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Gaming the Future: The Book!

Author: Foresight Editor

Feynman's Path to Nanotech (part 5)

Is it Worth Starting Now? Surely, you will say, it would have been wonderful if back in 1959 people had taken Feynman seriously and really tried the Feynman path: we’d have the full-fledged paraphernalia of real, live molecular machinery now, with everything ranging from nanofactories to cell-repair machines. After all, it’s been 50 years. The… Continue reading Feynman's Path to Nanotech (part 5)

Feynman’s Path to Nanotech (part 4)

MEMS Another reason the Feynman Path may not have been tried is the perception that a machine-based approach has been tried in the form of MEMS, and that standard machine designs do not work at this scale and below due to stiction. MEMS are in fact crippled by this phenomenon, which is a essentially an… Continue reading Feynman’s Path to Nanotech (part 4)

Feynman’s Path to Nanotech (part 3)

Self-replicating Machines So why hasn’t the Feynman Path been attempted, or at least studied and analyzed? One possible reason is that there still seems to be a “giggle factor” associated with the notion of a compact, macroscale, self-replicating machine using standard fabrication and assembly techniques. Although studied in the abstract since von Neumann, and in… Continue reading Feynman’s Path to Nanotech (part 3)

Moral railroads (update)

I wrote in the Moral Railroads post that the key to trustable systems is that they work right. A recent post at Metblogs points out one reason they may have failed: overregulation because of the demonization of a substance. “In the aftermath of the crash on the Red Line between the Takoma and Fort Totten… Continue reading Moral railroads (update)

Feynman’s Path to Nanotech (part 2)

Historical Note It’s appropriate on this July 7 to make at least a reference to the history of ideas that lies behind the Feynman Path. That’s because July 7 is the (102nd) birthday of Robert A Heinlein, the famous SF writer, futurist, and inventor. His invention of interest is the “Waldo F. Jones Synchronous Reduplicating… Continue reading Feynman’s Path to Nanotech (part 2)

Feynman’s Path to Nanotech (part 1)

The Problem In 1997, Philip Collins, then a graduate student at Berkeley, won the Foresight Institute’s Distinguished Student Award for his experimental verification that a defect location in a carbon nanotube could form a near-perfect rectifier, as well as various other heterojunction device behaviors, as had been theoretically predicted just the year before. “Such junctions… Continue reading Feynman’s Path to Nanotech (part 1)

Nanotech and climate change

Eric Drexler is apparently at the Renaissance Weekend with the intent to speak to the assembled interesting people about how “advanced nanotechnology can address the climate change problem providing low-cost solar energy and by removing accumluated CO2 from the atmosphere.”  In the same spirit, for the rest of us, here’s how I think we should… Continue reading Nanotech and climate change

Medical nanorobot control

Robert A. Freitas Jr., author of the Nanomedicine series of books, has just published a major new theory paper on aspects of medical nanorobot control, providing an early glimpse of future discussions of this topic that are planned to appear in Chapter 12 (Nanorobot Control) of Nanomedicine, Vol. IIB: Systems and Operations, the third volume… Continue reading Medical nanorobot control

Robo-ethics paper and Open-Texture Risk

There’s a paper on roboethics by Yueh-Hsuan Weng of Taiwan’s Conscription Agency in the International Journal of Social Robotics that has gotten a write-up on Physorg (h/t to Accelerating Future). Here’s the abstract:

Super-dense magnetic memory

There’s a post on Technology Review’s blog about a paper on arXiv about a theoretical result in magnetic memories. Current-day magnetic memory is already “nanotechnology” under the loose definition, involving 5-nanometer particles of cobalt (having about 50,000 atoms). The authors have shown that a single molecule consisting of a cobalt dimer sitting on top of… Continue reading Super-dense magnetic memory

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