Slashdot Mirror
Rise of the Nanobots
splinter writes "How nanotechnology will change the world is an article predicting that, as in the last turn of the century, an industrial revolution is coming soon - only this time we will see molecular nanotechnology rather than automobiles. " Mmmm...nanites. Beautiful, beautiful [nanites].
Is this yet another example of ST leading the way in technology or what?
how 1) you can read a story that says 'this will change the world' and you think to yourself that he hasn't really grasped all the implications,
and 2) that star trek's enduring legacy to earth culture will be the word 'nanites'?
Whoo Hoo. Nanos woupld be the coolest
Don't you hate having to stop programming and web-surfing to do those mundane chores like showering, blowing your nose, etc.? Wouldn't it be great to have nanites invading every part of your body, taking care of all the drudgery for you?
That's what I really want. Nanites up my nose. I'm sick of having to keep a box of Facial Tissues handy at all times.
99 little bugs in the code, 99 bugs in the code,
fix one bug, compile it again...
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
Diamond Age anyone?
Yet again, an article in which people talk about the wonderful (and terrible) things that nanotechnology has in store for us. These people don't seem to have any idea about the massive scale we're looking at here.
I don't want to be a killjoy, but we're still taking the very, very first few step. The equivalent of looking at Hero's engine and talking about spaceships.
Nanotech will be very very useful for certain things, but I suspect it will be a niche product for a long time, happily taking one very simple thing and turning it into another simple thing.
Remember, we still know very, very little about how our own cells are constructed. Trying to create a nanobot than can go in there and create new ones is a great idea, but it's not going to be here next week (or next year, or maybe not next century).
I suspect that our only hopy will be developing AI powerful enough to do all the hard work for us... (and that's another really big job)
My Journal
So now we are all gonna have out own personal little linux kernels in a eye-bee-em microdrive II style harddrive? I wonder how you can make your own nano-screen....
Welcome to Slashdot. Please don't feed the trolls.
The obvious solution to the dark side of nanobots usage is more nanobots. Toner Wars, anybody?
The coolest use of nanatech will be internal cleansing. Being able to clean one's arteries and cells will be the thing that make the nanotech folks very very rich.
After that would be DNA repair.
After that, having nanobots build me a new car would be cool. Potentially anyone could do it, with the main factor being speed, since poorer folks would be able to afford as many nanobots.
On the other hand, I question the idea that a few hundred miles of nanobot photovoltaic roadway could supply the electricity for the entire United States. Has anyone got real math on that, or did the author pull it out of his ass?
All the technology in the world won't hide your lack of vision, talent, or understanding.
I personally do not understand why journalists bother creating such a report. First of all, the writing comes off as very uninformed. Granted, this is primarily because he's writing about a field which few people know much about, but it feels like one of those things you see from the early 1900s about how the future will have flying cars and robots and stuff like that. Did it happen? No!
If you really want to see some good future predictions, go read a book. Who, at the turn of the cetury, made the best successful predictions? Why, science-fiction writers, of course. Tanks, A-bombs, etc., all were predicted far ahead of time. Unfortunately, there were tons of things that they predicted that never came to be as well.
The lesson to be learned here, I think, is that any prediction of the future is nothing more than a half-educated guess. Especially not from journalists. The future is far too fluid of a place to predict with any accuracy. Live your life and watch what happens. The future shall be far more interesting than we can predict right now, and the best way to find out what it will be like is to go there.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Weren't Nanites one of the biblical peoples?
[1 Jebediah 3:22] Yea, and Hemos took up his sling, and girt himself about the loins withal. And he was passing wroth.
[1 Jebediah 3:23] And Hemos left behind the tent of his fathers and the laps of his wives, for THE LORD sayeth, "Smite the Nanites, for they are a wicked people, full of sloth and blasphemy against My dominion."
[1 Jebediah 3:24] And with a jawbone, yea, even the jawbone of an ass, did he smite them. And the Nanites fell before him. Much woe was there in the tents of the Nanite women, and they did rend their garments with very fear.
[1 Jebediah 3:25] And Hemos rejoiced in THE LORD, who is God, saying "Behold, I am full with the spirit of THE LORD."
-konstant
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
This article seems to say: "Ra ra, Nanotech is amazing and will change your life in 50 years. You'll be living in a virtual paradise with all of the world's problems solved." Forgive me for not being so optimistic.
First, the time constraint. The article claims these things could likely be a reality in 50 or 100 years, citing the discoveries we've made in the past 100 years. But remember that Alan Turing claimed that we'd have AI capable of perfectly imitating a human by the year 2000, and we're nowhere near that. 100 years-- maybe. 50 years? No.
The article also claimed that the only factory jobs would be design and structuring. Tiny little robots would do all the work. Ignoring the problem of power supplies, I remember the words of Frank Herbert's Dune: "Machines didn't free men. They only allowed men with machines to enslave other men."
Or what about "synthesizing food to stop world hunger"? The major cause of famines is not lack of FOOD, but lack of MONEY. When you get right down to it, plant organisms are remarkably efficient at building food, far more efficient than robots building food could be. Enough food exists in the world for everyone to be fat and lazy, but the starving people can't afford to buy it.
Similar rebuttals apply to the rest of the claims. Common sense: 1, Pie in the Sky: 0.
-Ted
by Neal Stephensson does a better job of describing the problems with a nanotech world than this piece does.
--
RumorsDaily
Got me thinking:
:-)
The one use for nanites that no one seems to focus on is pest control. (and by pests I don't mean Microsoft Windows(tm) NT(tm))
The reading I now have done, points out that we lose 5 billion a year in stored food due to bug contamination.
Nanites would work well for this job of bug zapping. They don't even have to 'zap' the bug, just puncture the outer layer of the bug, and let dehydration do the rest.
All that has to be done is solve the problems of:
1) Power to the nannite
2) Controling them
3) Have them not run amok and re-programming themselves.
4) Making them taste good with milk or in baked goods.
On the upside: If you can't control them, at least EVERY box of Fruit Loops(tm) will have a toy suprise! MMMMM crunchy, and they have my daily dose of iron
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
"Nanites" sounds trite. I prefer, "nanities", a mush of "nano" and "entity." Then we can call us larger, organic types "inanities."
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
Yes, there exists a plausible heaven (and hell) upon the creation and mastery of nanotechnology. One of the points the article mentions is the obliteration of hunger and the emancipation of the environment. But, wait, we have the tools RIGHT NOW to do those very same things except that they aren't being used properly or are being kept from the hands of the people who need them.
All of the good and saviour aspects of nanotechnology the article mentions depend on how the technology will be distributed and put to use. Unless the technology is used on a wide-scale and available to everyone, the heaven-on-Earth described will be limited to pockets of "civilization".
If we want to take full advantage of nanotechnology in the future, we need to put in place the infrastructure that will support its gains TODAY. If we expect nanotechnology to clean up the environment, we need to take steps NOW to do just that (ie. reduce pollution and provide clean-ups *world-wide* and not just in isolated areas). The same goes with food. We need to put in place fair distribution channels TODAY so that nanotechnology can make use of them to help us save the world TOMORROW.
Nanotechnology is not a silver bullet and yet the article touts it as such. In order for the technology to really affect our lives in the future, we need to help it along and make sincere efforts to change our lives today -- something which I felt the article failed to mention.
ian
What could we build with Buckytubes? Well, besides the boring standbys such as ultralight space-travel vehicles, we could see super roller coasters that drop you from 14,000 feet [...]
The author calls ultralight space-travel vehicles (useful applications) a "boring standy" but gets all excited about a roller coaster (entertainment). I stopped reading when I saw this.
-----
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
"The Source will be with you... Always."
It's very hard to say whether nano tech will ever reach the hights of Neil Stephenson's 'Diamond Age' or Greg Bear's 'City of Angels' (one of my favorites). However I am willing to bet that people will come up with uses that are completely unimaginable today.
One of the big issues with the sci fi nano tech is the whole concept of assemblers - those little nanobots shuffling around molecules in a coordinated fashion.
On the other hand there is a great deal of work being done using chip fabrication to build micro mechanical devices. So far they seem to be good for things like sensors including gyros (beleive it or not - they use resonant righ gyro technology with no moving parts). There is also TI's 'Digital Light Processor' chip technology with little mirrors that is starting to show up everywhere.
Maybe, the sci fi nanotech will never happen but will have inspired some very interesting work done using chip technology.
Perhaps we won't *see* nanotechnology. That's the scary part.
If we have all these little nanites running around cleaning our bodies and making us live better and healthier lives...whats that going to do to the population explosion?
Irregardless of which comes first, we are slowly gaining the ability to replicate in ways outside the paradigm of history, so far as we know it. Be it artifical life, such as nanites, with the ability to self replicate on that nanotechnological scale, or artifial intelligence, with the ability to desire and feel and react and think and communicate. (MIT's COG, for example)
And for our next trick, we humans will make artificial life with artifical intelligence and make ourselves completely obsolete! Yay us! We're winners! lol
Greg Bear was writing Nanotechnology stories almost 20 years before Star Trek's feeble watered down use of "nanites".
Take a look at "Blood Music" or even better the more recent "Queen of Angels" which really gives you a feel for the potential of nanotechnology.
It was cool to see nanotech on Star Trek, but I was greatly disappointed with the story.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
If the article is correct, and eventually, everything will be software, everything will then be covered by software patents, making all the fuss about what's patentable or not irrelevant. If we could get rid of software patents now, though...
Even traditional plastic surgery would be eliminated, as medical nanobots could change your eye color, alter the shape of your nose, or even give you a complete sex change without surgery.
Christ. Remind me never to have lunch with a less-than-amicable ex-girlfriend in the Age of Nanotech.
They're nanites after all.
They can only take little, iddy-biddy, tiny steps.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Haven't any of you ever seen Red Dwarf? Star trek isn't the only sci fi show to use nano's The crew of red dwarf looses the ship, and so they chase it for like forever, and finally the find out that it is in the dirty clothes hamper. Kriten (the android) had a bunch of nono's that were meant to repair him and stuff. So they took over the ship, and it was to big for them so they shrunk it...(kinda weird I know...but if you've seen the show you know thats the whole smeggin' point.) so then they capture them and force them to give the ship back....and it just keeeps getting messy..... so my advice (which should be ignored, because as anyone with braincells >= 2 should realize) is to leave them alone. 00101111 00101110 00100000 01010010 01110101 01101100 01100101 01110011 00100001
(Instead of moving through a virtual core, the nanobots would occupy a physical "core", and would alter the state of the medium in specific locations within that.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The article seems like a pretty straightforward intro to the topic, but it reads like most introductions do: it contains a lot of useful information, but misses some pretty obvious stuff. He also seems to glaze over some of the more profound implications of nanotechnology.
The author seems to be making a huge leap--that the creation of nanobots will automatically lead to the creation of other things, such as food, energy, textiles, etc. But the creation of nanobots is only a small part; creating the rest of the stuff would be just as difficult as creating the nanobots, or else we'd be creating that stuff now (albeit more slowly than a nanobot could). Even allowing that once we perfect nanobots we could apply those techniques to synthesizing other products, each item would still likely take years to create.
The idea of using nanobots as a replacement for surgery or in conjunction with other medical practices is an interesting idea--load them up with the appropriate antibodies and send them into the body. But it also presumes that we will have the ability to fight these diseases and infections--which we don't. We still can't 100% cure or precent the common cold, and many other diseases remain uncurable. Although using nanobots as a new method of applying currently-existing medications is a good idea (perhaps a better way to do chemotherapy, or to stimulate hormone production).
Can't that be said for all kinds of technology?
This seems a little farteched to me. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Weren't they saying in the 60's that by the turn of the century robots would be doing all of the manual labor? Weren't there scares that factory workers would be replaced by automated workers? None of these things have come to pass... And nanobots taking over this aspect of our lives is probably in the same vein.
Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age relies upon nanobots very heavily throughout the story, and he does it very well. I would recommend that book as a fictional introduction to nanotechnology for anyone who finds technical articles too try (and have recommended it in the past).
darren(darren)
1. Cost 1.1. It will cost quite a bit to produce machines at the mollecular and sub mollecular level. The smaller the parts the more you have to spend to build it. 1.1.1. (ex) Swiss Watch 1.1.2. Intel CPU's 1.1.3. gem work 1.2. To get a technology to be widespread in industry you need to have it cheaply mass produced 1.2.1. Overhead will prevent this due to creation of machines. 2. Speed 2.1. Something has to have speed to have any value in modern society. 2.1.1. Competition will see to this and naturally force others to increase speed of their creation process. 2.1.2. Supply and Demand 2.1.2.1. Cost will skyrocket with increasing demand due to slow time 3. Range of Tasks 3.1. Anything on even a small scale to humans will not be possible cheaply. 3.1.1. They are small and even if they work fast will not be able to do anything faster than a group of humans. 3.2. Tasks that are dangerous will still mostly be preformed with people just paid more. 3.2.1. (ex) Most people wouldn't part their new Fararri in the slums for a couple of weeks and leave the keys in the ignition. 3.2.2. No one wants to risk an investment on something that has little possibility of success.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
The major cause of famines is not lack of FOOD, but lack of MONEY. When you get right down to it, plant organisms are remarkably efficient at building food, far more efficient than robots building food could be. Enough food exists in the world for everyone to be fat and lazy, but the starving people can't afford to buy it.
Yes, you've got it. The problem is that humanity doesn't look after its wider interests. The starving people/countries shouldn't have problems buying food... the rich, wellfed, spoiled countries should provide it. It's the whole 'Let them eat cake' mentality. People have trouble pulling themselves out of their own little world of trivial problems and thus don't see what the real problems are for others. They just can't comprehend it.
And this will not be solved with nanites or any other technology. The Diamond Age (by Neil Stephenson) was a very cool book... but we aren't going to see that world in our lifetime. And would we really want to?
This article was a piece of rambling fluff. It mumbled about the 90's equivalent to the 50's flying-car-dream-future. And it had very little real information. I expect we will see a lot of articles like this in the next few years. Becuase nano-tech sounds cool and it's vague enough at this point that journalists can pretend it will create a global utopia.
How nice. A little unrealistic, though.
---
I hope you're not pretending to be evil while secretly being good. That would be dishonest.
Everybody wants a healthy enviroment, but most people are lazy, thats where Nanology come in to play. If we could release nanites deisgned to clean our enviroment then we would just release them and forget about it. Thats why nanites could be the way we need to go in order to clean our enviroment.
Yes with proper orginization and lots of effort put in by everybody we could make great leaps towards a clean world, but that ain't going to happen.Sad, but true.
His books take a good look at both the positive and negative effects of a world filled with genetics and nano(nanoo-nanoo)-tech. Pecifically "Steel Beach" and "Golden Globe".
In the SF-books "MoonRise" and "MoonWar", Ben Bova explores an interesting future with nanotechnolgy.
Very good SF.
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
This article is a bit off on its history - it says that there were no automobiles in use at the turn of the century. The 100th anniversary of the first American killed by a motorist was this year, so automobiles were undoubtedly present in New York in 1899 or earlier.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
Good read for the flegling to Nanotech, or for managerial types. For a much better Slashdot-level intro to Nanotech, read "The Age of Spiritual Machines : When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence" by Ray Kurzweil (ISBN: 0670882178). IMHO, this is one of the best books of its type ever written.
In further critique of this article, I'd say the following sentence severely underrates the severity of the potential dangers of nanotech
As with any new technology, molecular nanotechnology could have some negative side effects.
Could have some negative side effects? Understandably the journalist doesn't want to scare people and wants to keep the article light, but come on people... just for starters consider the potential effect of Nanotech-flooding, if a set of assembers gets entirely out of our control and replicates forever at maximum speed until we're buried in heaps of nanotech...
---------
Question: How do I leverage the power of the internet?
---------
There is no try at jedinite.com
When writers in the Golden Age of SF predicted powerful computers, they usually didn't predict the tasks involved with maintaining those computers: system administration, database tuning, spam-filtering, etc.
I think jobs like this will always exist, even as AI gets better and better. We want our machines to serve us, and as our machines get more powerful and more complex, we think of more powerful and complex ways for them to serve us -- but then describing exactly how we want to be served, and describing how to prioritize those services when resources are limited, becomes an intellectual challenge. (Some people have a hard time explaining to other humans exactly what they want; why should they have any better luck with machines?)
The languages that we (or our agents) use to tell machines what we want from them grow more abstract and more efficient, but our ambitions for what we want from computers grow until they strain the capacity of our languages and our machines' resources ... and then someone invents a more expressive language, or a more efficient implementation of an existing language, or a machine with more raw power, and the cycle continues.
send all spam to theotherwhitemeat@ropine.com
Nanotech has the potential to act as a great leveler between large organizations [ governments, megacorps, illuminati ... just kidding ;) ]. The reason? Infastructure.
... interesting. Especially when the freaks, geeks and rabble-rousers can build giant robo war-wabbits literally out of crap they find in thier back yards.
Traditional industrial processes require a great deal of infastructure, hense large investments of resources and money, to operate. Since the ability to build this infastructure has always been in the hands of a small wealthy minority, there has been very little desire on thier part to make the world as a whole a better place. After all, *thier* corner of the world is quite nice, why worry about everyone else? This isn't because they are evil, but just plain ol' inherant human selfishness and shortsightedness.
Nanotech is different in that you need almost *no* infastructure to get it working. All you really need is knowledge, resources, energy and a few startup assemblers [ and maybe an initial computer control system, say a Palm XX ]. With nanotech, very small groups could create very high tech items with very little outside involvement.
Granted, most humans are much too unimaginative to do this. Just look at what the suits turned the Internet into, from one giant library to one giant shopping mall. There will be enough dissadent groups that will do it however, that the age of nano will probably be very
Numbers will no longer be as relevent, instead it will be knowledge.
-john
Yes and in fact the Mayan and Incan civilizations ate bugs. I believe the Mayans are speculated to have planted reeds for some forms of water bugs to lay eggs and then harvested the eggs to be fried up. This is all speculation, for the Mayans didn't have web pages where they could share with the entire world the best way to fix bugs.
And within the last 8 months, some archeologists have found grasshopper remains in human fecal matter that is some 10,000 years old.
Its just that here in the USA, the FDA and Ag departments say that bugs are not a food supplement, but the nasty toxic chemicals we spray on foods ARE ok to eat.
If the US Ag business wants to BE in the business of selling product to farmers, the best product of the future looks to be hunter/killer nannites, whos job it is to hunt and kill bugs.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
I think you're referring to persian-kitty.com....but I'm not sure.
Werd.
There is no reason to presume that nanites will not be able to assemble copies of themselves - hence the only cost of creating the first one.
By the way, swiss watches aren't expensive because their parts are small. You don't really believe that, do you?
This remindes me of a situation that Tad Williams, in his sci-fi novel "Otherland" imagined concerning nano tech.
There was this company who produced molecular sized cleaning machines for your house - the idea being that you would never need a vaccum or duster again becuase these robots would remove all the dirt by "eating" it. Anyway, in the case of this one family, something went wrong with thier batch, some sort of environmental problem, and the robots were unable to distingush between dirt and non-dirt. The result bieng that they devoured, molecule by molecule, the entire house and the family cat!
Given that the C/Net article is a pretty elementary version of intro to nano, it's a shame the author didn't bother to look at several sources, not to mention the most recent (and even more layperson-friendly!) writings of his source.
_________________
Oh, INTERCOURSE the penguin! (Python tribute, not Linux knock)
I was not clear in my original post.
The $5 billion figure is for STORED food products. (Lord knows how you would figure a realistic number for insect damage in the field.)
Keep in mind, the insects that affect stored food are not a 'bug found in the wild', but are able to thrive BECAUSE we humans make habitats for the bugs.
As far as pollinators go, simple solution:
1 release the nannites at planting
2 Issue a recall signal 2 days before you bring in the portable bees
3 Let the portable bees do their work
4 re-release the nannites
Most of the time, pollinators are NOT pest species.
The only real difference between the biological agents and nannites is Monsanto and others can make money year after year on nannites, just like the do on seed and pesticides. Once you have a good biological plan going, it is self-regulating.
Thing of the market:
Biodegradable nannites!
(Hermos is actually a taste tester in this new market. Notice how any time Nannites come up he says yum)
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
I bet you added just as much to the other discussion, too.
(First post is fun to get, but if you're not gonna add content, why post at all?)
_________________
Oh, INTERCOURSE the penguin! (Python tribute, not Linux knock)
Although it may not be feasible to design a single nanite that can self-replicate *and* preform some other useful function at the same time, you could probably design nanites whose sole job it is to replicate other nanites.
The one scenario that keeps coming to my mind is that early on in nanobot development some nanobot AI coder is going to be hacking some code late one night and introduce a small bug that just causes the bot to keep reproducing itself out of whatever's around. She'll tell her nano-bot-building-machine to build the first one, and becuase it all compiles cleanly, she'll go home for the night.
She'll wake up in the afternoon to find a huge sea-like nano-mass where her lab used to be. Which will be a huge swarm of nanobots deconstructing each other to build new copies of themselves except for the outer layer, which will be busy devouring the earth's crust in an attempt to do same.
And because the technology's new, we won't be able to stop them with other more advanced bots, 'cos they haven't been invented yet.
We might be able to nuke them....
K.
Why doesn't the gene pool have a life guard?
But how can a molecular sized machine possibly work? Does anyone remember their chemistry or physics classes? Problems: 1. Power. How are they going to get it. They are molecules and according to the article, they aren't even big molecules. 3 atoms wide? So with a grand total on 27 atoms(a cube), you are going to have a power source. A power source stong enough to lift say, a big organic compound consisting of hundreds of atoms. How? It's not like you can just hook up a duracell. 2. Atomic interactions. How are these things going to grab ahold of something? Are they simply going to know (and be able, which they couldn't) to shed a few of their electrons so they can attract another molecule, assuming that the other is positivitly charged? Is it just going to be able to grab ahold of it like you picking up the telephone? There is a big diference in scale here guys, with you're talking about grabbing ahold of an atom you're going to have to think about things like atomic forces and (possibly) subatomic forces. 3. How are you going to deal with photon interaction? If your nano-bot or whatever is exposed to light (or any other EM radiation for that matter) it's electrons are going to go nuts, how are you going to deal with that and still get some usefull work done? 4. Propultion? Exactly, how? Brownian Motion? Ha! We're dealing with a completely different scale here guys, and the rules are very different that whet we experence. The concept of tempeture goes out the window, you don't have enough atoms for an average energy to have any meaning. Also, electrical conductivity goes out the window. Many-body theory won't work because, again, you don't have enough atoms. It's a pipe dream guys, plain and simple.
Nanobots and tailored enzymes are best put into use to relatively simple, single purpose jobs, such as endlessly replicating a chemical, say insulin. Machines on this scale can never be multipurpose, and that's what prevents them from doing such things as building cars from blocks of steel and aluminum. They don't know how or where to stop. And a HK Nano could never be programmed to do anything more than destroy all nano's of one, or all types, making them very limited in use.
Furthermore, items on a molecular scale are affected far more by force fields than tools used in modern engineering. They will be extremely vulerable to electromagnetics, especially so if any sort of polar imbalance exists along the molecule composing the nanobot. Anything above this scale begins to become invasive, and can't travel a body without wreaking all kinds of havoc.
Nanites may be the stuff of sci-fi dreams, but there are cold hard realities to consider, and it is highly unlikely that they will ever become the mother of all solutions to humanities problems.
Effort can temper a man's body, but only experience can temper his soul.
Northwestern University is currently in the process of building a new chemistry building specifically for nanotechnology. It has been named the "Center for Nanofabrication and Molecular Self-Assembly". Here's an article on the whole business.
Unfortunately, I work in the building that they're tearing down for this...
The way I see it nanotechnology is the future, and it is only a question of when it will be implemented not if. To me it seems it will be a long time to we see nanotechnology implemented on a large scale.
First their are a number of practical problems in the way. The biggest one I see is computational and storage power. If each one of these little nanites is going to be self replicating, then it is going to need to contain, within itself, instructions to build a complete replica of itself with the materials it can find. This in itself is no small task, as the nanities will be neccessarly very complex machines. Also necessar are instructions to do all the various tasks that the machine will be designed to caryout. Human cells are increadibly complex living machines. The idea that a nanoscale machine will be able to contain directions for repairing all of the millions of types of cells in the human body to me seems to be a vary long way off, if not impossible altogether.
Going along with the necessity of storage space is the necessity of processing power. Nanities will not be opperating in the ideal enviroment. They will have to make on the fly desions about what to do in various situations. Now while the level of sophistication here is not as great as elsware. It will still need to have a decent amount of realtime processing power.
Also associated with the previous two issues are the ramifications of bugs in the system. If my computer crashes, it is a bad thing, but not necessarly life threatening. But if I have 1000s of nanites crawling around in my body, and things go wrong with their code, I could be in vary real danger.
These are just some of the problemes that must be overcome for nanotechnology to succed on a large scale. There are many, many, more. From power generation, to nano to macro level interface. It is a truly monumental task to be acheived.
On the other hand, once nanotechnology is perfected, the world will be transformed into a very, very diffrent place. The rammifications boggel my mind. We would see a world completely transformed. No longer would "things" have value. Why should they when a couple of nanities could build it out of some dirt in your lawn. The only things of value would be ideas and certain raw materials. The effect this would have upon our society would be truly incrediable. For a possible future I suggest you read the book Slant.
"He is wisests, that knows he knows nothing." --Socrates
I don't think predicting the impact of any technology is easy, especially when it is nascent. And eventually, all worthwhile technologies find some wonderful application that no one would have dreamt off -- including its inventor and the crystal-ball-types.
So what will nanotechonology do to us? well, who knows... but then some of us have to make a living...
I don't think predicting the impact of any technology is easy, especially when it is nascent. And eventually, all worthwhile technologies find some wonderful application that no one would have dreamt of -- including its inventor and the crystal-ball-types.
So what will nanotechonology do to us? well, who knows... but then some of us have to make a living...
I think this article just ignores the two most important questions regarding the making of the nanobots.
1. How are they going to be powered? I can't picture how to wire all these together.
2. How are they going to get the smarts to know what they're supposed to do? You can't that big of a computer on the thing if it's going to be a nanobot, and yet you would have to if the robot is going to be of any use!!
1. Military potential of nanotechnology. Anything that *can* be used as a weapon will be/has been. It started with sticks and rocks, and now has progressed to H-bombs and chemicals. Soon we will have biological weapons in wide use. Having viruses engineered to caused maximal damage to humans is scary enough, imagine machines doing the same!
2. Human population. One use that nanobots will have is probably to increase the amount of time that people are sexually reproductive. What I mean is that people will be able to have kids at later ages. Instead of having two or three children in their twenties, couples may be able to have multiple "sets" of children. After one set of children hast grown up and moved out of the house, they may opt to have more kids. This coupled with the possibility of longer life will cause a population explosion in the western world. The more people there are in a confined space, the more tensions rise. When tensions rise, war will eventually break out.
3. Loss of identity. If these machines will be able to give out nosejobs at a whim, then what will stop them from making every man look like Arnold Schwarzeneggar and every woman look like Cindy Crawford (forgive me if I'm using bad celebrity examples, I'm a little out of the celibrity-watching circles). You might argue that outside appearance don't matter, it's what's inside a person's mind that counts. Sure, but wouldn't these nanobots be able to muck around with our brain cells too? Sooner or later, we'd end up with a society of people who all are mechanically altered to be the same. What does this mean? EVOLUTION WILL GRIND TO A STOP!!!
No way, I do not like this idea one bit. But at least I'll be long dead before anything of the sort is invented, or at least useful. It's the next generations that will have the problems.
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
Yet again, an article in which people talk about the wonderful (and terrible) things that nanotechnology has in store for us. These people don't seem to have any idea about the massive scale we're looking at here.
:-) But that's not a fair complaint against your argument. We know a hell of a lot more about cell development and its molecular mechanisms today than thirty years ago. We actually know enough to create entirely new forms of bacteria. We have the general idea for how all the mechanisms work, even if some mysteries (such as protein folding) persist. This is after thirty years... and many technologies created researching molecular biology will be transferable over to molecular nanotechnology... we have a hell of a head start with this endevour compared to researchers in the sixties. I think you're a bit too skeptical here...
The dangers of Nanotechnology as both a weapon and the potential commercial misuse are staggering. Journalists are right to question the potential outcomes of this technology, just as they were right to question the justifications of molecular biology advances back in the late '70s. That journalists printed many mistaken ideas and displayed the ignorance of a layperson, compared to the knowledge of a scientist on the inside, doesn't disqualify them from printing valuable stories in order to inform the public.
I don't want to be a killjoy, but we're still taking the very, very first few step. The equivalent of looking at Hero's engine and talking about spaceships.
I don't understand the reference to Hero... Sorry. But I think you would find K. Eric Drexler, and the folks at the Foresight Institute might disagree on your timetable. The point they make, and one which I agree, is that the critical threshold discovery for viable molecular manufacturing is Self Replication. Once we can build a robot which can replicate itself using ambient atoms, we can actually begin manufacturing materials on a large scale. You might argue that this manufacturing process is fraught with the perils of complexity for which we can't plan. And you might be right... but I suspect that this kind of manufacturing is highly parallelizeable, hence the success of biological organisms, and we're going to find that a few fairly simple rules will allow us to build very complex three dimensional systems just like biological organisms.
Nanotech will be very very useful for certain things, but I suspect it will be a niche product for a long time, happily taking one very simple thing and turning it into another simple thing.
You've got to be kidding me. Nanotech represents the biggest (smallest) manufacturing shift ever. It's weapons potential make it a sure bet for NSF/DARPA funding for some time to come. And with funding on that scale, expect returns. How long did the government seed molecular biology research before it turned commercial? And before it turned commercial, how long was that research providing useful products to the military?
Remember, we still know very, very little about how our own cells are constructed. Trying to create a nanobot than can go in there and create new ones is a great idea, but it's not going to be here next week (or next year, or maybe not next century).
Nitpick: I hate it when people tell me to remember a point they're trying to present forcefully. As a reader, it's not my job to remember your stated position before it's even been written!
I suspect that our only hopy will be developing AI powerful enough to do all the hard work for us... (and that's another really big job)
Wow... now developing real AI is a seriously tough job which requires major new scientific discoveries before we can even begin thinking about a timetable. Nanotech almost just an engineering problem at this point... I don't think we'll need any form of self aware machine in order to resolve the parallelizeable problems of complex 3D manufacturing that Nanotech implies. And honestly, given the strategic nature of this technology, we're going to see nanotech advances a hell of a lot faster than you're predicting.
But I hope not... Humanity is less ready for Nanotechnology than discovering Atomic Bomb. And we still haven't figured a way out of that mess yet.
Going along with the article to agree that the entire nano-technology is possible and that this will then result in a surge of machines able to take raw materials and produce cheap and strong products, what happens to all of the people who actually work at production for a living? What do they do then? Suddenly, the people who have to be creative for a living are effictively slaves to their job as that can't be "replicated". Now all those factory workers sit at home on their replicated couches, eating their replicated pork rinds, with 100 appliances all on powered by replicated solar highways. Meanwhile the actors, musicians, writers, etc. are stuck still working. Okay maybe that's a little off base...but unless we are going to provide things for free (like food, housing, etc.) all the people who do any sort of production work would be jobless. Imagine taking almost all of the workers in Detroit and laying them off. It would be the resurgence of a new Luddite era. Even something as simple as the "McJob" becomes replaced. You walk up to a counter, swip your smart card, and your Big Mac, Fries and Coke are all "made" right there for you. Huge cultural changes will have to take place before this kind of technology can be used. Everyone compares this to Star Trek. Isn't it funny that in the future money is no longer used but they never show you what everyone does outside of Starfleet. If money and financial gain is no longer an issue (as you have a replicator) why would people feel the need to "work".
WTF?!?
What if, over the course of evolution, nature really did make the brain as small as possible to be a self-aware self-replicating self-gratifying machine? To put it more finely, what if the smallest possible machine that can do all of the functions the human brain can do is *exactly* the same size as our current equipment? That, on some quantum level, our brains are tee-totally perfectomundo and cannot be made any better, at least while serving the same purpose(s).
Nature tends to design efficiently. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if we ran up against some physics barriers while trying to make an AI. Which I guess is what I'm talking about and not really nanotechnology so I guess I'm just totally off topic here all of a sudden.
- Rev. ScatThe CNN piece wasn't any different than any other popular press article that shows up every century or half century. The clock is quickly ticking through the last few moments of what a rather large cross section of the planet refers to as the twentieth century. Journalists who also consider themselves futurists or have a passing interest in technology (maybe they picked up a pulp science fiction novel at some point) make all kind of predictions. Most of these predictions won't pan out.
These types of predictions are futile and I'll try and explain why. Consider the first computers, big bulky monstrosities that used large amounts of energy to do some small number of calculations and as a side effect produced huge amounts of heat. There were a number of differing views on what the impact of these devices would have on society. Some people felt that the US would need maybe 5 in total mostly for military or industrial use with no major impact on the general public. Other people felt that each community would have one as a shared resource and it would enable mankind to produce their own utopia. I don't recall reading any early prognosticators stating that every person in the industrialized nations would have one or more computer like devices in their posession (remember that from the point of view of the early machine designers a pocket calculator would be a pretty wonderous computer, not to mention all the hidden computers in microwaves, VCRs, TVs and automobiles!). They couldn't foresee microelectronics, it really wasn't even a blip on their radar screen. The actual reality turned out to be that everybody has access to computing resources but everybody still works. Nobody predicted the enabling technology of microelectronics and at the same time forgot that people still need food, clothes and like to be entertained. All of this means that somebody, somewhere needs to work.
Next consider electrical power and the enabling technology predicted for it: nuclear fusion. In the fifties everybody was sure that nuclear fusion would supply us with cheap, clean and limitless electrical power. Just the thing to power our personal aircraft and homes of tomorrow. For close to fifty years economically feasible nuclear fusion has been just around the corner but so far as of October 21, 1999 12:55 pm central standard time its not happened. The truth is that it may never happen but if it does there will be some enabling technology that enables nuclear fusion that will have been invented. Enabling technologies to enable enabling technologies. Even well respected experts in the field (real experts, not the guy who does the weekly science column for the hometown paper) can't predict this technology with any certainty.
This is the current situation with nanotechnology as well. It may well be 'just around the corner' for our lifetime, and our childrens lifetime and... Or it may happen in 25 years, or in 10 years. Lots of discoveries and inventions with respect to nanotechnology are made. In order for nanotechnology to happen in a meaningful way we need DISCOVERIES and INVENTIONS though. When these fundamental enabling technologies happen (if they happen) nanotechnology will take off and the impact on society will be vastly different than the utopia the experts (this time it is the guy who writes the weekly science column for your local newspaper) predict.
The CNN piece wasn't any different than any other popular press article that shows up every century or half century. The clock is quickly ticking through the last few moments of what a rather large cross section of the planet refers to as the twentieth century. Journalists who also consider themselves futurists or have a passing interest in technology (maybe they picked up a pulp science fiction novel at some point) make all kind of predictions. Most of these predictions won't pan out.
These types of predictions are futile and I'll try and explain why. Consider the first computers, big bulky monstrosities that used large amounts of energy to do some small number of calculations and as a side effect produced huge amounts of heat. There were a number of differing views on what the impact of these devices would have on society. Some people felt that the US would need maybe 5 in total mostly for military or industrial use with no major impact on the general public. Other people felt that each community would have one as a shared resource and it would enable mankind to produce their own utopia. I don't recall reading any early prognosticators stating that every person in the industrialized nations would have one or more computer like devices in their posession (remember that from the point of view of the early machine designers a pocket calculator would be a pretty wonderous computer, not to mention all the hidden computers in microwaves, VCRs, TVs and automobiles!). They couldn't foresee microelectronics, it really wasn't even a blip on their radar screen. The actual reality turned out to be that everybody has access to computing resources but everybody still works. Nobody predicted the enabling technology of microelectronics and at the same time forgot that people still need food, clothes and like to be entertained. All of this means that somebody, somewhere needs to work.
Next consider electrical power and the enabling technology predicted for it: nuclear fusion. In the fifties everybody was sure that nuclear fusion would supply us with cheap, clean and limitless electrical power. Just the thing to power our personal aircraft and homes of tomorrow. For close to fifty years economically feasible nuclear fusion has been just around the corner but so far as of October 21, 1999 12:55 pm central standard time its not happened. The truth is that it may never happen but if it does there will be some enabling technology that enables nuclear fusion that will have been invented. Enabling technologies to enable enabling technologies. Even well respected experts in the field (real experts, not the guy who does the weekly science column for the hometown paper) can't predict this technology with any certainty.
This is the current situation with nanotechnology as well. It may well be 'just around the corner' for our lifetime, and our childrens lifetime and... Or it may happen in 25 years, or in 10 years. Lots of discoveries and inventions with respect to nanotechnology are made. In order for nanotechnology to happen in a meaningful way we need DISCOVERIES and INVENTIONS though. When these fundamental enabling technologies happen (if they happen) nanotechnology will take off and the impact on society will be vastly different than the utopia the experts (this time it is the guy who writes the weekly science column for your local newspaper) predict.
It featured a movie which predicted radar would be used to solve crimes, find lost objects, and generally accelerate man into the age of aquarious. Television failed to live up to its promise, i think in 50 years we will file this article next to the articles about personal flying machines and table top fusion generators (both of which are still possible, but they didnt spring into existance as was promised)
"There is a holy mistaken zeal in politics and religion, by convincing others we convince ourselves" -Junius
Assuming the most optimistic case of the impact of nanotechnology, we could suddenly find ourselves in a situation I have been predicting for several years. Since Eli Whitney developed the concept of the assembly line, industry has been making amazing progress in its ability to produce more goods at less cost in a shorter amount of time. Computerization has increased the pace of progress toward efficiency (measured in effort hours to produce a widget, not neccessarily in cost; economists normally talk about efficiency in terms of the ration to capital invested vs. the return on capital; I am speaking here only of the human investment). This is immediately obvious when you consider how many people you know are actively engaged in "real" work (the production and distribution of food, construction of homes, medical practice, and other effort that is generally necessary for the continuation of life as we know it) versus the number who are engaged in non-productive work (advertising, web site design, movie production/distribution, selling clothes at the GAP, and other work that is not essential to the maintenance of life). We continue to move toward a service economy. Thus far, human efficiency gains have been mostly limited to agricultural/industrial work (replacing mules with tractors (allowing one farmer to farm a greater area of land) or replacing auto workers with robots), and have been limited by the government (farm subsidies to keep economically unviable farmers in production) or unions (through contracts which guarantee jobs which might otherwise be eliminated by increases in efficiency). To a lesser degree we have seen this in clerical positions (no one has a typists pool anymore; Also, fewer people have secretaries who work directly for them). If we take farming as an example, you will notice that the price of many agricultural commodities is undergoing a prolonged and severe depression because it is possible to product a far greater amount of food than consumers demand. Nanotechnology, the Internet, and other nascent technological developments stand to further accelerate our move toward human efficiency and expand it into other areas. The problem is that demand is basically a limited quantity. Invention of new products can serve to create additional demand, but these products are usually luxuries and demand for them fluctuates with people's perception of their wealth. When there is insufficient demand, prices drop, forcing companies to find means of operating more efficiently. Frequently, this means cutting employees. Thus, it is conceivable that we may in the near (20-50 years) future face a situation where excess production capacity forces a downturn for prices in every industrial sector (quality AI could do this to service industries as well), forcing companies to cut employees, further reducing the quantity of demand available in the economy. I'm not sure that our current economic systems can survive such a situation. Naturally, the optimistic Star Trek fans will suggest that we will all lead idyllic communal lives in harmony with nature and wealth will be completely abolished, but such does not seem consistent with human nature.
Check out Linux University
Hmm, let's take a short walk down a dark road.
... oh, they ate the panic button."
What kinds of accidents or eevil designs could we have with these things? Let's see, umm: (disclaimer: each of these items has probably been thought of *many* times before)
1) nanoviruses - like software variety, but reproducing with explosive growth. Mechanical Outbreak anyone? What will the CDC do? Downsides could include:
- using up a heck of a lot of carbon and leaving vast amounts of nano-junk in its place to wade or swim through
- using off-limits resources for self-replicating, like say, my arm. Hmm, maybe this should be in its own category called "3) eating the wrong thing"
2) bugs - nanites with software bugs. I wouldn't want Microsoft-programmed nano's anywhere near my home. How do your install sevice packs on trillions of molecular critters running amok?
3) nano's eating the wrong thing, like say
- people
- oxygen
- plants
- our power grid
- the earth's mantle (say if there were geothermal powered nanites)
4) missing or failed comprehensive kill -9. I could just imagine some tired lab engineer saying "whoops, that's not what I intended. Oh, they're eating though the container. Hungry little guys aren't they? Maybe I'll just hit the panic button around now
5) wrong product made by nanite assemblers.
- lots of uranium instead of lots of geraniums
- meat with human DNA (you know, the "people for dinner" scenario)
Okay this is getting silly so I'll stop now.
Esteem isn't a zero sum game
This is a really bad analogy or metaphor, or whatever the heck they were trying to say. Computers, as far as I know, don't break down data into its most basic form. Data is on and off in regards to a computer and it's hardware, and not all data is lodged in a computer anyhow. Data is a loose term for information. Furthermore, I thought that quanta(quarks and such) were matter's most basic building blocks.
In regards to nanites being able to do things on a macroscopic scale(I mean noticable by humans), the science of complexity will play a huge roll in the development of nanosystems. If you doubt the ability of nanobotes being able to perform complex tasks like building a new car, or repairing the body, think about your own body and it's cells. Nanobots that work together will not neccessarily have to be of the same make & model if you will indulge me. Your cells are by no means the same type, yet they work together on a cellular level to make the entity that is you. They work together because of genes and their ability to self-organize. Self-Organization will play a crucial role in nanosystems. Chemical reactions also display this ability, like the B-Z reaction.
Making nanabots work together on macroscopic scales will be a very black art, but I believe far from impossible.
$var = <STDIN>
$var =~ s/\\$//;
this is slashchomp
OOPS... Used HTML on the last one when I meant to use text. Should have used the preview button.
Assuming the most optimistic case of the impact of nanotechnology, we could suddenly find ourselves in a situation I have been predicting for several years.
Since Eli Whitney developed the concept of the assembly line, industry has been making amazing progress in its ability to produce more goods at less cost in a shorter amount of time. Computerization has increased the pace of progress toward efficiency (measured in effort hours to produce a widget, not neccessarily in cost; economists normally talk about efficiency in terms of the ration to capital invested vs. the return on capital; I am speaking here only of the human investment).
This is immediately obvious when you consider how many people you know are actively engaged in "real" work (the production and distribution of food, construction of homes, medical practice, and other effort that is generally necessary for the continuation of life as we know it) versus the number who are engaged in non-productive work (advertising, web site design, movie production/distribution, selling clothes at the GAP, and other work that is not essential to the maintenance of life). We continue to move toward a service economy.
Thus far, human efficiency gains have been mostly limited to agricultural/industrial work (replacing mules with tractors (allowing one farmer to farm a greater area of land) or replacing auto workers with robots), and have been limited by the government (farm subsidies to keep economically unviable farmers in production) or unions (through contracts which guarantee jobs which might otherwise be eliminated by increases in efficiency). To a lesser degree we have seen this in clerical positions (no one has a typists pool anymore; Also, fewer people have secretaries who work directly for them). If we take farming as an example, you will notice that the price of many agricultural commodities is undergoing a prolonged and severe depression because it is possible to product a far greater amount of food than consumers demand.
Nanotechnology, the Internet, and other nascent technological developments stand to further accelerate our move toward human efficiency and expand it into other areas. The problem is that demand is basically a limited quantity. Invention of new products can serve to create additional demand, but these products are usually luxuries and demand for them fluctuates with people's perception of their wealth.
When there is insufficient demand, prices drop, forcing companies to find means of operating more efficiently. Frequently, this means cutting employees. Thus, it is conceivable that we may in the near (20-50 years) future face a situation where excess production capacity forces a downturn for prices in every industrial sector (quality AI could do this to service industries as well), forcing companies to cut employees, further reducing the quantity of demand available in the economy. I'm not sure that our current economic systems can survive such a situation.
Naturally, the optimistic Star Trek fans will suggest that we will all lead idyllic communal lives in harmony with nature and wealth will be completely abolished, but such does not seem consistent with human nature.
Check out Linux University
is not "little more than a single molecule", it is a robot built to nanoscale precision. It has a computer on board (or it wouldn't be a robot), sensors, and tools built into it. It can perceive and respond to its environment.
I agree, however, that microscopic nanobots probably aren't going to be all that useful. They can't see the big picture, so they can't really know what's going on around them. They also can't have terribly powerful computers because they're just too small. Power sources will be problematic, as will communication, further limiting their uses.
IMHO, nanobots will show their greatest potential, not as isolated nanites, but in huge differentiated linked masses (closer to mammals than microbes). This will make them better-coordinated and a lot less likely to go berserk on a self-reproducing rampage (think self-expanding, not self-reproducing). They can still have nanoscale tools, they'll just know where they are and how what they're being used for fits into the larger task.
As you said, everyone wants to compare this "not having to work" situation to Star Trek....why the hell does everyone forget about our *real life* history?
There are countless examples in history of people who were so rich that they didn't have to work, exmples include: the ancient Greeks (who had slaves up to thier eyeballs), as well as most of the European aristocratic families as they were a few hundred years ago. These people didn't have to "really" work for a living so what did they do? Primarily three things as I can figure: Politics, War, Philosophy (including math & sciences). Personal motives would include fame, leisure, and/or technological and philosophical advancement.
Well, that's my opinion anyway and food for thought at the very least.
...it creates something good enough to survive. There's no doubt in my mind that a higher than the human brain form of intelligence is possible.
I think it's overpopulation and poor distribution. But generally, I agree: famines and other ills are social and political problems; we already have the technology to make our world a "garden of Eden".
Actually many current societies use insects as a major food source, in fact a large part of the world because of insect abundance, ease of capture, and concentration of nutrients.
-------- This space intentionally left blank --------
What about Blood Music??
Yes, I realize the basis of this thread was humor, but it seems that many people consider "nanites" to be capable of magical atomic rearrangement to/from any configuration, with no energy cost at all. I'm afraid that just ain't so.
Burn it into its constituent atoms, of course.Hmm...last time I checked, snot was a non-flammable substance. Even one molecule at a time, you could only get a physically sustainable reaction if the end products have a more stable energy state than the raw materials (or else you have to add a bunch of energy from outside).
Water (the main component of any bodily goo) is an extremely stable & low energy compound. There's just no way to transmute water into anything else without adding a whole lot of energy. Where will that energy come from? And where will it go after it's been wasted into heat?
I guess most computer science majors aren't required to take thermodynamics, otherwise you'd already remember There's No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.
This has already been predicted in Walter Jon Williams' Aristoi. If I recall, Earth was destroyed accidentally by a lab in Indonesia. He call it mataglap, rampantly destructive nanotech.
The problem with the possibility of such a thing existing is it assumes that a type of nanite will exist that can use any type of atoms to self-replicate. And if life hasn't been able to move beyond using carbon, and then usually only in a limited number of forms, in 3 billion years, it's unlikely the less rigorous system of created nanotech, even when it's directed by intelligent minds and not just evolution, has the capacity of leapfrogging the destructive power of viruses. Lichen takes a long, long time to break down rocks.
I'll eat anything that's not quick enough or clever enough to get away.
If God hadn't meant for us to eat animals, he wouldn't have made them out of meat.
...then the population will grow and you'll need to send more food, and more food, until there's really not enough food.
The cold hard reality is that people need to be starving at the bottom because people will always be breeding at the bottom. If some people are not inclined to breed, the next generation will be mostly composed of people who are inclined to breed. The only other option is enforced population control, which IMHO isn't any better.
Like most liberals (excuse me for labelling you, but your post is classic liberalism, so I'll respond to your state of mind when you posted it), you think everyone should be feeding the poor, but you won't apply it to yourself. As a wealthy citizen of a rich country, you have an enormous power to help those in poorer countries. If you eliminated luxuries from your life, you could feed hundreds who will starve. Every time you buy a candy bar, you could have provided a family with a sack of grain. Every time you upgrade your computer, you could have dug a well and prevented several fatal infections. Your monthly internet bill could keep a small village alive through a bad time.
Perhaps you are generous, perhaps if everyone gave as much as you, there would be no problems with starvation (at least right now). But you would rather have the government coerce everyone to give as you do rather than give up your precious luxuries and act privately.
These things are your choice, as plainly as if you faced a child's head on a chopping block and a vending machine with a dollar in your pocket and had to choose between delaying the child's death for a week or buying a snack.
I know these things about my own life, and I accept them. Morality is enlightened self-interest. I obey the law, at least in serious matters. I am loyal to my friends, kind to those near me, even generous at times. I deal honestly, so that everyone involved profits, and preferably so does the local community and the society. I do not concern myself with the problems of those who are far away, unless it threatens to affect me. People profit by association with me, and so those I could profit from choose to associate with me. I do not support those who do not threaten me and my offspring, but might grow to do so with my support.
Am I moral in an absolute sense? I don't care. I am as moral as I want to be, and my actions are no less moral than the average. If my awareness makes me immoral, so be it, but if others are unaware it is because they are blocking the line of thought, rationalizing; the evidence is clear.
the bit i picked out primarily was the article talking about how some patch of sunny pavement could power the US...i don't know if anyone else did this way back in AP physics (high school...*shudder*), but we spent a period once calculating the total amount of energy striking the earth from the sun...and it wasn't enough to power one american city. which means if you covered the planet with a PERFECTLY EFFICIENT solar cell array, it still wouldn't be enough to be a major contributor of power.
the other intriguing note is the idea of nanites that can make any substance for effectively nothing. again, sounds great and all, but unless we're talking nanotech that arranges subatomic particles (can you build particle accelerators that are three microns around?), the raw material still has to come from somewhere. if you want to make an apple, you mainly need carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen (go figure). but there's bob alone knows how many other elements necessary to make a realistic apple (cyanide, for example). and all that stuff has to come from somewhere, too. not insurmountable, of course, but it's still not free food, just food without a land base to support it.
not to mention the power consumption of the critters, and where it comes from--i don't think you can exactly hook one up to a AA battery.
is this revolutionary? sure, it could be, but let's not get carried away with ourselves, please.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
Don't you all see? WE are the result of nanotech! A race of hyperintelligent organisms built us to create a home for them, and WE are the tools! Our bodies are the tools, really just a (large) system of nanites working together. Our cells are the nanites, which SELF REPLICATE, creating components in a massive, complex whole. How do the nanites communicate? Checmically, though hormones. DNA? The source code. We've been building a society for all of these thousands of years, and really, evolving for MILLIONS! We're at the point where we can finally create the homeworld for these huge beings, and when we're done, POOF! We're dead! How will they accomplish this? Small nanites that invade the larger ones (cells) and destroy them, using them first to create MORE of themselves. We call these tiny killers viruses. They've been around for millions of years, invading everything, but not quite killing us off. When the skyscrapers and underground railway systems are done, we're all going to be RECYCLED! Armagedon (sp) is here! Flee the cities, and live in the country. Abvandon large scale construction and live int eh dirt! Cease the project that will eventually be our DOOM! Argh! Aiyeeeeeeeeeeee...
So if these little guys can permeate the cells in our bodies then they can "fix" all the DNA so that every cell is instantly young again and we could live forever.
And they could also flood our brains, create new synapses in the right places so that we would instantly know every programming language and instruction set that has ever existed.
And while they're in there, they could rearrange existing synapses to get rid of all those negative thoughts like prejudice and hate. Oh, wait a minute. We're up against that "what really is politically incorrect" question again. What if greed were eliminated and that turned out to be a "bad thing". Or, evil schemers turned us all into their slaves.
Once again, technilogical advances bring us face to face with ourselves. Human potential can be the potential for good as well as the potential for bad.
Maybe one solution would be to rearrange our synapses so that we all become satisfied with what we already have.
Naw. That wouldn't be any fun.
There are three reasons why I think that nanites will not create a paradise on earth:
(1) Conservation of Energy, and Entropy. In other words, you don't get something for nothing. You _must_ use energy to do useful work (just because you're at nanoscale doesn't get you around this, the effect of a large number of nanites working will still follow the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics exactly).
(2) Human reality. Scarcity of food is currently primarily created. The U.S. Government buys surplus food to keep prices artificially high (at the behest of Archer Daniels Midland, primarily, and in the name of "saving the family farm", which doesn't really exist any more anyway). It would be possible, given the political will, to feed everyone in the world right now. So why doesn't it happen? Why does any increase in agricultural efficiency translate into increased profits, not an increase in the number of people being fed?
In short, it's because the goal of a capitalistic system is not to feed everyone, but instead to make money. Whether or not one believes that it is possible for capitalism to do so, it manifestly does not at present, and there is no reason to believe that would change in the future, nanotechnology or no. If scarcity does not exist, it must be enforced to ensure the ability to make a profit.
(3) Technology always has problems. As something created by fallible humans in a largely unpredictable universe, no technology is capable of perfect functioning. In particular, if you have devices that are very small, then they become susceptible to very small perturbations, akin to mutations in biological systems. Cosmic rays would be able to knock out components and/or change structural and program elements in unpredictable ways. If the devices are self-replicating, then the whole system would act very much like a population of microorganisms which can mutate into unexpected forms, and therefore start eating things they're not supposed to, or engage in other negative behaviors, as others have already suggested below.
Nanotechnology will undoubtedly create many magnificent and fascinating things, and I will be looking forward to announcements of them here on Slashdot. But let's not forget that reality has some rules that can't be broken (physical laws) as well as some that seem resistant to change (human social patterns).
Keep your eyes on the legitimate nanotech literature (i.e. refereed publications rather than hyperoptmistic puff pieces in the lay press) for the truly fascinating stuff going on, and beware of snake oil salesman! -Slendro
--
God is my Palm Pilot.
Ants are pretty good (kind of acidic). Hard to fill up on though. Grub worms are a lot bigger, but they taste like dirt (really). I'm not sure what grub worms are the larvae for though so maybe they don't count as bugs. I can't think of any other bug type things I'd care to eat, but I can't think of what this has to do with the topic either. I guess I'm just in mind wandering mood.
No, 100% of the people can be employed while being 10x more productive.
-- Remember that we live in a world where all the really big decisions are made by people with short attention spans.
To reiterate a point someone above(or perhaps below for you) made, biology has provided adequate solutions to these problems.
Cells in the developing embryo don't need to communicate with a central intelligence to figure out what to do, rather the central intelligence is built in to each. They communicate with their neighbors to figure out what to become, roughly speaking.
As for accidentally creating a globe eater, I don't think it's that easy to create an unstoppable menace *accidentally*. You can insert faults in your nanites that may be triggered by, say, a certain wavelength of light, or perhaps a frequency band of sound. Boom, no more nanites.
Our cells have their own arsenal of self destructive codes. Yes they still go ballistic sometimes (cancer) but we're here to learn from Nature's mistakes, not necessarily repeat'em.
Even without built in faults, experimental populations could be contained by climate shields, areas of projected temperature too hot or cold for nanites to thrive in.
Yes we have something to fear from mad scientists, but I think we have a bigger chance of being wiped out by tailor made virus's before nanites can do the same.
Imagine a disease as lethal, incurable, and slow developing as AIDS, but transmittable by air. *brrr*. I think I'd rather face an amorphous blob of crust eaters with a flamethrower.
And one more point, as unethical as it may seem, nanties will be able to enact population and drug controls. That is to say, we can create and saturate the world with nanites that will render reproduction impossible and illegal druge use useless, unless specific counter nanites are administered to an individual in question. Endless food != endless people.
-Illserve
The figure you calculated in your physics class is TOTALLY WRONG. Sunlight already provides almost all of Earth's food, fresh water, and heat needs. Industrial demands for electricity are trivial in comparison (and when the electricity is used we still get the heat). The a square meter at the equator gets an average of 640 watts of power. We could provide all of our energy needs with biotech (grain or plancton alcohol) without even getting into nanotech or photovoltics.
P.S. Cyanide isn't an element. The elements we need alot of are the ones we have alot of. If we had others, we would develop needs for them instead. No-one claims that nanotech makes EVERYTHING possible, just that it can manufacture anything that current technologies for a low, element dependent, price per pound (which often means a VERY low price compared to the current price of, say diamond or doped silicon).
I guess someone had better spell it out.
The nanomachines could distribute themselves either throughout the entirety of the body's skin and mucus membranes or throughout the whole body. There's no need for any magical "burning into constituent atoms", because the machines would be interlinked, either directly or into larger scale transportation systems, so any material that needs to be eliminated (or provided) at any given site is moved bodily.
All this talk of energy problems misses the rather basic point that nanomachines are *already* doing this throughout our bodies. The current ones are soft protein-based, whereas we'll be heading for hard MNT because of its better engineering properties. Despite the differences in detail, the energy considerations aren't all that different in the two cases, so lack or excess of energy certainly doesn't look like a showstopper of any sort.
Having said that, this subthread completely misses another point: once it becomes the norm to have hard MNT machines running around your body, it's only a matter of time before bodies will no longer stick to their homo sapien form at all, so "personal grooming" may end up about as relevant to you as it was to the "liquid-metal" Terminator.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Slimy, yet satisfying.
So this almost certainly won't happen by accident. Well, maybe with the passage of time as nanobots got more complex, it might accidentally emerge... but people would know to keep an eye out for it. Even very slow accidental emergence seems quite unlikely.
Will somebody make gray goo intentionally? Because it is a tough challenge, they'd need a lot of time and/or a lot of money. Possible in principle, but hard to do without being detected, assuming the intelligence community remains clueful.
Rapidly growing goo will almost certainly throw off infrared radiation. The example you give, of a building being consumed overnight, means that a huge amount of chemistry is happening. There would be about as much energy changing hands as you could expect if the building burned to the ground. In a world primed for the possibility of run-away replicators, there would be look-out bots watching for infrared oddities, possibly from orbit. It's quite possible that there might be some tell-tale characteristic of the IR spectrum that would give more hints. At least it could give you a rough idea what kind of chemistry was being done.
I think there are some precautions we'll be able to take in order to detect and contain run-away replicator accidents. The very first would be to design replicators that can only run on exotic fuel available only in a lab environment.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
[world hunger is] that nanotech isn't going to solve.
If you'll forgive me for a bit of pie-in-the-sky optimism, I'll describe a device that would solve world hunger.
This device is a Box. You can pour some easily available raw materials (dirt, water, and sunlight? Air? Whatever is needed) into the top, and press the green button, the nanobots inside do some quick molecular reassembly, and a ham sandwich pops out the other side. Or, you can press the shiny red button, and another Box pops out the other side.
Give one of these to one human being, and within a month world hunger would be solved, because everyone who wanted one would have one. Kind of like software piracy, really...
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
"We might be able to nuke them...."
;)
...from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.
Female Prison Rape in NY
Even nanofood is limited by the total amount of energy extractable from the earth, sea, wind, sun etc, multiplied by the maximum efficiency (<100%). I have no idea what that limit will be for Earth (probably very very huge), but there will be one. If and when we near that point, we'll have to confront the fact that for people to sustainably have children, other people will have to either voluntarily commit suicide, or go into space. The right to choose to die is going to have to become a fundamental human right, I believe.
Of course, there's the possibility of harnessing Zero Point Energy as well. But even then, an Earth covered in 100-story abodes isn't a very appealing prospect.
Female Prison Rape in NY
The article ignores a lot of current issues and totally avoids what will happen to current economies with the ability to create articles of value cheaply.
Anyone remember The Diamond Age? Did Stephenson have "an end to world hunger and poverty?" No. It just changed how you would get your hands on something. Instead of going to the store for (say) an matress, you tell your personal army of Nanobots to make one. They charge you the same amount, you just cut out all the manuacturers.
So, maybe nanotech is the end-all of technology. It doesn't change who controls it.
-- Bill "Houdini" Weiss
As the article points out, the key to using nanotechnology effectively is self-replication. It is too difficult to manufacture the millions of nanobots that would be required to complete any one task. Essentially, nanotechnology should work by humans designing and making a single (or a few) nanobots which are designed to replicate under certain conditions. From there, the nanobot works as a Von Neumann machine, replicating itself from raw materials provided and continually working on the task it's been made to complete, whether it be microsurgery or buckyball construction or whatever. However, there is the problem of limiting replication... one must consider the possible military applications of this technology.
There are ways of limiting replication, however. In the cells of animals (and maybe plants - I'm not too sure about that, though), there are telomeres, short dna fragments that do not replicate when the dna cell does, halving in size with each cell division, eventually inhibiting division when it reaches a certain size. This idea could be applied to nanobots, easily limiting replication to a certain limit (say one hundred or so - 2^100 nanobots should be able to accomplish most any task). However, this must be implemented by the creators of the nanobots - which raises the question of whether or not implementation of this is possible.
As most any programmer knows, programming embedded systems is often quite difficult due to the limited ram in most of those devices. Creating a nanobot that is both able to replicate and able to complete the task it is designed for would require quite complex programming, likely beyond that which can be accomplished through the use of straightforward electrical circuits. Some sort of processor with instructions for that processor would be required. Creating a processor that small with a flash rom for machine code and ram for variables could prove to be impossible. An entirely new method for control of these nanobots would have to be developed if we are to effectively use them.
However, this method is many, many years off. The only feasible use for nanotechnology at this point is for converting some simple matter into other simple matter. Perhaps mining certain rare metals from ore could be done in the next ten or twenty years. Medical nanobots and weaponry are far, far off in the future. (though you can never underestimate human ingenuity - it has only been forty or fifty years since computers were first made and now they run most everything)