C-R-Newsletter #57

The latest edition of the C-R-Newsletter has been posted on our main website.

CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE:

CRN Leadership Expands
A Successful Nano-Bio Conference
Scenario Publication Plans
Nanoethics Questions
CRN Goes to Hoboken
Journey vs. Destination
Live-Blogging Productive Nanosystems
Feature Essay: Levels of Nanotechnology Development

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Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology future

Comments

[Tom Craver]

Regarding the analogy made in the feature essay of nanotechnology to computing:

A correct analogy of generations of computers and nanotechnology would compare nanofactories to robotic factories. I presume you recall the enthusiasm/fears regarding robots. Robots would create a new age of wealth and leisure as they made all goods almost free. Robots would wreck the economy by putting us all out of work. Robot armies would oppress us all. "It's the 21st century - why aren't all factories run by robots?"

Will nanofactories have the same problems as robots, and so be (at least) much delayed?

A common response is that unlike macroscale factories, nanofactories can benefit from having a small handful of identical components - atoms. Macroscale factories are made up of and must deal with a huge spectrum of different parts. That makes it difficult to program robots for factories.

And robots would still need to use many specialized machines, or else deal directly with a huge range of raw and partly finished materials - fluids, random chunks of ore, etc. So robotic manufacturing would likely remain capital intensive for efficiency - i.e. robots wouldn't make a multi-billion dollar chip factory cheaper to build - at best cheaper to operate. Nanofactories don't have to deal with all of that, at the level of bonding atoms.

But atoms do not really provide "digital" functionality. Yes, they're either present or absent - but they will have "analog" properties, depending on how the atoms are bonded, what atoms are adjacent, etc.

This will make it more difficult to design with atoms - the equivalent of designing an analog computer, or designing a digital circuit out of transistors - skills much more complex than writing a program, or even digital logic design.

To create truly digital matter - the equivalent of bytes of data and instruction sets in computers - it will be necessary to build parts that are interconnected in limited ways, and which behave and interact in a totally predictable fashion.

Furthermore, if we used our identical atoms to create millions of different "digital" parts, each slightly different to be best suited to a particular optimized design, that gets us back to the level of designing a factory to handle a huge range of parts.

So nanofactories need to benefit from a fresh start. Just as nearly identical transistors are used to create a small range of logic devices, atoms would be used to create a small range of functional parts, with standardized interconnection interfaces.

That approach should allow a nanofactory to can produce a huge variety of macro-scale products with good, though rarely "optimal" performance. That's also analogous to what we have in computers - software can almost never approach the performance of dedicated hardware, but a fairly small number of instructions can be used to program just about anything.

So not only are nanoblocks a useful abstraction and means of limiting the dangers of nanofactories - they may be critical to nanofactories by-passing the problems of robotic factories and achieving their full revolutionary potential.