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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Major breakthrough in Nanotechnology I have just been reading an article in this month’s Scientific American that has me smiling from ear to ear. One of the difficult problems for ‘strong nanotechnology’ has been cracked: how do you handle C3I with millions or billions of nanoassemblers? How do you program them? How do you tell them when to start and stop or do something different? How do they report problems, lack of raw materials, whatever?
University of California Berkeley physicist Dr. Alex Zettl and colleagues have built nanoscale radio receivers and transmitters using a single buckeytube each. One tube performs all the actions of an AM radio. Antenna. Tuner. Amplifier. Demodulator. Best of all this is not just theory. It already works well enough to communicate to and from the human scale at this primitive stage of development.
I might add that if you can turn radio waves into mechanical energy at the nanoscale, then you also have another tool in the nanoparts box for feeding energy to nanosystems.
This is big.
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…that is interesting, but the link doesn’t work…
Ayrdale, link fixed. Also added the link to the Scientific American article.
Here is also a link to a ZDnet blog(Link) on the same topic.
If you follow where the link should go there’s a really bad recording of Layla by Derek & the Dominoes.
Presumably it’s a recording by the nano system.
Or could be a cassette recording of Radio 1 from the seventies.
Who knows.
http://www.sciam.com/nanoradio
Shirtbloke, strictly speaking it’s not a ‘bad recording’ – it’s the nanoradio actually ‘relaying’ the song, which could be of the highest quality. However, doing this with a radio that would easily fit inside a living cell, means major geek kudos!!!
I am sufficiently geeky to be excited by that, static noise or not.
Anyway, snarky may be easy, technology not so.
Darwin pointed out that manufacturing processes are never perfect, and quantum processes mean that the chances of mutation are never zero, so with millions of the nans, I would expect the grey glue specter to become a routine hazard of future life!
Head for the hills- whilst they’re still standing!
However, the very term ‘mutation’ assumes that a machine has something that not only serves the function of DNA, but is also mutatable. Computer languages are not randomly mutable. Transformations are almost certain to lead to halting, looping and other behavior which prevents the assembler from carrying out its job.
Even if the assembler is combined with code for self-replication, the code is still not mutable.
To be mutable you need a language suitable to a genetic algorithm in which you are guaranteed that a random change has a least a reasonable chance of creating a functioning result.
Grey goo is not something that happens by accident. It requires malice.
Note that the original goal was to develop tiny sensors that can radio back data. This is a concern from a personal liberty perspective. Consider the sprinkling of nano scale senors on someone or some place. Of course then you need something approaching AI to filter through all the returned data.
It does have Geek value and nano tech could lead to plenty of wonderful developments but there are concerns other than “grey goo”.
Dale is right. I was talking to Aubrey de Grey, the scholar on life extension, the other day. He says that many of the essential tools of nanotech are in place. It is one of the reasons why he signed up for cryonics.
@Johnathan: You’ve just eminded me of today’s Dilbert…
While humorous, the strip above contains a reinforcement of the meme that things are and have been getting worse. This is not true. The average human being on this planet is *hugely* better off than they were when I was a teenager.
We are now living in what is perhaps the best time in all of human history to be alive.
I sure hope that life-extension keeps advancing as fast as it has been doing so that I can live in a time when Bill Gates standard of living is considered below the poverty line. I don’t think they’ll be interested in marinating me. They’ll be too busy arguing about their inability to afford the noveau cuisine shipped from Mars that only the 22nd century wealthy can afford… (Help! Help! We’re being oppressed?)