Nanotechnology: Intelligent Machines from Lilliput
Dateline: October 12, 1997
"THE greatest technological breakthrough in history," trumpeted the controversial K. Eric Drexler in Engines of Creation. My vote would still go for the automatic cat litter box, but nanotechnology is indeed right up there. It is technology for building things—ultimately, anything (including, I suppose I must concede, automatic cat litter boxes)—atom by atom and molecule by molecule. The dream goes even further, to encompass things that can reconfigure themselves into something else. When you get bored with your perfect copy of a Rembrandt, you could have it transform into a Picasso, or a cat litter box. A machine that could accomplish such feats is called a "universal assembler."
One of the first things nanotechnologists were working on in 1986, when Drexler’s book was published, was the "bio-chip," a molecular computer made from biological molecules. The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, IBM, Genex Corporation, NEC, Hitachi, Toshiba, Matsushita, Fujitsu, Sanyo-Denki, and Sharp were among organizations that mounted "full-scale research efforts on bio-chips for bio-computers," according to Drexler. Biological (protein) molecules were chosen largely because Nature had already done the design work; all we had to do was harness the molecules to do what we wanted them to do. Protein molecules are synthesizers—they make things out of the chemicals that slosh around in cells. They are machines, and pharmaceutical firms already use them to manufacture, for example, insulin.
But they are not universal assemblers, and the goal of nanotechnology is to create universal assemblers out of inorganic molecules. Zyvex, a company whose slogan is "Nature does it, why can't we?" claims to be on the road to building one. Assemblers need the same sort of gears and mills any manufacturing machine uses. The main difference is that an assembler’s gears need to be a nanometer—one billionth of a meter—in size. Engineers at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico are getting there. They have not only developed tiny gears and motors, but have made one millimeter square "intelligent" micromachines incorporating computer chip controllers.
"This will be a big enabler for a variety of new products to be produced that are small, smart, and cheap," said a Sandia press release. "By using the semiconductor industry's fabrication methods, we've created a generic manufacturing process." Possible applications for the process include tiny drug-delivery devices and tiny, inexpensive, long-lasting gyroscopes for civilian and military uses.
Sandia had already succeeded in mass-producing micromachines that could perform work, turning gears each one-hundredth the weight of a dust mite at hundreds of thousands of revolutions per minute, in 1995. Each gear was approximately one-hundredth the thickness of a sheet of paper, and smaller in diameter than a human hair.
Small as they are, such micron (millionth of a meter)-sized devices are still 1000 times too big for the nanoscale engineering necessary for working on individual atoms and molecules. That this will eventually be possible is indicated by the scanning tunneling microscope, an existing device demonstrated to be capable of manipulating individual atoms. IBM scientists wrote the letters IBM with just a few atoms using such a device.
Despite these mind-blowing achievements, in its more optimistic, futuristic, Drexlerian, form nanotechnology seems to get up the nose of the more staid members of the scientific community. Wrote Gary Stix in Scientific American magazine:
Drexler's fanciful scenarios, nonetheless, have come to represent nanotechnology for many aesthetes of science and technology. The phenomenon is not uncommon in the sociology of science. The public image of a certain field or concept, shaped by futurists, journalists and science-fiction scribes, contrasts with the reality of the often plodding and erratic path that investigators follow in the trenches of day-to-day laboratory research and experimentation.
I share Drexler’s distress at such discouraging put-downs (the more so as a book I am writing is likely to receive similar treatment!) Stix nevertheless had the decency to let Drexler respond:
Drexler contends that his critics, with their need to focus on new products or the next grant-funding cycle, have trouble thinking far enough into the future. "To people outside who don't understand that you're talking about the year 2020 or whatever, these ideas raise confused, unrealistic expectations about the short term," Drexler maintains. "That makes researchers uncomfortable because it's not a yardstick they want to be measured by. It also brings in ethics and the future of the human race, which are not the usual cool, scientific, analytical concerns."
And this is the point. This is why I have bothered to write this article on nanotechnology at all. If the nanotechnology envisioned by Drexler—which is a nanotechnology controlled by humans—has awesome ethical and survival implications, how about nanotechnology controlled by Machina sapiens? The scientists at Sandia have taken the first step toward such an eventuality.
Until
next week,
NEXT WEEK: The Future of the Internet, with Machina sapiens crawling all over it.