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Nanotechnology: the new IT

By Christine Peterson, on November 12th, 2007

For decades, information technology has been the biggest change agent in technology. Now we see a prediction on CNet News.com that atoms will again step up to a significant role, compared to bits:

Society-impacting technological change will increasingly come from physical sciences, such as chemistry, physics and mechanical engineering, rather than information technologies, said Matthew Nordan, the president of nanotechnology research firm Lux Research.

Nordan on Monday provided an overview of nanotechnology at the firm’s annual conference here, arguing that material sciences will fuel technological development and economic growth in the coming years in much the way that information sciences did in the last 20 years.

I hope he’s right. Ultimately, we want atoms to be as controllable as bits. Of course, that will bring a whole new set of complexity-related challenges! Credit: Memebox. —Christine

November 12th, 2007 | Category: Nano, Nanobusiness, Nanotech, Nanotechnology, Opinion

2 comments to Nanotechnology: the new IT

  • Alvis
    November 14th, 2007 at 12:09 AM

    For a while now I’ve been musing about the relationship between technology, information and physical particles (as many are, I’m sure), and viewing all matter as a continuum of hard-to-soft tech, with information as a soft technology. The notion of tunneling down to the nano-scale to create a new super-IT makes a lot of sense from this perspective, and inevitable from a MEST compression standpoint (shout out to John Smart). :)

  • Waleed
    November 13th, 2007 at 5:39 AM

    Biotechnology is another technology that’s becoming more like IT in the sense that it’s progressing really fast, and is increasingly being done through computer simulations.