The Quantum Revolution: Nanotechnology and Personal Fabrication

A magic what we can do with this, you could imagine injecting millions of them into your bloodstream, and they would furst serve as watchdogs, waiting for the early onset of cancer, or some other terrible disease, and allowing you to intervene far earlier than you ever could be for. The next generation of nanobots are expected to be the hunter killer ones, and those are the ones who you could send in, and destroy cancer cells right at the beginning. It's even theoretically possible to imagine that these could go after fat cells, so that you'd never see an obese human being again. But nanotechnology is not only being developed or health and longevity. Well on the battlefield, the nanobots are going to do a lot of things. For instance, they can seek and destroy specific targets. You can make them very, very smart, so they can identify not only geographical areas, but specific weapon systems or communication systems that you wish to attack. You've heard about the surgeons that you can inject into your bloodstream. Well, the surgeon can go in there to repair a blood vessel, or they might be able to go in there and punch holes in blood vessels if you want to destroy an atmosphere. The embryonic stages are here today, and a lot of work is being done. There are national level programs in several countries in the world developing these technologies. They will, in the period of a couple of decades, you're going to see major changes. It is particularly exciting and extremely controversial about nanotechnology. Is the belief that nanomachines will be designed to scavenge molecules from their environment to reproduce themselves. They will be smart and autonomous, but just like the viruses and bacteria they're modeled on, they will have the potential to do enormous damage. In nanotechnology, people are all talking about creating man-made objects that can produce more of themselves. They're self-replicating. And you've got to be real careful about a self-replicating anything, because you'd better know where the off switch is. In the gray goose scenario, this is a world in which these nanobots might keep on replicating until they consume all of the energy on the entire planet, leaving nothing but gray goobie-eye. Prince Charles concerned over gray goob, bought the threat of nanotechnology to the public's attention. But for some, nanotechnology malfunctioning is not the most worrying thing. The much bigger risk seems to be not a freak accident, but the deliberate design of weapon systems using molecular nanotechnology. And with this advanced form of nanotech, it would possible to build different kinds of weapon systems for which it's very difficult to see how an effective defense would possible. In my view, the advanced form of nanotechnology is arguably the greatest existential risk that humanity is likely to come in this century. You can be guaranteed it will eventually get into the wrong hands. The best we can do is both safeguard that against that eventuality, but it will happen. And then we want to step ahead for every move that is a counter move. And we need to continue the research in these areas. I believe will build safeguards to destroy or deactivate nanobots if they get out of control or into the wrong hands. And I think the potential benefits of nanotechnology vastly outweigh the perceived risks. Nanomachines could give us the amazing ability that this assemble molecules into individual atoms and reassemble them into new structures. This means we could make anything we want at home using a personal fabricator. A box full of nanomachines that builds objects from the atom up. Commercial companies are already promoting a future of personal fabrication. Future advances in molecular nanotechnology will enable desktop appliances to manufacture products far better than today's best. Each product is built from beneath, layer by layer, by billions of tiny machines all working together. As I see it, a personal fabricator is a factory on a desktop. It'll be about the size of a microwave oven or maybe a vending machine. But instead of dispensing with candy bars or soda pop, it creates pretty much anything you can imagine. From high-tech items like PCs and mobile phones all the way down to basic necessities like food, clothing, and medicines, almost anything you can imagine this device will create. Neil Gershinfeld of MIT believes this technology will work in the same way that the body is built. From proteins that produce other proteins. Your body has a protein that assembles other proteins like building blocks and it really runs a program. So the research that we're doing is we're just on the edge of learning mathematically, technically, had a program materials, had a fundamentally digitized fabrication. So if you can manipulate atoms to modify proteins, you're in some sense improving on Mother Nature. The absolutely research roadmap is leading 20 years from now to make the Star Trek replicator, the molecular assembler that really builds everything on a molecular scale. So that at that stage, it's very much like life where a part can make a part that can make a part. We're just at the edge now, this very parallel digital revolution in fabrication. And what it's going to do is take all of the programmability you're used to in the digital world on your desktop and bring it to the physical world so you can really program the physical world. So you're programming reality in some sense in a very explicit sense. So in the future instead of shopping from our computers or in the high street, we could be producing everything we want and need at home, programming matter with our personal fabricators. To invent your recurrence while, this will have radical implications for society. Hi, good to see you. Well, actually, I think overcome the have have not divided because we'll be able to create physical products of just from information. So a shirt, a meal or a computer, we're able to essentially print out using these nanotechnology tabletop fabricators and really very easily and very inexpensively meet the material needs of any size by biological population. But with nanotechnology and personal fabrication, perhaps at least the simple basic necessities can be gotten simply by asking for it. So possessions are not going to mean that much. But we thought I agree. I mean it's not just the necessities, but we will still have wealth and it'll still be wealthy people. There'll still be proprietary forms of information that you have to pay for. Not everything is going to be free. But the lowest level, you'll be able to live very comfortably with adequate housing and food and clothing and fashion and really living what we today consider almost a wealthy lifestyle at the lowest level. If a self-assembler ever does become possible, that's going to be one of history's great holy shit moments. Then you're really talking about changing the world into something beyond anything we've ever recognized before. Personal fabrication could challenge everything about our economy. The role of money, the nature of commerce, the gap between rich and poor. Some scientists believe that in a mere 20 years we're going to have personal fabricators right in our living room. I'm not so sure. There are a lot of hurdles that still have to be negotiated. I would say perhaps by mid to late 21st century.