss how to avoid high-tech terrorism: it involves more nano, not less. Another of their essays talks about 6 lessons from 9/11 that should be applied to molecular nanotechnology:

1. Foresight's concern for the long-term potential abuse of nanotechnology has been confirmed and strengthened. Those who abuse technology -- from airliners to anthrax -- for destructive ends do exist and are unlikely to stop before full nanotech arrives, with all its power for both good and ill.
2. Foresight's position favoring speedy development of advanced nanotech has also been strengthened. The longer we wait, the better the infrastructure worldwide, the smaller the budget and project needed -- and the easier to hide the work. Let's do it fast, while it's more difficult, expensive, and harder to conceal.
3. Our advocacy of openness as the safest strategy has been validated. In under two hours, the problem of airliners hitting buildings was solved -- by passengers in the fourth plane to be highjacked. They did it "open source style": shared information on the need, collaborative design, and unpaid group implementation. (With earlier information, they might have been able to save their own lives, as well as those in the building their plane was meant to hit.) Their example can inspire us as we work to find a "bottom-up," distributed, networked, immune-system-style defense against the abuse of nanotechnology.
4. There are no good excuses for lack of foresight. We've got to be pro-active, not just reactive. Environmentalist-architect William McDonough wrote the following about environmental disasters, but it applies just as well to Sept. 11 or a future abuse of nanotech: "You can't say it's not part of your plan that these things happened, because it's part of your de facto plan. It's the thing that's happening because you have no plan...We own these tragedies. We might as well have intended for them to occur."
5. It would

A salient quote from a nanodot.org article on this subject:

After the seminar, I happen to bump into Drexler and have a rare opportunity to speak with him alone. I bring up the possibility that there could be a secret military project to develop nanoassemblers, and the current government position in the nanotech debate is a disinformation program.

Following the briefest of pauses, Drexler looks me in the eye and replies in the same high, clear voice I'd heard him use during the panel discussion, "Those things are hard to know about." He still has his game face on.

--

Do you have any links to any NanoTech think tanks or anything which talks about your claims further? I couldn't find any critisms on any nanotech websites

The primary MNT websites (primary because the people who really invented nanotech work there) are those of the Foresight Institute and the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing. Their people are the editors of the Slashdot-like MNT discussion site Nanodot. Here are a couple of news articles they've posted there about the NNI funding issue:

TNT Weekly: deletion of MNT study from nano bill is "a farce"

Nanobusiness Alliance spokesman attacks MNT

Do you have any links to any NanoTech think tanks or anything which talks about your claims further? I couldn't find any critisms on any nanotech websites

The primary MNT websites (primary because the people who really invented nanotech work there) are those of the Foresight Institute and the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing. Their people are the editors of the Slashdot-like MNT discussion site Nanodot. Here are a couple of news articles they've posted there about the NNI funding issue:

TNT Weekly: deletion of MNT study from nano bill is "a farce"

Nanobusiness Alliance spokesman attacks MNT

Do you have any links to any NanoTech think tanks or anything which talks about your claims further? I couldn't find any critisms on any nanotech websites

The primary MNT websites (primary because the people who really invented nanotech work there) are those of the Foresight Institute and the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing. Their people are the editors of the Slashdot-like MNT discussion site Nanodot. Here are a couple of news articles they've posted there about the NNI funding issue:

TNT Weekly: deletion of MNT study from nano bill is "a farce"

Nanobusiness Alliance spokesman attacks MNT

There are more extensive technical discussions at nanodot.org here and here. One of the problems is that people, particularly Smalley who is a chemist cannot understand the merging of physics, biotech, nanotech, MEMS and computer science. Drexler and a few other scientists attempt to bring these all together. See particularly various comments on Nano@Home from Nov. 22-24 here.

The point should be made that the problem does not appear to be with regard to molecular or atomic assembly. As others have pointed out the ribosome performs this task quite well. As do DNA polymerase, RNA polymerase and literally all of the enzymes known to biology (probably thousands). I have on my desk a basic Biochemistry textbook (Voet & Voet) documenting the 19-step conversion process of Lansterol into Cholesterol which tends to be performed atom by atom or small molecule by small molecule. And this doesn't include the extensive number of reactions that lead up to cholesterol synthesis from Acetyl-CoA! All of these are mediated by enzymes that add or remove atoms or small molecular groups.

So the problem appears to be that Smalley objects to mechanosynthesis in a vacuum or an inert atmosphere (or even an atmosphere which will not interfere with the reactants). Yet he does not make any case for that. Even if his "fat fingers" argument was valid that would still not prevent one from creating nano-structured materials with somewhat less density. Buckyballs and carbon nanotubes are not exactly the most dense materials one can envision. He presents no strong argument with respect to the limits of what could not be constructed with "fat fingers".

The discussion from my perspective is a disappointment.

There are more extensive technical discussions at nanodot.org here and here. One of the problems is that people, particularly Smalley who is a chemist cannot understand the merging of physics, biotech, nanotech, MEMS and computer science. Drexler and a few other scientists attempt to bring these all together. See particularly various comments on Nano@Home from Nov. 22-24 here.

The point should be made that the problem does not appear to be with regard to molecular or atomic assembly. As others have pointed out the ribosome performs this task quite well. As do DNA polymerase, RNA polymerase and literally all of the enzymes known to biology (probably thousands). I have on my desk a basic Biochemistry textbook (Voet & Voet) documenting the 19-step conversion process of Lansterol into Cholesterol which tends to be performed atom by atom or small molecule by small molecule. And this doesn't include the extensive number of reactions that lead up to cholesterol synthesis from Acetyl-CoA! All of these are mediated by enzymes that add or remove atoms or small molecular groups.

So the problem appears to be that Smalley objects to mechanosynthesis in a vacuum or an inert atmosphere (or even an atmosphere which will not interfere with the reactants). Yet he does not make any case for that. Even if his "fat fingers" argument was valid that would still not prevent one from creating nano-structured materials with somewhat less density. Buckyballs and carbon nanotubes are not exactly the most dense materials one can envision. He presents no strong argument with respect to the limits of what could not be constructed with "fat fingers".

The discussion from my perspective is a disappointment.

You are not up-to-date on the literature. The questions you pose are addressed by Robert Freitas in the ever expanding body of literature on Nanomedicine. Specificially the recently published Nanomedicine V. IIA deals with biosafety issues and the 4 year old Nanomedicine V. I deals with things like power delivery and movement. If you want to educate yourself and contribute to real molecular nanotechnology, or as Drexler has recently suggested zettotech progress, (rather than simple nanomaterials which is much of what people talk about today) feel free to come on over to the Nano@Home project. We could use a few good developers.

If I've understood the article, once the chip is in, it's impossible to adjust the delivery schedule, which depends on the rate at which the coating dissolves.

One thing that really worries me is that the chip can't be reloaded. The patient needs to have the chip replaced regularly. Isn't each replacement a minor surgery? I know about the difficulty of getting people to follow a regimen, but a recurring minor surgery seems a steep price to pay in exchange. If they could manage a chip that could be reloaded with an injection, that would be better.

the next logical steps are chips that release medicines based on the detection of biological markers

There is a technology which could make this feasible. It checks the blood for the presence of (potentially hundreds of) different DNA/RNA sequences simultaneously, which information is diagnostically rich. If deployed clinically in a small blood-testing gadget, this could dramatically reduce health care costs and catch a lot of missed diagnoses, so I'm wishing these guys good luck.

If you're really interested in what's coming soon, read up on it at The Foresight Institute and a Slashdot-styled discussion site, NanoDot.

Eric Drexler and his wife Christine Peterson started the Foresight Institute after Eric wrote the book Engines of Creation which he has now made available on-line. It was written in 1986 but is surprising still relevant. Eric and Chris also wrote Unbounding the Future which is also available on-line. His doctorate was turned into the book Nanosystems, which is a struggle to get through but has solid science in it (after all, it passed the review of his professors).

This is very relevant to the subject matter. Digital computers have created untold wealth for consumers, who can download any digital creation (music, movies, books, software) for zero cost (apart from the cost of the computer, electricity, and an Internet connection).

This is highly disruptive to the RIAA and MPAA (less so to the book publishers and SPA; people prefer books on paper, and software more often "phones home" with activation codes, preventing piracy -- except people then trade the codes). Disruptive enough that they have gotten laws passed to support their failing business models, similar to how the buggy whip manufacturers tried to pass laws stating that "carriages on roads must have horses in front of them."

My addition to this discussion is to extrapolate technological advances, and see how they will affect future industries. The truth of the matter is, no industry is safe from nanotechnology -- it will make all products duplicatable at zero cost. Like the Linux distributors, other industries will see their business model turn into one of service. And the fact that money won't matter (since you can make whatever you want) won't really hurt these companies, because they too will have replicator boxes[1] and will be able to create whatever they need in order to run their companies.

[1] -- (I understand your attack now: you singled out the word "replicator" and figured that it could only mean one thing. Sorry to give you that impression; I'm talking about reality, not a fictional TV show.)

I first read Engines of Creation about 10 years ago (it was published in 1986, and you can read it online, or download it for free, at the above link).

A few years later Drexler published Unbounding the Future which is also available on-line.

In 1995, Ed Regis wrote the book Nano which is not available on-line, but was a much better introduction to the technology and ideas behind it, geared toward the layman. (Read some of the user comments at Amazon.)

The technology is inevitable; if we ban it, then it will be created in (and controlled by!) other countries. So we must develop it, and we must develop it first, because there are plenty of issues with misuse (diseases targeted to a certain skin/hair/eye color, nationality, etc.), terrorism, and world destruction (the "gray goo" problem).

Eric Drexler and his wife Christine Peterson created the Foresight Institute which promotes nanotechnology policy and research, and Chris is also very big on open source as a way to disseminate nano. This is where I got most of the grandfather post from, her ideas on merging our current model with an open-source-based model.

There is also a Slashcode-based site for discussion of nanotechnology at Nanodot.org.

I realize you were joking, but this state of mind is brought on by something more powerful than recreational substances: ideas.

The goal might be different, but the methods seem largely the same; an eternal war that can't be won against a foe with a constantly changing face, surveillance of citizens in the name of this war [...]

At any rate, it was about then that we started the whole "War on Drugs" movement. I knew as it was being started that it was completely unwinnable; people have various reasons for altering their consciousness and nobody will ever be able to remove all of those reasons (I mean, children spin around until they fall down dizzy -- how can you eliminate that?).

You hit the nail on the head -- an eternal war with constant casualties on both sides which is completely unwinnable, consuming more and more resources because we MUST "think of the children."

Changing the subject slightly, we are in for an incredible conflict when nanotechnology becomes a reality: we truly will no longer need the "ruling class" and there will be one hell of a class struggle. I am looking forward to the technological aspects (physical items will be "free" just as music and movies are currently "free", although frowned upon; IA (intelligence amplification) will be possible and most probably required (the government mandates vaccines...)) -- however, I am most definitely not looking forward to the social aspects of the singularity, because things will be changing too fast for people to keep up, and people will start to revolt. We truly live in interesting times.

PS A great book on facing and traveling through the singularity is The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect which was mentioned here several months ago.

I have a feeling that what is hindering advancement with nanotechnology is that same thing that hinders the advancement of stem-cell research and many other fields: politics... which goes hand-in-hand with money and religion and thus brings along paranoia, fear, misunderstanding, etc. ("We shouldn't play God with our genetic code...", "What about creating a gray-goo that will destroy everything on our planet...")

As for having absolutely only minor advancements in nanotech, that's just not true. I've read about stain proof fabrics and windows that can keep dirt particles from clinging, not to mention advancements in carbon nanotubes.

Yes, there are no nano-doctors floating around in our bodies yet, but complexity such as this requires a LOT more research. You can't possibly think that the time from an idea popping into his head to the time it gets created is going to only be 20 years, do you? Look how long it took for us just to get to the moon! And we haven't even been to any other planets yet! I doubt we will see any superbly complex nanomachines (such as the nano-doctors (cell-repairmen), or teeth cleaners, etc...) in our lifetime, but we are still continuing research in the field. Nobody has given up on it.

Some programmable logic technologies handle wiring with a uniform sea of logic gates connected by fuses, and you create a particular logic circuit by selectively blowing fuses. The HP/UCLA rotaxane work involves essentially the same idea, using molecular switches at the intersections of a 2D grid of molecular wires. In addition to some discussion here on Slashdot, there is more at Nanodot, and a fairly extended discussion on sci.nanotech.

Solving the problem of routing specific wires to specific gates, and doing it in a way that's reliably manufacturable in mole quantities, will pretty much relegate today's foundries to niche markets. But that's probably a long way off, numerous problems to solve to get there. Interesting times ahead.

Now that the con artists on Wall Street are getting into what they call 'nanotech' and leading governments are starting to restrict basic science for fear of "terrorists", it's not surprising that the Foresight gollums and Greenpeace elves are starting a wary catfight. Each seems unsure about what the hell the other is talking about, but seems to see the other as a rival to take over the world and control "The Precious" AI and nanotech. It's hilarious.

Most highly recommended for amusement value are this rant from LSMcGill who claims among other things that "Ethical and moral debate is worthless" (which someone should tell Josh Storrs Hall) and that it's a choice between Foresight and bin Laden(this stuff must be easy if you can do it in a cave in the boonies while being carpet bombed!) and this unofficial stupid Al-Gore-like plan to take over the world by 'safely building a nice Bible type gardener God'. I nearly fell off my chair! Clearly these people are all on some kind of crack.

Also amusing are these heated exchanges between Dr. Frankenstein and Unabomber wannabes on kurzweilai.net and the thousands of amazing 'Also By Anonymous' posts at Greenpeace - takes a looong time to load (from Amsterdam) but well worth it!!!

Just read the anonymous post titles and you will feel exactly like you spent a week in a 'coffee house' over there! Better than a vacation in a crackhouse. Reality ranges from +0.95 to -3 on their own weird scale. Why not wade in wherever? Like slashdot anonymous folks are welcome but unlike slashdot they don't fall out of the list due to such silly stuff as scoring.

Enjoy!

Now that the con artists on Wall Street are getting into what they call 'nanotech' and leading governments are starting to restrict basic science for fear of "terrorists", it's not surprising that the Foresight gollums and Greenpeace elves are starting a wary catfight. Each seems unsure about what the hell the other is talking about, but seems to see the other as a rival to take over the world and control "The Precious" AI and nanotech. It's hilarious.

Most highly recommended for amusement value are this rant from LSMcGill who claims among other things that "Ethical and moral debate is worthless" (which someone should tell Josh Storrs Hall) and that it's a choice between Foresight and bin Laden(this stuff must be easy if you can do it in a cave in the boonies while being carpet bombed!) and this unofficial stupid Al-Gore-like plan to take over the world by 'safely building a nice Bible type gardener God'. I nearly fell off my chair! Clearly these people are all on some kind of crack.

Also amusing are these heated exchanges between Dr. Frankenstein and Unabomber wannabes on kurzweilai.net and the thousands of amazing 'Also By Anonymous' posts at Greenpeace - takes a looong time to load (from Amsterdam) but well worth it!!!

Just read the anonymous post titles and you will feel exactly like you spent a week in a 'coffee house' over there! Better than a vacation in a crackhouse. Reality ranges from +0.95 to -3 on their own weird scale. Why not wade in wherever? Like slashdot anonymous folks are welcome but unlike slashdot they don't fall out of the list due to such silly stuff as scoring.

Enjoy!

Now that the con artists on Wall Street are getting into what they call 'nanotech' and leading governments are starting to restrict basic science for fear of "terrorists", it's not surprising that the Foresight gollums and Greenpeace elves are starting a wary catfight. Each seems unsure about what the hell the other is talking about, but seems to see the other as a rival to take over the world and control "The Precious" AI and nanotech. It's hilarious.

Most highly recommended for amusement value are this rant from LSMcGill who claims among other things that "Ethical and moral debate is worthless" (which someone should tell Josh Storrs Hall) and that it's a choice between Foresight and bin Laden(this stuff must be easy if you can do it in a cave in the boonies while being carpet bombed!) and this unofficial stupid Al-Gore-like plan to take over the world by 'safely building a nice Bible type gardener God'. I nearly fell off my chair! Clearly these people are all on some kind of crack.

Also amusing are these heated exchanges between Dr. Frankenstein and Unabomber wannabes on kurzweilai.net and the thousands of amazing 'Also By Anonymous' posts at Greenpeace - takes a looong time to load (from Amsterdam) but well worth it!!!

Just read the anonymous post titles and you will feel exactly like you spent a week in a 'coffee house' over there! Better than a vacation in a crackhouse. Reality ranges from +0.95 to -3 on their own weird scale. Why not wade in wherever? Like slashdot anonymous folks are welcome but unlike slashdot they don't fall out of the list due to such silly stuff as scoring.

Enjoy!

Now that the con artists on Wall Street are getting into what they call 'nanotech' and leading governments are starting to restrict basic science for fear of "terrorists", it's not surprising that the Foresight gollums and Greenpeace elves are starting a wary catfight. Each seems unsure about what the hell the other is talking about, but seems to see the other as a rival to take over the world and control "The Precious" AI and nanotech. It's hilarious.

Most highly recommended for amusement value are this rant from LSMcGill who claims among other things that "Ethical and moral debate is worthless" (which someone should tell Josh Storrs Hall) and that it's a choice between Foresight and bin Laden(this stuff must be easy if you can do it in a cave in the boonies while being carpet bombed!) and this unofficial stupid Al-Gore-like plan to take over the world by 'safely building a nice Bible type gardener God'. I nearly fell off my chair! Clearly these people are all on some kind of crack.

Also amusing are these heated exchanges between Dr. Frankenstein and Unabomber wannabes on kurzweilai.net and the thousands of amazing 'Also By Anonymous' posts at Greenpeace - takes a looong time to load (from Amsterdam) but well worth it!!!

Just read the anonymous post titles and you will feel exactly like you spent a week in a 'coffee house' over there! Better than a vacation in a crackhouse. Reality ranges from +0.95 to -3 on their own weird scale. Why not wade in wherever? Like slashdot anonymous folks are welcome but unlike slashdot they don't fall out of the list due to such silly stuff as scoring.

Enjoy!

This other article seems to suggest that all of the mice tested had their lives extended ..

Many of the animals had long-term survival, and all of them had their lives extended after asingle treatment at a low dose.

Nanodot is an okay source for people who dig this kind of stuff.

Interestingly enough, people at both Bell Labs and IBM are working on these issues. Here is a URL for the discussion of the Bell Labs progress on Nanodot

Interestingly enough, people at both Bell Labs and IBM are working on these issues. Here is a URL for the discussion of the Bell Labs progress on Nanodot

Not exactly SF writers by profession, but K. Eric Drexler and Ray Kurzweil may be writing what the future will actually be like in 50 years with more detail than any other SF writers I've read. See Nanodot.Org for more information.

Check out PriorArt.org -- they are collecting submissions from the community, for free, to create a database of prior art to combat absurd patents with.

It was created with the help of the Foresight Institute , which also runs a Slashdot-like interface at NanoDot.org .

(PS NanoDot appears to currently be down.)

It is worth noting that Lloyd's thought experiments in these areas were preceded by similar speculations over 4 years ago in Anders Sandberg's paper The Physics of Information Processing Superobjects: Daily Life Among the Jupiter Brains. Lloyd has extended them a bit by bringing Black Holes into the picture.

Now, what we will be able to engineer in this century, using diamondoid molecular nanotechnology, is solar system sized nested layer Dyson shell supercomputers. This is a unique architecture that I have named a Matrioshka Brain. It will allow us to most efficiently use the entire power output of the sun and compute somewhere in the range of 10^42 to 10^52 ops per second.

Interestingly enough, Michael Franks has a paper "Reversibility in optimally scalable computer architectures" which postulates a solar system sized reversible architecture that would out-compute any non-reversible architecture. This too would be using atomic-scale engineering. Unfortunately it requires the power output of an A or B class star (~50,000 suns) and requires an amount of silicon equal to the mass of Saturn (our solar system doesn't even come close to having that unless we mine the sun for it). After we have developed machines of these architectures, our development comes to a slow halt unless our ability to do sub-atomic engineering can be developed. I'll be quite happy with what we can get out of atomic-scale engineering -- it supplies enough computronium for roughly a trillion-trillion human minds for those who choose to upload.

As the AC notes above, this may be nanoscale assembly, but it is not the molecular engineering with precise placement of individual atoms that Drexler talks about.

BTW if you look at Eric Drexler's Engines of Creation cited above you'll see that he actually argues not for top-down regulation but for a synthesis of strategies to deal with dangers from nanotech.

If you are interested in issues related to molecular nanotechnology, come on over and join us at www.Nanodot.org. Among other things we're currently having a discussion about regulation and nanotech.

As the AC notes above, this may be nanoscale assembly, but it is not the molecular engineering with precise placement of individual atoms that Drexler talks about.

BTW if you look at Eric Drexler's Engines of Creation cited above you'll see that he actually argues not for top-down regulation but for a synthesis of strategies to deal with dangers from nanotech.

If you are interested in issues related to molecular nanotechnology, come on over and join us at www.Nanodot.org. Among other things we're currently having a discussion about regulation and nanotech.

You can test the logic (high level) design of circuits on an FPGA, but CBL (Clocked Boolean Logic) design is sensitive to races - unlike alternative logics that are delay-insensitive (and asynchronous!) such as Theseus' Null Convention Logic (NCL).

Having said that, rapid prototyping using FPGAs, such as Xilinx's contribution to artificial intelligence research can be neat.

"Foresight Institute's goal is to guide emerging technologies to improve the human condition. Foresight focuses its efforts upon nanotechnology, the coming ability to build materials and products with atomic precision, and upon systems that will enhance knowledge exchange and critical discussion, thus improving public and private policy decisions.

One of the things they're doing is pushing for open source nanotech designs and tools.

Also check out their slash-based news site.

I read Nanodot just as frequently as I read Slashdot. Nanodot is a forum built off of slashcode where people talk about oncoming technologies. Sad thing is that there's only about 3 or 4 replies per article. There is some great discussion going on here that could just get better on Nanodot. Check it out and comment it up! Don't let it sit there...

See: www.nanodot.org.

Good luck to you if you do start your own slashdot, but don't get too disoulutioned. There's already alternatives out there, Kuro5hin, Advogato, Technocrat and even Nanodot. The quality of Slashdot really does seem to be going downhill recently. The only thing that keeps me here is that there still are a few interesting things. Bahh humbug, it was all much better in my day....

Speaking as someone who runs a non-profit (foresight.org, nanodot.org), what most non-profits need desperately is consistently-available trouble-shooting and systems administration (i.e. boring stuff), to keep their machines working. Only after that is in place can they take on more-ambitious projects, and those are sometimes given as a treat to the person who does the boring stuff. Only a few nonprofits (like us) try to do fun, ambitious new software (crit.org, etc).