Nanotech: "Smart Fabrics"

Reidar Gunn writes: "This article is about nano technology... I read it over to make sure I was really reading what I read! Red to Blue cloths, sizes going from bigger to smaller... Wonder if they'll make wireless clothes with a subscription service, Yah never know! Logo changing shirts eh!"

Comments

Re:What about the textile industry?

[Snowfox]

A man is nothing without a job, unless man has a reason for existence, be it tilling the soil or repetitively inserting screws on an assembly line, he is nothing, for work maketh a man.

Nanotechnology changes all this - the technology does the work. With this new technology, it looks as though the textiles industry will be the first to suffer once again. Clothes will manufacture themselves, and the honest worker in the clothing industry will become as the ancient hand weavers, non-existent.

Feh. The degree to which we can coopt a technology for ourselves is the degree to which we remove control from the hands of our masters.

There's not much we can do to get our hands on our masters' looms, but once the replication is done by nanomites, we've gotten our hands on the machine - the control has moved outward as it did when mainframes gave way to PCs where Linux and the likes were born - the control has moved outward as it did when huge bandwidth went from just a few sites to everyone who could afford cable and DSL and peer to peer file sharing became/is becoming the norm - and when we can capture and successfully reprogram the little knitting machines that comprise a sweater, we'll find a new wealth there as well.

Don't fear the nanobots. Fear the legislation that will attempt to stop you from using them yourself.

Re:What about the textile industry?

[Saeger]

A man is nothing without a job, unless man has a reason for existence, be it tilling the soil or repetitively inserting screws on an assembly line, he is nothing, for work maketh a man.

Wrong.

Most people hate their jobs, and given the freedom to do whatever they want with their time, they'd turn to other more gratifying activities, such as hobbies, family, travel, writing, painting, or... maybe the orgazmatron. :)

A work ethic is traditionally valued because it HAD TO BE in order to survive. But once we are able to assemble food from dirt, etc., it won't matter what you DO with your life because the necessities will be essentially free.

Oh... and a few of those former textile workers' hobbies now might include fashion design... and EVERYONE could then benefit from their [Open Sourced] designs, and only need to repay them with gratitude.

The Hype vs The Reality

[InfoVore]

The Hype: Nanotech clothes are coming!!!

The Reality: Some innovations are being explored in the textile industry. Some of these are very good ideas (sports socks that absorb bacterial odors). Some of these are very bad ideas (a jacket with built in cell phone and mp3 player. where do I put the batteries? what if I want to wear a different jacket?)

The one thing that intrigues me about the article is not that big companies like DuPont are exploring new "smart" textiles, it is that the popular media has absorbed the idea that molecular nanotechnology is coming and is going to be a Big Thing. The idea of smart clothing is no surprise to anyone who read Drexler's ENGINES OF CREATION back in the late 80's, or for that matter anyone who reads a fair amount of SF, or has the least bit of technical knowledge and imagination. I find it simply fascinating and funny that popular culture is "discovering" these ideas many decades after they were first proposed.

What is even funnier is that the jounalists and speculators are making the same innane impractical speculations they have always made. Baby pajamas with a built in cell phone? Get a life. Remember these are the successors of those visionaries in the 50's and 60's who said we all would be driving nuclear cars, flying personal helicopters, and using too-cheap-to-meter electricity by now. Yeah, right.

There were many good ideas mentioned in the article. I hope that Nano-Tex, et. al. are able to bring out some of these products: Bio-monitoring clothing, color/pattern changing cloth, variable permiability cloth, etc.

Just do us all a favor. Leave the cell phones out of it.

IV