Nobody’s Talking About Nanotech Anymore
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I think everyone is stuck wondering how to make the tooltips from the tooltips paper: http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/nanotech/Optimal%20tooltip%2...
All of that was motivated by goals of making nanofactories like shown in this eye candy video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEYN18d7gHg
Because positional, precise molecular manufacturing still doesn't exist, I have been increasingly interested in using DNA synthesis (using phosphoramidite chemistry) to combinatorially build proteins that lock together in pre-defined shape based on ligand-specific binding affinities between the blocks. The Nanosystems book left out a lot of biology that can be hijacked to help out goals like these.
Long-term we might be able to coerce enzymes into creating molecular machines anyway: https://groups.google.com/group/enzymaticsynthesis
It's anyone's guess how significant these constraints will be from the viewpoint of developing artificial protein machines (maybe rapid (bio)degradation is a good thing!), but there's definitely large swathes of chemical design space outside of arbitrary chains of known amino acids, and we might be able to discover entire classes of molecular machines that don't have the drawbacks of bioinspired proteins.
http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/ai/The%20evolution%20of%20se...
(To be clear, the first "self-copying sequences" didn't look like self-replication in CoreWars or whatever, but evidently they did observe the construction of self-replicating programs over time.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tierra_%28computer_simulation%...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avida
http://beacon-center.org/welcome/
In particular this was a surprisingly interesting overview of their recent work:
http://beacon-center.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/BEACON20...
I also blatantly steal your diagram on the following page, so fair warning.
I wonder how we can hope to make nanofactories, when we don't even have a robot arm that can fold my laundry for me.
You see: poor people are accustomed to doing these chores by themselves, while the rich can always use their paper money to hire naturally occurring biological robots.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ms_ehUVvKKk
Actually assembling individual atoms together to make stuff is still very much an unsolved problem. Freitas' work on mechanosynthesis tooltips shows that we may need to control more than just position to precisely react atoms and that 'fat fingers' is still very much a problem.
How far could we go by modifying existing biological molecular machines? Probably quite far.
"We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run."
Big leaps forward seem to broadly cause people to either significantly underestimate them (the home computer mid 1980s), or to significantly overestimate their near-term impact (the state of all things stem cells 15 years ago).
It occurs almost every time there's a big headline about growing organs, curing HIV/AIDS, curing various forms of cancer, curing alzheimer's, and so on. It occurs with almost everything to do with gene therapy right now.
Robotics has been under an almost constant state of overestimation for more than a century, while the industry has still delivered amazing technology in that time. Artificial intelligence has been treated the same way for decades. I think these two instances are heavily caused by fear, people are projecting far beyond what's rational.
You see it in batteries a lot. Solar suffered from it for decades. Storage / memory seems to see the effect in action with nearly every breakthrough (the gulf between the date of first public awareness and reaching a commercial economy of scale representing that typically huge gap of time).
Yes, exponential growth trends result in overestimating short-term, and underestimating long-term, changes.
However very few phenomena show persistent long-term exponential growth characteristics. For all the obvious reasons. The growth rapidly becomes ridiculous and/or unsustainable.
The internet "bubble" is the surest sign of this. Many people thought that everyone would buy groceries via the internet by the late 90s. Grocery delivery via the internet can be a good business, but it wasn't ready 3 years after web browsers got popular. The experience wasn't good enough, the cost of operation was too high, and not enough people were there to use it.
Today though, I can speak a few sentences to a wireless black glass box I keep in my pocket, and groceries will arrive at my house in the hour. Beyond that though, I can instantly feel a tingling buzz when someone on the opposite side of the globe wants my attention. Major celebrities have lived their entire careers on the internet. World leaders converse and issue statements via a short-message public-ish broadcast system we can all see instantly. Multiple currencies powered solely by shared public work and cryptography are in wide use. Major mathematical discoveries have been made by free associations of mathematicians in blog discussion threads.
That's just the tip of the iceberg, but it's already far more profound than online groceries. The effects of the internet over decades are essentially unfathomable, but we were far too optimistic about them in the short term.
Non-informational technologies often don't see such trends. Where they do they often manifest network effects (telephony, railroads, autos and fuel/road/repair infrastructure), or ...
Nominally non-information goods with very high informational content benefit from Moore's Law growth. This can include very high tech manufacturing or control systems (aircraft engines), R&D and process control (pharmaceuticals), an similar goods.
Even within high-eech and information goods, where the rubber meets the road, improvements are limited and the Jevons law limits overall efficiencies. Healthcare spending has exploded over the 20th century. Life expectency gains have been modest. Aircraft and ship speeds are lower today than 40 years ago. Greater data access runs into limits of human attention, and the fact that there are only 1,440 minutes in a day. An iPhone is in some regards amazing. In others it merely replaces pen and paper, books, radio, and live performances of entertainment.
I suspect tech impacts may be greatly overstated.
Space flight is probably coming out of its trough of disillusionment right now, as is renewable energy (solar/wind).
Genetic engineering is deep in the trough with anti-GMO sentiment, the supposed failure of the human genome project to pay out, and general paralysis in the field. Nuclear power is also probably still deep in the trough with Fukushima and us still being stuck on overgrown submarine reactors.
Interesting to see what has / hasn't moved.
A great example of this is rotaxane containing metal organic frameworks. A rotaxane is molecule consisting of a ring on a rod. Make your molecule just right and you can get the ring to move back and forth using electric charge which allows you to store bits. Recently, there has been success of organizing these rotaxanes spatially by putting them in a self-assembling molecular space frame type structure called a metal organic framework. This is getting us closer to making ultra-high density data storage that just self-assembles. Some well respected researchers(not Drexler) are even starting to seriously consider robot arms capable of moving individual atoms.
There is even a name for this sort of research: supramolecular chemistry. In short, 'nano' is coming back, it's just not going to be called nano.
It is science since you are taking data to answer a question. If your not answering a question or using a scientific method it falls short.
Good example is all the medical data science that has been happening in the past decade or so. http://www.oreilly.com/data/free/how-data-science-is-transfo...
Data science is already much more than statistics. That's why the term was invented in the first place.
Additionally, your definition of science seems pretty lacking. Merely using data to answer questions isn't what defines science. Some questions are scientific and some are not.
Usually it happens a lot more like LASERs. There is no giant LASER segment of the economy. There are just lasers in barcode readers, medical gear, machine tools, lasers in robots, lasers in survey gear, lasers in hand held power tools, lasers in pointers, all manner of things not sold by LASER Inc a giant conglomerated manufacturer or even made by a LASER economic segment of dedicated LASER companies.
My gut level guess is Data Science will be more like LASERs and less like computers, as will nanotech.
Everyone will be doing nanotech, they'll just call it plain old ore refining, or plain old medical care, or plain old IC manufacturing, and they'll be no Nanotech Inc company or even market sector.
But, you know, it takes billions-of-years evolved plantlife about 20 years to produce a simple structural element able to support maybe a thousand lbs and 20 feet long (ie, to grow a tree). We notably do not see anything in nature that does "molecular assembly" from microscopic cells to differentiated macroscopic objects in a time-scale of less than months.
Also, even if the initial version of nanotech worked as fast as tree grows, you could still put a lot of products in parallel, so for most intent and purposes, after few months of waiting, you'll be getting new copies daily. We do that a lot with traditional manufacturing today.
> But, you know, it takes billions-of-years evolved plantlife about 20 years...
Well, evolution is really stupid and really slow. Having brains, we can now iterate many orders of magnitude faster, so I wouldn't worry. Comparing things to evolution is comparing to the simplest and dumbest possible process imaginable that still works.
Now, if you consider nanotech as a new term for some or all of the traditional fields of materials science and pharmaceuticals, then it is bullshit to claim that the hype died out. The traditional materials science companies soldier on and continue to grow at very impressive rates (stocks returning an annual 10-30%): P&G, Dow, Du Pont, 3M, etc.
The barrier for entry for startups is too high. Forget about building a manufacturing line, running a manufacturing line for a couple of days can cost in the order of millions of dollars. It is hardly a thing that one can do in one's parents' basement or garage. That is how most materials science-y and pharma companies have all been in the business for 50-100 years or more. Naturally, the successful companies in this area will be rather few in number.
From self assembly of socks to breaking down pollution and gray goo.
Now it's just doing what science does best, sit in the background and provide the basic building blocks of progress.
But yeah building a nanotech company is not like putting a dating app on the app store that much is certain :)
That sort of progress over 70 years strikes me as very comparable to the progress made in computing since the 1950s. Small wonder the science fiction writers of the previous generation thought we'd have flying cars by now!
I would expect to see such an explosion of capability in a brand new field, in a society that had a lot of resources to dedicate to exploring it. It could happen with anything we really, really cared about, I think. Aerospace and computing both saw tremendous amounts of commercial, scientific, and military research during their accelerated growth phases.
I don't know about nanotech. I'd say that sort of energy in this generation seems to mostly be going into building our society a hivemind. And I'm not gonna say that's wrong.
The only real example I can think of where huge amounts of public attention actually got results was in aerospace. We actually did get to the moon. After that, I struggle to think of examples.
Even so, getting to the moon was not something that public attention and funding just 'made happen'. Luckily, it happened to coincide with the invention of microchips and computer power shrinking down enough to fit in the nose of a shuttle. All of this required incremental progress that wasn't always in the limelight. Sure, the actual moon landing phase was, but not everything leading up to it.
Also, I would say Tesla is very much in the spotlight and making progress because of it, as one example.
Believe it or not, the hype among scientists was even worse than among the public, to the point of (in my opinion) hurting good science. Everyone was shoehorning "nano" into their proposals, regardless if their work was legitimately nano[1], and that really hurt the SNR for manuscripts and grant proposals.
[1] I define nanotechnology as dealing with something sufficiently small to access properties not seen in bulk materials. For many materials, restricting one or more dimensions below 100nm will lead to side-dependent properties. There was a lot of stuff during the Great Nano Hype that was claimed to be nano, but was say 500nm—that would be "submicron".
The investment case behind it was wrong, but we got an incredible tech advance in less than 10 years.
I found it extremely interesting, and finished it in 2 days.
I wouldn't call it "a dream" in a sense that it's utterly unrealistic; physics says that these systems can work.
As far as true nanotech goes, we've had it for about 4.5 billion years. It's called biology. You are basically made of nano-assemblers holding hands. Genetically engineered biology and "wet artificial life" are engineerable nanotech, but if you want to see Turing-complete universal assemblers in action right now go plant a tree.
In other words, I sort of think nanotechnology is a useless neologism for biology and bioengineering and I doubt that anything other than carbon-based systems are going to do much better than biology... and those are basically synthetic biology.
Where's the disruption exactly? Everytime I look at the 3D printing scene its a bunch of neckbeards printing Star Wars figures and other useless knick-nacks. What industry has cheap 3D printing attacked? The argument seemed to be "Oh we'll make spare parts and such," but that never happened. It was supposed to make a new market, but seems to have completely fizzled out.
Small nitpick. Earth is around 4.6 byo. Life, as far as anyone knows, is about one billion years younger.
The book contains a careful physical analysis of molecular machines. The technical material is unchallenged to the present day.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/10/hp-and-sandisk-join-f...
I guess they're calling it "3D XPoint" now, which is a shame because memristor has such a cool retro-future sound to it. 3D XPoint sounds like what a bunch of bored marketing execs would whip up over a short lunch.
While I'm at it, what ever happened to 3D printing? It was supposed to change everything, except its expensive and everything it makes looks like piled spaghetti. The resin/liquid based printing never took off and the few that did were troublesome and crazy expensive for materials.
Or that quantum computer that company was selling, except it was huge and cooled with liquid nitrogen and no one could prove it was doing quantum anything.
I'm also skeptical of the new VR fad. Yeah FPS addicts will probably love it, but grandpa and grandma aren't putting giant tissue boxes on their faces to watch a movie or skype with the grandkids.
All the cool stuff from just a year or two ago are either dying, forever in the "we're working on it" stage, or were just vaporware. Nano hype has been here from the 80s and, unsurprisingly, has gone nowhere.
Be careful about buying into hype, grandson.
The whole industry is about to be disrupted though. HP has a new machine coming out in 2016 that does the same thing as industrial 3d printers except faster, cheaper, and in color. They have probably made a bunch of 3d printing processes obsolete. These machines might be fast and cheap enough to put in every kinkos in the country to locally produce moderate value plastic stuff(action figures, keychains, overpriced as seen on TV products), offer customized products(3d selfies, your face on an action figure), or consumer 3d printing.
In short, big companies are starting to get into the 3d printing game. The days of kickstarter 3d printers and 3d printers made by a bunch of guys in a garage are over.
[1] http://3dprint.com/98086/graphene-3d-lab-patent/
http://www.zdnet.com/article/ibm-claims-breakthrough-on-carb...
I hear there's at least one stealth mode startup in SV working on it...
"And while Facebook, like the most celebrated of Silicon Valley’s startups, went from idea to ubiquitous product in less than a decade, most nanotechnology applications taking much longer to find a market."
Does anyone, even here on HN, think that it is really absurd to make these comparisons? Comparing Facebook with an advanced technology? Come on.
Really, we're all still riding the 1970's VLSI wave, finding new stuff enabled by that basic technology. But we still feel the need to talk about whatever is coming next.
It is a bizarre comparison, but the author appears to be using it as a colloquial way to describe a runaway success, which makes sense even if the industries are not directly related.
From the limited knowledge I have on nanotech, I'd suggest the closest it's come to a runaway success so far has been in superhydrophobic coatings. If a food-safe and long-lasting superhydrophobic coating was discovered, I could imagine the market would be huge. Consider plates/bowls/cutlery that you'd never/rarely need to wash up, that could take off massively.