Snarky joke and micro contamination concerns aside, this tech is really exciting. The implications for health alone are immense, imagine nano bots circulating in your body and repairing stuff along the way.
It has 80s sci fi vibe all over it, optimistic and pessimistic takes alike.
Something I'm much more hopeful about is the possibility of growing organs in laboratories, which will have massive implications for health aswell as industrial production of food.
Though, putting aside pessism I can see these technologies being synergistic, potentially benefitting all of humanity. One can dream
Every technology leads to problems because we as humans who use the technology are flawed.
After all someone thought nitrate fertilizer was going be the biggest boon to world peace.
Before we build something, we usually have a pretty good idea of what problems it may cause. We can only have no idea if we don't know any property of it, and creating something that you didn't predict in any way is extremely rare.
For example, smart dust is one thing guaranteed to create both great ecological problems and solutions.
Agreed. Yet the preventive solution seems obvious: we need to set aside our differences and work together bending the economies of the super powers towards the miraculous development of smaller rice.
The status quo today is an onslaught of (seemingly) random genomic and environmental impacts causing huge problems in human bodies. Treatments for these mutations may result in a lack of control of your arms or bowels…and don’t include a rollback feature.
Now, in the super simplistic worldview of my comment it disregards all of the random mutations and illnesses we’d need to deal with in addition to the possibility of poorly written code being deployed to our hypothetical nano bot army…so it’s for sure not the only answer, and your point has definite merit.
Just, climate change, nuclear war and disease are more at the forefront due to current events.