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Comment by RobertoG | Hacker News Reader

Very cool.

The pessimist (realist?) in me can't avoid remembering Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky" novel, where the perfect surveillance device is a network of "dust computers".

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"See, there's mites around all the time. They use sparkles to talk to each other," Harv explained. "They're in the food and water, everywhere. And there's rules that these mites are supposed to follow. They're supposed to break down into safe pieces... But there are people who break those rules [so the] Protocol Enforcement guys make a mite to go out and find that mite and kill it. This dust - we call it toner - is actually the dead bodies of all those mites.

Toner: dead bits of nanomachines. From The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson.

That may be so, but imagine when they get cheap enough that e.g. NSA installations must be kept at ridiculous cleanroom conditions because every speck of dust may be conducting counter-surveillance, or automatically dump footage onto Youtube.

Perhaps at some point we'll be able to harness weakly interacting particles, like neutrinos, to such an extent that we can just fire a beam through a building and image the entire contents including magnetic domains or memristor structures or crystal lattices or whatever we're using for data storage then.

Actually, you can see that scene in another brilliant SF novel: David Marusek's "Counting Heads" (even better that "A Deepness in the Sky" in my opinion)

Ehhh. Marusek makes several rather large conceptual leaps in order to make his plot hang together: notably, both human clones and intelligent machines have no civil rights, at all, to the point that either can be killed at the will of their owners.

Most ludicrously, there's no hint of political opposition or a protest movement. At no point does any character say anything like "Hey, wait, maybe clones are humans too?" or "Maybe sentient machines should have rights?"

If there's anything Sci-Fi has taught me, it's that sentient machines will either be our salvation or our doom, and in both of those cases, treating them like they have no rights isn't good for our health in the long run, so to do so is stupid.

As for clones, considering how often our bodies replace all our cells, you aren't remotely close to the same person you were even a year ago, which proves that it's our minds and experiences/memories that make us who we are. With that in mind, and knowing many other people would agree, the idea that everyone would be ok with a clone slave force is absurd. Maybe if they were brainless chunks of lobotomized flesh incapable of learning and totally empty of sentient though, but otherwise?

I'm reading through Ian Bank's Culture series currently, and enjoy the way he treats it.

In a post-scarcity culture, where energy and information are more or less the only resources, what argument is there against agreeing to give sufficiently advanced AIs rights?

If you haven't read Charles Stross' Accelerando [1] yet, there's a character early on that advocates for AI rights so that maybe they will fairly treat the humans who made them later on.

[1] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera...

It doesn't have to be for "our" benefit (who's that? not us personally, we won't be there). It could be for their own benefit - same reason slaves were freed.

Or the "EDust" (everything dust) assassin in Iain M. Banks' novel "Look To Windward"...

That said, this is awesome. Next step - useful actuation on the same scale.

Love that book, it also reminded me of his book/short story Fast Times at Fairmont High where they use small devices like this as breadcrumbs to keep them connected to the grid (a mesh network).

The book is Rainbows End.

Ahh, my bad, he did have a short story called Fast Times at Fairmont High that was related to/in the same universe as Rainbows End. I've read both. Great author.

From Wikipedia [0]:

> Vinge's 2006 novel, Rainbows End, set in a similar universe to Fast Times at Fairmont High, won the 2007 Hugo Award for Best Novel.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernor_Vinge

That's what came to mind when I read this sentence of the article:

Numerous specks of technology could be discretely placed to invisibly monitor a home, business, or personal device.

I wonder what the people working on these technologies think of pervasive surveillance, and their stance on the gradual loss of privacy trend, because that's essentially what they're enabling.

If you watch the video, at least one person working on this specifically calls out surveillance as a potential application. He doesn't explicitly say much about what their opinions on it are, but it seems they're definitely aware of what they're doing.

I'm hugely impressed by this tech, and I can't wait to see what happens when these devices (or similar) can automatically become a dynamic cluster, but the term "smart dust" will almost certainly come back and bite these companies in the near future.

PR isn't my thing, but "smart dust" has a whole heap of potential negativity when said by the general media, or heard by the general populous. Just because phones, cars and cards can be "smart", most people want their dust to be dumb.

Alternately, we could end up with something like the Angelnets from Orion's Arm.

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