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Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

I'd say the article is realistic, based on how oncology is currently done in the medical field.

As for the question of whether nanobots can completely cure cancer, that's scifi. Actually identifying tumors and removing them is a hard classification problem followed by a careful surgery. Generally this is done using advanced imaging, radiologists who interpret the images, guiding surgeons or doctors to either do tumor resections, or select chemotherapy. Nanobots are just a tiny version of the tumor resection, with the added problem that nanobots don't exist, they don;t' have the computational power to discriminate invasive tumors (at least, the current generation of "robot pills don't).

So let's focus on what is tangible in the near future: additional use of machine learning based on large training sets collected across hundreds of studies. That is in fact very likely to counter the author's hypothesis.

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It is sci-fi just like having the entire world's knowledge at your fingertips was sci-fi 100 years ago.

If it is physically feasible, which it is given we have immune cells and they are just evolution-created versions of these nanobots, then it is just an engineering problem and we humans are pretty good at engineering things.

Things will keep moving forward; macro approaches such as your suggestions will work insofar as we can find the cells. In the end it will probably be a mixture of re-engineering our immune cells to better identify and protect against cancer, macro approaches such as the ones you mentioned, and more.

It is a hard problem, of course, otherwise we'd have it solved by now, but we've solved hard problems before. And with AI it will be easier and easier to do so.

you know I've worked in this field for over 25 years and while I started out thinking nanobots were going to cure diseases, I haven't seen any realistic evidence showing they have a promising future, even 100 years from now. I think it;'s much more likely we'll just study immune cells more and use them for therapy without creating nanobots.

> I haven't seen any realistic evidence showing they have a promising future

We’re not yet at nanoscale manufacturing in one of the few domains with the scale and capital to fund its development: microprocessor manufacturing.

What do you think editing DNA to make a protean is? You don’t get smaller scale than individual atoms, but it takes more than an atom to do anything.

> What do you think editing DNA to make a protean is?

Re-defining biology as “nanobots” renders the latter word useless.

Biology runs on the same physics as anything else. At best nanobots get a wider range of atoms to play with, and that’s it.

> Biology runs on the same physics as anything else

Paper planes and fighter jets run can be modelled by the same physics. That doesn’t mean they’re the same thing. “Nanobots” implies greater degrees of freedom and function than purely biological techniques can manage. (For example, by incorporating digital circuitry and novel materials into the mix.)

Nanomachiens are to small and fast for digital circuits.

As I said, they can include more types of atoms, but that adds little as life already makes use of a wide variety. It’s basic capacity that’s the issue not micro optimizations. Further, depend on a non organic atom and you can’t self replicate without being fed it.

At the smallest scale you can’t for example take a picture, you need to detect stuff by touch and respond before bouncing off while traveling at 50+MPH. Make a vast structure like a cell and movement and energy become major issues.

> Nanomachiens [sic]are to small and fast for digital circuits

“Digital” means a logic model. Not a physical technology. Atomic-scale digital circuitry—completely foreign to life as we know it—is certainly plausible.

Your claim is that anything that can be done at the nanoscale can be done by “editing DNA to make a [protein].” I’m saying the latter is a subset of the former. Given all we have, at this point, is theory, it’s a reasonable point on which to disagree.

I get what you mean by digital, the problem is analog is vastly faster and more compact. Digital essentially reduces the solution space adding overhead. It’s not a technical problem it’s the core tradeoff for going digital.

That’s not to say proteins are as efficient as possible. Just that they are fairly close to the limit of what’s possible at 1 to 100nm. Now start talking micrometers‘s and I can see some things changing.

Crispr is nanobots.

Science Fiction vastly overstated what physical things at this scales can do. I can describe anti gravity fairly easily, that does not let people build something.

It's sci-fi...sure...just like instantly sending messages across the world was 200 years ago. The point is that it is perfectly feasible that this will indeed happen, but the author suggests that "engineering" won't solve the problem because it's "organic" and "ecological". Well, so were many other diseases over the course of human history which are now virtually eradicated.

Nanobots are not necessarily just tiny tumor resectors, they could be implemented in dozens of possible ways with future technology (using some form of machine learning).

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