But I wonder if that’s such a good idea. Destructive technologies generally seem to come along sooner than constructive ones—we got war rockets before missile interceptors, and biological warfare before antibiotics. This suggests that there will be a window of vulnerability between the time when we develop technologies that can do dangerous things, and the time when we can protect against those dangers. The slower we move, the longer that window may remain open, leaving more time for the evil, the unscrupulous or the careless to wreak havoc. My conclusion? Faster, please.

OK, it’s counterintuitive, but it may be right.  —Chris Peterson

It seems when nanotech is applied to photovoltaics it can either boost their efficiency to new heights or it can cheapen their manufacturing process. But it never seems to provide a solution to both of these. It’s always a tradeoff: increased efficiency but difficult manufacturing processes or a cheaper production process but less efficiency.

The solution to this, of course, is that the efforts in nanotech research should be going toward developing atomically-precise machinery that can do the manufacturing.  Like any form of research and capital formation – vs – consumption question, there is a balance between this and direct application-oriented work, but the more spent on the former, the better in the long run. And the use of the word “nanotechnology” to characterize the latter has confused the issue.

"Nanotechnology" hunting arrows

As I wrote in Nanofuture:

… the stuff that’s going on in most labs today under the name of nanotechnology may make smaller computer chips, or stronger aerospace materials, or whatever, but it’s really more of the same old conventional technology by another name. You don’t need to read a whole new book to learn that people are trying to make more stain-resistant (and expensive) pants, or stronger (and more expensive) tennis racquets, or smaller, faster computers. Nor do you need to worry over the fact that marketing departments will be calling these things, and lots of other things over the coming years, “nanotechnology”–it’s just a word.

… So “nanotechnology” really does have two different meanings. One is the broad, “stretched” version meaning any technology dealing with something less than 100 nanometers in size. The other is the original meaning: designing and building machines in which every atom and chemical bond is specified precisely. I’ll refer to the former as “nanoscale technology” when I need to; but I won’t refer to it much. The capabilities and dangers of nanoscale technology are simple and straightforward extensions of current trends in the capabilities and dangers of chemistry, materials science, and microfabrication. The majority of new techniques being discovered and trumpeted as the latest thing in “nanotechnology” today will be obsolete in ten years.

… Nanotechnology has the potential for increasing our physical capabilities more than did the industrial revolution; expanding our ability to learn and communicate more did than the printing press; accelerating our ability to travel more than did the boat or the wheel; and enlarging the range of places we can live more than clothing did. It could induce greater biological changes in the human organism than the difference between humans and chimpanzees; indeed, greater than the difference between humans and horseshoe crabs. It is coming, possibly in the next decade, probably in the next two-and-a-half, almost certainly in the twenty-first century.

Meanwhile, solar power continues to fall in a Moore’s Law – like fashion; but it won’t really be mature until we get real nanotechnology.

Gallery – A joyride through the nanoscale – Image 1 – New Scientist.

This New Scientist article has some nice images from Whitesides recent book, sort of a retake on the “Secret House” idea.

Amorphous-silicon solar cells patterned with nanoscale domes absorb more light–and shed water and dust.

DailyTech – AMD Desktop Roadmap Features Bulldozer Architecture, New Chipsets.

Next Big Future: AMD has an Ambitous Roadmap for 2010 and 2011

These days, though, Merkle is setting his sights much higher. Over the past few years he has put together a theoretical system for building diamond, atom by atom. It involves nine molecular tools and methane/hydrogen feedstock on a diamond substrate. He has analyzed all the side reactions, he says, and shown why they won’t throw the process out of kilter. “This is the first effort to define a minimal tool set for positional diamond mechanosynthesis,” he says. “It’s hard,” he says — an understatement — “but it ought to work.”

It’s great to see so many Foresight members helping teach over at SU.  —Chris Peterson

Harnessing DNA origami to arrange CNTs.

“You can imagine trying to peel a piece of shrink wrap off a dish to put it on a new dish — it’s going to be messy,” said lead researcher Jiwoong Park, Cornell assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology.

Inspired by previous work in which scientists grew graphene on copper foil, the team grew the graphene directly onto silicon wafers coated with a special evaporated copper film. They then cut the graphene films into their desired shapes using such standard methods as photolithography, and removed the underlying copper with a chemical solution. What was left was a graphene film that draped down over the silicon wafer with little defect.

“Once the graphene is made on top of this wafer, you can apply any thin-film processing technique,” Park said.

The team is now experimenting with growing full-scale, four-inch graphene wafers, which would further demonstrate the manufacturing potential of graphene-based electronics.

One wonders if this could be combined with the recently invented surface-plasmon fluidic logic.

From there he skims through a catalog of progress — familiar example of pushing atoms into IBM logos and such on a 2D grid — to the goal of 3D shapes, and ultimately nanoscale machines. It doesn’t always work. “You’re not seeing the failures,” he allows, and describes a planetary gear he built that was just too slippery to hold together. “There’s no friction at that scale.” Moreover, that style of assembly is one atom at a time — very resource-intensive. A better solution is self assembly, along the line of, say, a redwood tree — a huge structure self-assembled by nanomachinery. If we can accomplish that, “manufacturing costs will go through the floor.” Products of nanomachinery will be as cheap as potatoes.

The notion that nanotech will provide new materials with superior strength-to-weight characteristics or other cool properties is familiar. Eye-opening proposals: Respirocytes (carry oxygen in the bloodstream so you can hold your breath for an hour), microbivores (eliminate diseases more rapidly than they body’s own system), chromallocytes (removes chromosomes in a cell and replaces them with a new set). Finally, Merkle sketches out a single-stage-to-orbit vehicle made of specific (theoretical) nanomaterials that apparently has been designed by someone in a published paper, name and title I didn’t catch. Bottom line: It could transport four passengers into space for a few thousand dollars.

Other topics include artificial intelligence, robotics, networking, computing, and quantum computing.  —Chris Peterson

Phone robots: Let’s all rebel

By Hasso Hering, Columnist | Posted: Saturday, November 7, 2009 11:45 pm

What this country needs – even more than a shorter baseball season so the World Series doesn’t go into November – is a popular uprising against the tyranny of telephone robots.

This is how those talking machines drive you up the wall.

You want some information from a company, but there is no local number. So, dreading what comes next, you dial the toll-free number in the book.

After the greeting and a burst of Spanish – which presumably means that if you prefer that language you should push numero uno or something – a machine asks you for your account number.

You don’t have one, of course. And while you’re thinking of what you might say to get to the next step, the machine gets impatient:
“I’m sorry, I didn’t get what you said. In order to proceed with this call, I need your account number.”

You sputter something in response, but it’s not an account number.

The robot comes back wanting to know your phone number. This is something you can provide, and you do, grudgingly, knowing that it really won’t help.

Sure enough, the robot asks: “I don’t recognize this number in our records. Is this the phone number for the account you have with our company?”
No, you dummy, it’s not. It’s my own phone number.

“I don’t have an account,” you say.

Robot: “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand. Is this the telephone number on the account? In order to proceed with your request, I need an account number or the telephone number for the account. If you do not have an account number or do not know it, say: I don’t know it.”

“I don’t know it,” you mumble, obediently.

Robot: “I’m sorry, I did not understand. …

This is, unfortunately, the kind of “robotic” robots that actually are taking over the world.  And the problem is not that they’re too good, or too intelligent, or anything like that.  Indeed, it’s just the opposite: the problem is that they’re incompetent.  If Hering had gotten a polite, friendly, knowledgeable, and helpful agent on the phone, there wouldn’t have been much of a column.

On the other hand, it should be pretty clear to any business that they would be better off with polite, friendly, knowledgeable, and helpful robots.  There’s a strong market pressure and money available for development (to the extent that there’s money available for the development of anything).

A call-center help-desk was one of the possibilities mentioned at the AGI roadmap for an intelligence test.  The idea is that the system would be given a manual and some software (or other system) and a week (or whatever) to read and learn, and then be put on the phone and judged on how well it managed to help people who were having problems with the system.

The state of the art in phone-answering systems isn’t quite as bad as the humorous editorial above makes out, but it’s still not good enough to carry on a reasonable conversation even on the simple, constrained subjects that an automated receptionist should handle. I confidently expect this to change over the coming decade — but it remains a toss-up, in my opinion, whether we’ll have a system that can learn to be a  competent receptionist, as opposed to having been laboriously hand-coded and trained to be one.  And if we do, it’ll most likely have major chunks of general skills coded in — things like speaking and reading, for example.

But to the company that wants a roboreceptionist, it doesn’t matter where the skills came from — the company will decide between learned and coded skills on the basis of cost. So if I had a system that could do the learning, it would be worth as much as the development and training team.  I would want to sell trained systems with skills, not learning systems — that would be like giving away my factory.  (It will be interesting to see what happens when open-source IDEs get good enough to be said to be learning the program rather than being a pile of tools for a programmer.)  And it seems unreasonable to think that at any level of technology, learning a skill would be as cheap as simply doing it once learned.

So it seems very likely that the technology of learning AI will develop, in early days at least, in a form of learning machines that create separate narrow AIs, instead of a more human-like learning paradigm.  And it seems likely that a common origin of these learning systems will be AI development envirionments, which today are intended for very heavy human involvement and should simply become more and more automated over time.  And of course these will be self-improving — the first thing everyone with a development environment does is use it to work on its own code — but again with lots of human input.

Let’s just see if we can’t just get to the point where I, as a software architect, can simply talk and wave my hands to my development system, which does all the low-level design and coding. Competently.