Life in the 2020s - nanotech miracles are everywhere
August 18 2008 / by futuretalk
Category: Technology Year: General Rating: 6 Hot
By Dick Pelletier
Futurist Ray Kurzweil, in his recent book, Fantastic Voyage, dubs the 2020s as “the golden age of nanotech”. Nanotech first gained worldwide attention in 1986 with Eric Drexler’s book, Engines of Creation, which detailed amazing wonders to come that would change humanity beyond our wildest dreams.
At the heart of Drexler’s vision is a small machine called an assembler, which, when loaded with nanobots, can build things one atom at a time. With instructions from the Internet, assemblers can extract atoms from raw materials such as dirt, air, and seawater and turn them into food, clothes, and appliances; or any item desired. They can even build another assembler.
Some companies are already creating nano-enhanced products, such as makeup, lotions, and sunscreens, which last longer and look better. But Drexler says by the 2020s, nanobots will do much more. On command they can change hair and skin color, and remove wrinkles and excess fat. Future nanobots will give us great health in a perfect body.
Already in design are nanobots that repair cells, fix damaged DNA, remove toxins, eliminate cholesterol, stop cancer, and reverse aging. You could even mix and match your age: distinguished hairline of a senior, sturdy frame of a thirty-year-old, lusty libido of a twenty something, and sharp eyesight of a child.
In the entertainment world, nanobots promise full immersion of virtual reality systems. By mid-2020s, “neuro-bots” will provide artificial environments indistinguishable from real ones. Enjoy a trip to Mars or a memorable romance – without leaving home.
Scientists predict by the late 2020s, nanobots will enable optic nerves to receive and send information. We will view and understand TV without using our eyes – and transmit thoughts without using our voice.
Nanotech also promises to eliminate world poverty and hunger. Food shortages will disappear by simply rearranging atoms from dirt, water or air to produce potatoes. Grass clippings could turn into bread, and so on.
But critics worry. First, they say benefits of new technologies are never shared equitably, always leaving the poor behind. Proponents say that problem will quickly fade away, as usually happens in our innovative market economy. (Think of the notorious “digital divide” of the 1990s; thanks to the Internet, it’s now all but gone.)
Second, nanotech will change society too fast; it will shift workers, eliminate jobs, and destroy industries. Could abundance created by assemblers make us excessive – or will it have a reverse effect making us less materialistic? Will life become so easy that it loses meaning, or is it in our nature to always seek new challenges? (These questions may be as groundless as the “leisure question” that social scientists worried about when they wondered what we would do with all our free time in the age of automation and computers…hello.)
But nanotech does raise ethical issues. How much are we willing to tinker with, and revise our bodies? Will we end up as humans or machines?
Clearly the road to this “magical future” winds around unknown, even dangerous turns; but strong commerce and government support guarantees that “the golden age of nanotech” will become reality in our lifetime. Comments welcome.
Comment Thread (11 Responses)
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I think the clock was ticking the moment the STM (and later the AFM) was invented. This event was recognised as so important that the Nobel proze was almost immediate – usually they take decades.
It’s not that an AFM, for example, can position atoms with the precision needed for a molecular machine (actually, some very impressive things have been done, but…), but the key point is also the key point of acceleration: we use the last tool to make the next tool. The next stage is not the assembly of robots but the assembly of the assembler.
I think that the 2020’s is a reasonable timeframe for this. The arguments against the plausibility of nano-scale machines have already been discredited (see http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/impossible.html), and once an assembler has been designed, progress will be swift. A reasonable interpretation of “golden age” is that the 2020’s will see steady progress towards this goal. i.e. we should see nano-scale machines with the sophistication of macro-scale machines by the end of that decade.
Posted by: CptSunbeam August 18, 2008
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“Already in design are nanobots that repair cells, fix damaged DNA”
Dick, can you provide a source to verify this claim? Because I had an impression that we have no clue about how to build even a most primitive nanobot. So I’m very surprised to hear that we are already designing nanobots capable of such advanced functions.
Posted by: johnfrink August 19, 2008
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The piece refers to research by Robert Freitas and others; here http://www.nanorobotdesign.com/papers/nanorobotHeart.pdf and here http://www.nanorobotdesign.com/
Posted by: futuretalk August 19, 2008
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Also, you might check this document written to support Freitas’ patent application for nanorobot design: http://www.bentham.org/nanotec/samples/nanotec1-1/Cavalcanti.pdf
Posted by: futuretalk August 19, 2008
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From patent application: “The ability to manufacture nanorobots MAY result from current trends”.
So basically they have no designs whatsoever. But if someone creates such a nanorobot and decides to use it to monitor glucose levels these guys will want their royalties.
Posted by: johnfrink August 19, 2008
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Robert Freitas is a Senior Research Fellow at Institute for Molecular Manufacturing and his book Nanomedicine, details numerous designs for everything from respirocytes, nanobot blood cells, to nanorobots that can reprogram DNA.
Here is a Wikipedia description of Freitas’ book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanomedicine_(book)
Posted by: futuretalk August 19, 2008
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More on nanorobotics development:
The most detailed discussions of nanorobotics, including specific design issues such as sensing, power communication, navigation, manipulation, locomotion, and onboard computation, have been presented in the medical context of nanomedicine by Robert Freitas. Although much of these discussions remain at the level of unbuildable generality and do not approach the level of detailed engineering, the Nanofactory Collaboration1, founded by Robert Freitas and Ralph Merkle in 2000, is a focused ongoing effort involving 23 researchers from 10 organizations and 4 countries that is developing a practical research agenda2 specifically aimed at developing positionally-controlled diamond mechanosynthesis and a diamondoid nanofactory that would be capable of building diamondoid medical nanorobots.
Posted by: futuretalk August 19, 2008
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Seeing as there are more scientists alive now than in all previous human history (another contributor to acceleration), it’s quite hard to keep track of, or even be aware of, all of the research which is going on.
What this means is that when a naysayer tries the “show me some evidence” trick, they’re far more likely to be corrected afterwards than not. I suspect that there is a lot of research that even you, Dick, are unaware of, and you actually do your homework. Even the scientists themselves have to attend conferences just to keep up with developments in their own field.
I wonder how many nantechnology conferences the naysayers have attended recently? What about Surface Science conferences? Do these armchair attackers, who probably can’t write down even the Biot-Savart equation, actually conduct searches on Scopus or the Web of Knowledge for journals or IP? I would guess not, but I could be wrong…
Posted by: CptSunbeam August 20, 2008
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CptSunbeam,
Some of us have been in tech field long enough to smell BS without applying Biot-Savart or any other irrelevant in this case equation.
Posted by: johnfrink August 20, 2008
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I can’t believe it!! Another empty response. The only thing you’ve ACTUALLY said is that Dick’s article is BS; as usual for a naysayer, you failed to explain why that is so. In other words, you said nothing at all. By saying that the argument is Bull without explaining why only serves to strenghthen Dick’s argument, and embarrass yourself.
On the other hand, the author of this article did a pretty reasonable job of providing some information to back up his stance. All you did is provide hot air for the reader to consume. It makes me wonder exactly what “tech” field you are in.
Most people who are blind to accelerating change are part of some IT field, which would explain why you think that any physics equation can ever be irrelevant. A physicist needs to understand as much as possible if he wants to understand the bigger picture without missing something. If you are infact a scientist rather than your average IT worker, then even so, you are a bad one. So by raising (vaguely) your field of work, you accomplish nothing.
You only “smell BS” because you’re at the middle stage of understanding science. Most people spend their childhood believing anything is possible, then they do high school physics and realise that most things are impossible, then they do a physics PhD and realise that anything is possible again. You’re at the naive stage that most people leave school at, when they’re about 16. You think that anything fantastical sounding is emotional and/or not grounded in reality. Soon you’ll see just how wrong you are.
Posted by: CptSunbeam August 20, 2008
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“On the other hand, the author of this article did a pretty reasonable job of providing some information to back up his stance.”
He backs up absolutely nothing. It’s all a bunch of useless hot air. There is NO EVIDENCE towards a 2020s advanced nanotech scenario. None. Nought. Zip. Zero. Nada. Donut. Bupkiss. NOTHING.
Captain Sunbeam is the one embarrassing himself here, not John Frink, who provides evidence-based – rather than faith-based – observations. To claim we will somehow have nanobots whizzing through our bloodstreams within this century is to repeat the ravings of a dyed-in-the-wool fraudster.
Posted by: adbatstone80 August 24, 2008
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