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].

Comments

Isn't it funny...

[rde]

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'?

Nanites for personal grooming.

[bgarcia]

Now here's a use for nanites that every geek would love.

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...

Very small steps

[samael]

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)

Re:Very small steps

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, we are at the very begining.

Kind of like the place my Grandmother (born 1899 - died 1997) was at when she was 4 and the Wright brothers flew.

Or the place she was at when ENIAC first came on line.

I was born in 1973, I will soon see in a new century. If genetics and technology have anything to say about it, I will ring in another one before I die. Think of the changes my Grandmother saw. Think of the ones *I* will see.

Do we have a long way to go?

Yes.

But look at all the way we've come in the span of a human lifetime. Look at how far we've come in HALF the span of a human lifetime.

Will I have 'nanites' scouring my house for dust in ten years? Probably not, but maybe. Will I have them before I retire? Almost certainly.

How is the Genome Project comming along? Not bad since Watson And Crick only discovered DNA 45 years ago.

And even if Moore's law cannot be sustained for much longer (and recent chemical techniques may mean that will continue) the exponetial increase in processing power that bleeding edge science has at it's disposal will only continue to hasten the advancment of all sorts of technologies.

Add to all of this the fact that 'Gen-X' and beyond have grown up with 'high-tech' as an integral part of their environment. Us and younger generations can navigate in this new world in ways (most) older people cannot (and we would be pretty lost in the world of my Grandmother's youth) Add the fact that some kids will now be playing with Lego Mindstorms for years before they take their first physics class.

Add the almost overnight 'wiring' of the world.

And how long do you think it will be before the next 'revolution'? Before another technology changes the way science and business is done? Not long I bet. And that revolution will only hasten the one after that.

We are on the verge of some truly society shattering technology, and that is a Good Thing TM.

Maybe Y2K is The End of The (Old) World.

Maybe we are living Armegedon right now, as the Industrial Age crumbles, and we see traditional governments, corporations and institutions crumble or change radically overnight.

Whew...

Anonymous Coward

Well, yeah.

[jabber]

They're nanites after all.
They can only take little, iddy-biddy, tiny steps.

the sysops will always be with us

[sethg]

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.

Or happily taking a lot of simple things, turning them into a few complex things, but also creating a bunch of complex side effects ... which will require human intervention to manage intelligently.

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.