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Nanotechnology and Society?
VoiceOfZule writes "Bringing advanced sci-tech and humanities grad students to teach undergrads about nanotech and its implications is a great idea. I was in this class on Nanotechnology and Society at the University of Wisconsin-Madison this spring, and a lot of the course materials were just put online along with a preprint paper about the new course, and some of the student research projects. The class was a lot of fun (some nano, some scitech studies, some scifi/future stuff), I learned a lot (about the reality of nanotech and its societal implications beyond the B.S. hype out there), and the world of nano now seems like a good career path to me. Are similar experiences going on across the country? In light of recent worries concerning science and engineering in the US, I hope so."
I hope there was very little homework....
Alot of universities seem to be offering similar classes of late. In fact, next semester I begin a 4 semester course track about the implications of technology in our society with a focus on nanotechnology. I'm looking forward to all that extra time to nap on the oh-so-comfy 1970's era right-hand-only desks.
You just said a mouthful there... Nothing is going to pull things out of this nose-dive but a radical restructuring of the US's political and social structures. Not even nanotechnology:
July 15, 2005
America's Descent Into The Third World
By Paul Craig Roberts
The June payroll jobs report did not receive much attention due to the July 4 holiday, but the depressing 21st century job performance of the US economy continues unabated.
Only 144,000 private sector jobs were created, each one of which was in domestic services.
56,000 jobs were created in professional and business services, about half of which are in administrative and waste services.
38,000 jobs were created in education and health services, almost all of which are in health care and social assistance.
19,000 jobs were created in leisure and hospitality, almost all of which are waitresses and bartenders.
Membership associations and organizations created 10,000 jobs and repair and maintenance created 4,000 jobs.
Financial activities created 16,000 jobs.
This most certainly is not the labor market profile of a first world country, much less a superpower.
Where are the jobs for this year's crop of engineering and science graduates?
US manufacturing lost another 24,000 jobs in June.
A country that doesn't manufacture doesn't need many engineers. And the few engineering jobs available go to foreigners.
Readers have sent me employment listings from US software development firms. The listings are discriminatory against American citizens. One ad from a company in New Jersey that is a developer for many companies, including Oracle, specifies that the applicant must have a TN visa.
A TN or Trade Nafta visa is what is given to Mexicans and Canadians, who are willing to work in the US at below prevailing wages.
Another ad from a software consulting company based in Omaha, Nebraska, specifies it wants software engineers who are H-1B transferees. What this means is that the firm is advertising for foreigners already in the US who have H-1B work visas.
The reason the US firms specify that they have employment opportunities only for foreigners who hold work visas is because the foreigners will work for less than the prevailing US salary.
Gentle reader, when you read allegations that there is a shortage of engineers in America, necessitating the importation of foreigners to do the work, you are reading a bald faced lie. If there were a shortage of American engineers, employers would not word their job listings to read that no American need apply and that they are offering jobs only to foreigners holding work visas.
What kind of country gives preference to foreigners over its own engineering graduates?
What kind of country destroys the job market for its own citizens?
How much longer will parents shell out $100,000 for a college education for a son or daughter who end up employed as a bartender, waitress, or temp?
Dr. Roberts, [email him] a former Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal and a former Contributing Editor of National Review, was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during the Reagan administration. He is
Seastead this.
Are similar experiences going on across the country?
Country? Considering the small amount of population your country has compared to the rest of the world, wouldn't it be smart to ask for experiences around the world?
During my comprehensive exams, one of my committee members cynically advised me to rephrase my answer using the prefix "nano", since that's what funding agencies like to see on grant proposals.
...you should ask Wesley Crusher how much trouble a bright young man can cause with those little buggers.
This section of the syllabus seems to capture what the course is about the most concisely.
to consider the societal implications of nanotech in the context of social, scientific, historical, political, environmental, philosophical, ethical, and cultural ideas applied from other fields and prior work;
My question: How is this different from any other major technological advance? For goodness sake, there were backlashes against the railroad, against the first steam engines. More recently we have backlashes against cloning, and nuclear power.
Every time we run into some topic like this, we have a very polarized debate. In practice, society adapts to the change and goes on with life. Ultimately, the market decides which innovations become wide spread, and how they are implemented.
My impression from the syllabus: fluff class looking to cash in on a hot button topic.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
The course also explored the possible environmental effects of nanotechnology, and the possible regulation that might help manage those effects. When dealing with one class of nanotech, like fullerenes, this is quite a broad and complex topic. When on introduces the everything that might be nanotech, it becomes nearly unmanageable.
Another project that has some popularity is the nanokids.
There is actually quite a bit from the course that can be used in any number of high school courses. And, since Nanotech is likely to tbe defining technology of the next generation, kids who are familiar with the concepts are going to be better prepared than those who are not.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Here's the text book they used
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3459769.stm
Nanotechnology is interesting mainly in that it has uses in transhumanism(machine neuron interfaces and such). The singularity institute is forming ties with the foresight institute to tie transhumanism with nanotechnology.
But it's easy to see how transhumanism is the greater of the two. When we are posthumanism, we'll be able to analyze nanotechnology much better.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
I'd be interested in hearing what the course covered with respect to environmental, health and safety issues around nanomaterials. While these new materials bring interesting properties, they could also present some interesting, unexpected health hazards.
By virtue of their size, nanoparticles can cross the blood/brain barrier. For some materials this new route of entry could be the difference between toxic and nontoxic. Materials that previously were thought of as nontoxic in the micron and above particle range could now have toxic effects. - Material data safety sheets generally don't consider a material's particle size, except to state "dusty" type warnings.
That the nanoparticles can have this new route of entry is proven - that this results in new toxic effects for previously nontoxic compounds is not (at least not that I've seen in the lit) - so there may be no issue - or there may be a big issue. Hopefully we don't find out the asbestos way where we make the material ubiquitous then be stuck with huge remediation and civil lawsuit issues!
the post clearly pertains to the last link in the summary if you bothered to look at that... but i get it, if you don't agree with something its much easier to start the name calling than to actually address the real subject...
Politics 101,
Nonotech is a compettitive threat to a LOT of entrenched industries who have cozy monopolies. So you can better believe that there will be strong push to "regulate" it for peoples "safety" and the "protection" of society.
The inportant thing to understand is that there are two types of laws. Ones that seek justice by punishing people who make bad choices, and ones that try to "prevent" problems by limiting the kinds of choices people are "allowed" to have. It should always be understood that the former is usually good and the latter is almost always BS, and causes more harm than it "prevents".
I'll be applying to colleges next year. Is Madison a well-known school in the Midwest/Northeast? I hadn't heard of it until I started my college search. Are Madison grads typically presented with good jobs/career paths? If anyone knows anything about this school, I'd love to hear it.
This class represents everything that is wrong with modern college education. Some poor physics teacher is stuck spending hisr time giving "Science and Society" classes to students seeking an easy A to fulfill their core science requirements. What ever happened to teaching real science classes involving math and physics, instead of "soft science" classes involving primarily politics and social issues?
America is facing a serious fulcrum. Either we can continue to busy ourselves with our moral and ethical dilemmas which I feel partly stem from our Puritan ancestors and let the rest of the world pass us by. Or, we decide that we'd like to be a recognizable technological force in the 21st century and realize that our ethical dilemmas are rather unfounded.
The rest of the world doesn't seem too have much trouble figuring out where they stand on issues like abortion, gay marriage and nanotech. Why do we?
When anybody can make anything, virtually for free(1), they are then self-sufficient and truly liberated from the wage-slave supply-chain-gang. This "make anything" device is not too good to be true either - it's physically possible, and will be invented. Nature already does it.
And ultracheap manufacturing isn't the only thing to be "hyped" about. There's cheap access to space thanks to diamondoid space-elevator material, environmental cleanup, medical advances, and much more.
(1) The main cost is time. It will take a certain amount of time to assemble a given object in a given period of time, but the rest of the ingredients are essentially free: recycled molecules which compose the desired object + stored solar energy from solar arrays you bootstrapped yourself + molecular "3d" blueprints (of closed, or open source design).
Power to the Peaceful
Politics 102
Once nano takes off, people will likely be able to manufacture things in their homes, and there will be two types of industries.
One will see the entire purpose and meaning of the nano age as a tool to leverage their patnet holdings for unlimited growth and profit, extracting royality for every last thing that everybody creates in every private home. They will try to secure this "right" by force.
The other side will see the entire purpose and meaning of the nano age as an opportunity to provide creation services, consulting, and customisation, and support with no restrictions or royalities on what people create.
When they collide, all hell will break loose.
(if this sounds allot like the copyright vs tech industries today, that is not a cooncidence)
He's working on molecular computers or something.
Apparently 1/4 of every dollar has to go to impact research, evaluating whether it will destroy the world.
I think Bill Joy has done more than his fair share of damage, this field of research is hamstrung by paranoia about the possibility of a grey goo which is impossible.
After all, Bacteria would LOVE to be a grey goo, eat everything, reproduce endlessly, destroy the world. That's really what bacteria are all about, they just can't manage it. So how in the hell is mankind supposed to outdo several billion years of evolution's attempt to make grey goo.
It just can't happen, the power consumption is too great, and even if it weren't, lack of heat dissipation would melt the goo from the inside.
and indeed, think outside your own national borders. The US appears to be in the grip of religious cultists and their influence appears set to only rise. If you are serious I'd consider looking further afield rather than you and your career is trapped in what is almost already a theocracy by proxy. Theres a whole world to see, you could begin to see a bit more it by looking a bit further than your local college (also, it might well be cheaper to go overseas anyway).
Nanotechnology is one of the primary causes of science fiction in the last 10 years, and will probably continue to be so for years to come.
Nano Tech will make us all jobless, will make all our lives worthless, and will eventually help computers replace the majority of us. The survivors will be the owners of the NanoTech companies and people who are lucky enough to live in socialist or communist countries.
How will NanoTechnology influence the economy and how can us smart individuals profit from the massive job losses, homelessness, and poverty?
Heh, the website it is from is pretty wacko, far more than the stripped down stuff in the wall street journal or even national review (where he says he used to work).
It's hilarous!
If you read the article you might notice this is a social studies course, not a science course. I suppose you also think that requiring a certain number of humanities courses to earn a bachelor of science from a 4 year college is useless too?
That's all we need, a buch of highly trained but out of touch scientists. Next thing you know we'll be fending off nano-sharks with tiny little laser beams.
Personally, I have seen quite a bit of nanotech at various research and academic institutions. Right now it isn't huge, and there isn't alot at undergraduate levels, but the graduate/post-doc research is very active.
Voice your opinion!
Nanotechnology is probably too broad of an area to specialize in. I think picking one particular area of nanotechnology would be a good idea. There are many areas of science and engineering that fall into this area.
For example, most of electrical engineering is now nanotechnology. Microbiology is where most of the work in biology is being done.
I recently graduated from Louisiana Tech University. During my last quarter there, the university was offering a NanoSystems Engineering intro course similar to the one the parent thread talks about. LaTech has actually been approved for a Nanotechnology Undergraduate degree, the first in the U.S. I belive.
Save your money and buy as much stock as you can, thats career.
Run your own business, sell your services to the rich, or be rich and buy stock. Forget about finding a long lasting "career" or "job" and learn to create your own job.
Everyone in this country should be given a free Economics class by the government when they learn to read and do math, because all the bullshit taught in school has nothing to do with survival. Knowing reading and writing will not help if you dont know how to do business and invest.
Own or be owned. Invest or die, these are the new rules of todays economy.
Bowery has a long history of usenet and online crackpottery. Back in the 80s he was advocating quarantine for all AIDs patients. When George Koopman was killed in a car accident (the head of AmRoc, a private space launch company), Jim was saying that NASA had arranged for him to be killed.
You have to consider the source.
If U.S. companies don't want to hire U.S. engineers because of their salary, wouldn't that mean that prevailing salary for engineers is too high and does not reflect the value of their education and skills?
"Nano" is getting redundant, because most technical fields have an interest in getting to smaller and smaller scales. Whether it's electronics or chemistry, things are going nano. It's not like you can major in nanotechnology alone and expect to handle anything in the nanoscale. Realistically, you have to choose a field of concentration.
It is very easy to write doom and gloom stories, but it is difficult to come up with good advice.
Young people should look at the hot technologies and pursue those - that will give them a start in life. Biotech is one. Microwave is another. Of course there is also the old favourite: Military products.
It is the mature and sweatshop technologies that gets outsourced. Software development is one of them.
Oh well, what the hell...
As a U.S. citizen and holder of a degree in Mechanical engineering, I don't especially like the movement of manufacturing to places other than the U.S. That said, you know what happens to third world economies? They become sources of cheap labor for other economies. So lets hope that the U.S. goes third world as fast as possible.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
hehe
Now is the time for each of us to go to Law School and prepare. When Nano Technology comes there will be plenty of law positions open in the market.
I am a student at UCSB and we just got built a $200+ Million dollar Nanotechnology facility. Ive been wondering what practical uses there are for nanotech (I know there are plenty) But i dont know WHAT they actually are... Can we make a nanotech comb that brushes away dandruff and fixes the scalp? Anyone done any brainstorming or have articles pointing to already accomplished processes?
You can certainly make that argument. But I would assert that conversely, U.S. companies want OTHER companies to support a highly-paid workforce, in order to buy THEIR products. In other words, it's a bit like the Prisoners' Dilemma. YOU pay YOUR workers top dollar so they can buy MY products. I pay my workers dirt, because I don't care if they can buy YOUR products. If everybody plays the game that way, everybody loses.
There are "high value products" for sale in the US that simply won't sell in any third-world economy. There are companies that will go under if these products lose their customers. Yet they're all destroying their customer base by destroying their US workforces.
Think large flat panel HDTVs, sports cars, high-end gaming PCs, latest'n'greatest video cards, commercial-quality home stoves. There are things that little real-world utility, or such luxurious implementations of basic utility that nobody without excess wealth would even think of buying one. Obviously - no probably, there will still be overpaid corporate execs in the US to buy these products, but they're not a big enough market to justify the business.
The real question for corporate survival:
Will economies like India rise fast enough to become customers of "high-value products" before the US economy degrades far enough to lose its customers?
On the side...
By the time India's economy rises to the point of becoming customers, will they have priced themselves out of the job market?
Will the company then go to another country, looking for cheap workers?
Are we really seeing "employment crop rotation?"
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
"A country that doesn't manufacture doesn't need many engineer"
This could not be more incorrect. There is absolutely NO need for a design engineer to be colocated with manufacturing. After the prototype is built,debugged and tested is it the manufacurer's (who will have thier own manufacturing engineers) responsibility to make it.
This is exactly why the fabless semiconductr industy flourishs. There is no reason for a company like Nvidia or Xilinx to own a fabrication facility. TSMC does NO design work but they are fantastic at operating semiconductor fabrication facilities. If the manufacturing process is your product(say you make paper) then yes, you should own and operate your facilities but for the vast majority of engineering this is not the case.
As far an India and China, most of what they do now is the grunt work of designs by European/American/Japanese companies. They are VERY good at this and know it.
I know you us guys think that the world is a state of the usa, but sorry. America does not means USA. Sure, most of south america are 3rd ord 2nd world, but you forgot canada. And at the end even if america would be completely 3rd-world-zone: USA is still not America! Get it!
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
These are first order "back of the envelope" calculations about the effects of making things small.
.222 Hp. Fuel consumption at this level would be one thousandth of that of the full size engine. Since the fuel tank is also one thousandth of the size of the full size vehicle one might be tempted to think that the distance between fill ups would be the same.
For reasons which will become apparent as you read this I doubt that true nano scale weapons will ever exist. What could possibly be built are micro
scale robotic devices of a non self replicating type which could possibly be used as weapons. Let us find out how practical they might be.
Let us start by examining the effects of scaling on things. We'll start with my Nissan Maxima and reduce it in size by a factor of ten. Instead of being about 17 feet long the scaled car will be about 1.7 feet long. Instead of weighing about 3000 lbs it will weigh about 3 lbs. Why is that? The answer is that the mass of a scaled object is proportional to its volume - which goes as the cube of the dimensional ratio. Ten times as long, ten times as wide, ten times as high has 1000 times the volume.
The scaled engine would be 3 cc in displacement instead of 3000 cc. Instead of 222 Hp it would produce
However, the fuel consumption of the smaller vehicle is proportionally greater. Why? The smaller vehicle is one thousandth the weight but the frontal area of the vehicle - the size of which determines the drag - is one hundredth of that of the larger vehicle. Thus at the same speed the drag of the smaller vehicle is proportionally ten times as great as the larger vehicle.
The optimal speed of the smaller vehicle is lower than that of the larger vehicle. Because drag goes as the square of the velocity, one thousandth of
the fuel consumption will drive the smaller vehicle at a speed which is about 32% of the speed of the larger car and its range will also be about
32% of the full sized car's range.
If we tried to make a car scaled down by a factor of 100 its speed and range would both be only one tenth (square root of a scale factor of 100) that of a full size car. We are forced to conclude that the product of speed and range of any vehicle with an internal fuel supply will scale directly with
the scale factor.
For example reducing the size of a jet plane by a factor of 100 makes it fly at one tenth the speed and one tenth as far. By the time we scale to nano
sizes we have objects which won't go very far or very fast. A nano device is an exceptionally crappy weapon delivery system compared to a full sized device; it can only move slowly, and it can't go very far.
However there are other things which occur which would effect our attempt to simply scale an engine down in size. The first of these is the change in
heat loss. In simplest terms the rate of heat production is proportional to the volume of a heat source, which means that heat production scales with the cube of the scale factor, but heat loss is proportional to the surface area of the object which scales as the square of the scaling factor.
A smaller engine requires much less of a cooling system than a large engine does, if the engine is small enough it doesn't require a cooling system at all - it will lose heat naturally fast enough without one.
Because of the square - cube relationship for heat loss there is a minimum size flame which is possible. A small ball of flame loses heat faster than a large one. If a ball of flame is too small it can't produce enough heat from internal combustion to maintain its temperature above the ignition point, and the flame can't exist.
This means that if we try to scale our engine far enough it will refuse to run, it will lose heat too fast for the fuel to burn. Even making the engine out of heat resistive materials like ceramics only works to a certain size;
eventually the heat loss will keep things from burning.
This is part of the reason that biological cells use c
If it is so easy for socially irresposible brats (script kiddies) to disrupt society by writing or modifying computer viruses / worms / trojans / backdoors, then think what wiil happen when it is easy to give those evil code snippets nanobodies?
Total disaster.
The end of the world as we know it.
THe sky is falling!
wake up and hold your nose
I took this class last semester, although it was with a different TA. Nobody took it seriously (not even the TA). The class was only really about nanotechnology for the first few weeks. We spent most of the remaining time learning about STS (Scientific and Technology Studies) theories and how they could be related (loosly) to nanotech. There was one midterm that was ridiculously easy, and no final. We emailed all our papers and never received comments or grades for them. The class was 75 minutes twice a week, and we probably spent 45 minutes per class period just talking in our "small groups". On a related note, our TA received a $500 grant to make this http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~rleung/sts_201/ (visit for a laugh) which was only updated a couple of times. It was clearly made in a few hours time (and never finished). I guess I wish I was in the other section of this class if someone else actually found it useful.
Excellent advice, delivered concisely, with a smack at Wired. It's great.
C.P. Snow wrote about the great divide between the 'two cultures'.
Representative quote nicked from wikipedia entry although he wrote quite a bit more than soundbites on the matter:
"A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: 'Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?'
I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question -- such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, 'Can you read?' -- not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had."
I think he had a point then and its unfortunate he still has one now. The divide must be bridged on both sides. My understanding is the course was in the general spirit of bringing two sides of an issue, located on different sides, together. It seems stunning short sighted of people not to understand that.
Plays violent online games as: Nerfherder76
The ECE Department at UF had Dr. Scott Thompson, an Intel Fellow and former Director of 90nm Logic Technology at Intel, teach a class on semiconductor nanotechnology. This was a great class because Dr. Thompson didn't overburden the students with tedious homework but rather would assign projects to help us get a better understanding of the different nanotechnologies. He lectured about the future of these technologies and how soon we could be seeing such technologies. He went into great detail about MOSFETS, CNTFETS, spintronics, Single Electron Transistors, Resonant Tunneling Diodes, Quantum Cellular Automota, Molecular Electronics. I highly recommend anyone interested with new technologies to try out a class like this if its offered at your school.
Not necessarily in a world in which the US currency is the international currency of reserve. Prices get so distorted by trade relationships that the only folks in the US that really make it are:
1) folks with property
2) folks in positions protected from both trade and immigration.
My first thoughts on nano were probably the same sci-fi ideas that everyone else has -- self-assembling nanobots could build just about anything, and do anything.
But real-life applications of nano are much less groundbreaking, and much more mundane -- making circuits and storage a bit smaller, and so forth. Nano is more of a psychological barrier than anything else.
If self-assembling robots were really such an awesome idea, for getting work done, we would have done them at the far-easier-to-work-with size scales that we are comfortable with.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
genetically modified yeast & sime molds could well end up being "grey goo". There was a US government-funded research project to develop a geneticaly modified fungus to eradicate coca in the Amazon basin a few years ago, I seem to recall...
I agree completely. This course was a bit of fluff. If you read the preprint paper about the course you'll see that it is filled with the most gag-inducing edubabble imaginable. I have taught 10 year-olds about nanotech at a higher level than this.
The sources and readings were especially lame. For example, the only required book for the class was the 150-page SciAm hack job on nanotech. The readings had only one chapter from Engines of Creation and nothing from Nanosystems. Even the popular, non-technical stuff was not the best - why no Ed Regis or Neal Stephenson?
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
He considers himself a wit. He's also under some sort of illusion that it's permissible for him to draw.
This is offtopic fearmongering. It isn't even coherent. The start of the rant doesn't relate to the rest of it.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
What kind of country gives preference to foreigners over its own engineering graduates?
When the foreigners will work for less? Any capitalist country in the world.
Reading thru the various materials, the person who put the course together chose to follow the mainstream ingore/dismiss MNT ideology. Too bad.
The NNI promotes this kind of thinking. I call it 'Nanotechnology: By Chemists, For Chemists' because it shies away from the most powerful applications of molecular manufacturing in order to not offend the gray-haird 'experts' trying to defend their turf.
So what we're left with is buckyballs and other stuff we can already do with bulk processes. Yawn.
Dude nanotech is scary, and we don't have Superman and friends to save us...
What you are doing with software is coming up with formal systems that model reality. It is easy to come up with complex models of reality -- just enumerate all the data you have and call that a "theory".
Where science gets its power is where software gets its quality: Parsimony. The problem with parsimony is that it's hard. It's so hard you can't find a better definition for artificial intelligence quality than Kolmogorov compression ratio.
Seastead this.
There's a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?
Sorry, but the magic replicator that makes everything IS silly hype. Natural examples such as plants make things from ambient materials and energy in the environment, but manufacturing complex technology such as consumer products, from materials like hard plastics, metal, and semiconductors, will take exotic material feedstock as well as much more energy than is likely to come from solar arrays. Making something out of metal is just not the same as making it out of proteins and cellulose; the chemical bonds are stronger, it takes more energy; that's why there aren't any steel-jacketed trees or animals with titanium bones. Furthermore, solar powered assemblers are likely to be slow, just like plants - how long does it take a rose bush to grow from a seed? People are barely willing to wait a week for something to arrive from amazon; they're not going to wait a couple months for their solar powered nanoassemblers to make them a new TV. The only way to speed up production is to add more energy and feedstock. The optimal place to do this is in a factory, with large vats of chemicals which supply both energy and feedstock, remove waste, and carefully control the environment (temp, pH, etc) for optimal functioning of the nanoassemblers. Economies of scale will be substantial; compare a large medical drug factory with garage meth lab. Which one is more efficient? Which one can afford full time staff to comply with environmental regulations?
Also, general purpose nanoassemblers are really unlikely in business terms; there's always a tradeoff between generality and efficiency, and markets usually prefer efficiency. That's why your oven is not also a cloths washer/dryer. So if assemblers are possible at all, expect to see specialized varieties, each of which runs on purified or specially prepared feedstocks and energy supplied in the form of chemicals (sunlight is too diffuse). In factories.
Incidentally, this is why Bill Joy's "gray goo" fears are a bunch of nonsense which should forever discredit the man as a fool. Commercial nanotech is very unlikely to take the form of general purpose nanoassemblers that can operate in the wild without somebody purposely dumping truckloads of chemicals on them. And plants show us that nanoassemblers which can "live off the land" are likely to be too slow to be a serious threat. When a fire breaks out in a house, we send some people to spray water on it; the building may be wrecked, but it doesn't take out the city, and we live with the problem of housefires because fire is useful. When a nanoassembler cluster goes rogue, we'll spray it with nanocyde. Maybe Orkin can branch out into that market.
Didn't the FORVE in STARWARS envolve the ability to control nanides? IS THE FORVE...REAL???
The story is about a little girl, Gordona, who is thrown into a situation as the result of being exposed to advanced technology in the form of an escaped lab animal with a bloodstream full of microbots (based on nanotech, it will be a REALLY long time before we have true nanobots). She gets "infected".
While those near to Gordona struggle with the understanding of what happened to her, the corporation behind the research is searching for her to get their technology back.
Set in the near future, CYBERCHILD explores what happens when advanced science meets human reality, an action thriller that explores real-world issues and the challenges presented by medical research and developing technology. The story strikes a balance amongst technology, futurism, and geo-sociopolitical economic forces.
Read a preview of my novel CYBERCHILD at www.smartalix.com/cyberchild
Dude nanotech is scary, and we don't have Superman and friends to save us...
Yeah, Gray Goo is Bad Stuff, but an ordinary unemployed husband can save the day - read "Prey."
What you are talking about is International Capitalism, aka Globalization. It has a counterpart in National Capitalism or traditional capitalism which gives national security priority over multinational profits. BTW: "Homeland Security" and the associated loss of civil liberties domestically is simply the manifestation of national insecurity predictably arising by this shift in priorities.
Seastead this.
Fine. The Bible. Not making a qualification for "good" impact on people's lives, but hey...science produced the nuclear bomb.
With a career half-life of under 7 years, it is rather hard to pay off a $100,000 education before you are tossed out the door. So by the time you made it to 30, over half of your engineering graduating class would be unemployed, laid off or promoted to Pointy Haired Boss.
Robert's perpetuates the Industrial Age mentality about jobs.
It is true that jobs are disappearing but blaming it on the third world is incredibly short-sighted. You only have to visit a modern factory and realize that automation is here, and it is just the beginning. Experts like Rifkin suggest that industry has not fully embraced automation (probably for fear of community backlash) and automation remains at about 5% of what is possible. What will happen to jobs when automation moves to 50% or 100%?
Just about any job you care to name can be replaced by smart robots and intelligent computers either right now, or in the very near future.
The Industrial Age mentality sees this is a threat to jobs, the Information Age mentality sees it as an opportunity.
If he cast aside his Industrial Age mentality for a moment he would see that this is the solution to bringing back manufacturing. Why have fully robotised factories overseas, when you can have them on US soil and save the cost of transportation?
The real problem, as I continue to point out, is not job loss: the problem is how to more equitably share the productivity gains of centuries of progress.
And the real problem as I continue to point out is that you should solve the equity problem before you remove people's means of livelihood -- not after you have disenfranchised and rendered them politically impotent as most certainly they have been by the globalists.
Seastead this.
Agree, but only in an ideal world situation.
Unfortunately, humans always resist new ideas and change, at least initially. Then there is luddite factor which is wedded to doing things the 'old' way.
It is too late to close the barn doors, the horse has bolted. But this does not mean we can't do anything about it. In fact, the restoration of people's means of livelihood can be achieved, at least in part, by utilising advances in production technologies to bring down the cost of living.
The problem is the Industrial Age mentality which sees everything through the job/profit filter.
Tell that to the Japanese and for that matter the Koreans and Taiwanese.
I'll tell you what's "ideal".... the idea that non-subsistence property rights aren't a mere social construct that could fall apart with catastrophic consequences.
I'm not saying there is no technical fix here -- there is -- its not "nanotechnology" as people have been discussing it and I really am fed up with people going on about "nanotechnology". I suggest if you care about solving the hard social and political problems arising from technological civilization that you start using well defined terms so people don't think you're a mere palaverer.
Seastead this.
What terms have got you confused?