
There is no nanotech, stop talking about it and start laughing at it - asmithmd1
http://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2010/08/24/nano-nonsense-25-years-of-charlatanry/
======
jacquesm
For those that are skeptical about nano machinery, google 'ribosome' and be
amazed.

Nano machinery is real, it exists, it powers the world, it's called biology.

The problem is that we seem to have a hard time translating our hard won
knowledge of mechanical engineering to the nano scale, I expect some time will
pass before the SF visions will become a reality but I think eventually we
will get there. Figure another 50 to 100 years or so?

As long as we keep thinking in terms of conventional mechanics (wheels, gears,
levers, wires and so on) it's going to be slow progress because we are trying
to push down the size limit on our macroscopic ingredients without a real
appreciation of what you can do with molecules 'as is'.

I think at some point the 'genetic synthesis' crowd is going to meet up with
the 'nano technology' crowd and that's when we'll see some real action. The
first little bits of progress in that direction have already been made.

~~~
paraschopra
Evolution took billions of years to engineer the ribosome (and more
importantly to engineer the whole supporting ecosystem where ribosome can do
what it needs to do). I doubt humans will be able to do that in next 100
years.

Granted a similar argument can be made for many other comparisons (such as
camera or airplanes) but at nano-scales physics of environment plays a
tremendous role. The beauty of evolution was that it is an inside-out
distributed process so the physics of environment actually helped engineering
ribosome.

I wonder if humans will fall back to mechanisms such as guided evolution to
create other "nano-machines". Lots of effort has started being put into that
direction. Just google "artificial enzymes"

~~~
BrandonM
> Evolution took billions of years to engineer the ribosome

I see this argument a lot, but it doesn't really hold water. Evolution wasn't
_trying_ to engineer the ribosome. In fact, the only thing evolution tries to
do is replicate. The biological forms that have come out of that are
completely random.

Humans, on the other hand, consciously make efforts at engineering. Thousands
of monkeys will never (for all practical purposes) manage to write a
Shakespearean work, but Shakespeare did.

100 years ago we barely had phones. Almost no one had a car. There were no
televisions and movies didn't have sound. Human flight was relegated to hot
air balloons. On the other hand, total Internet bandwidth has increased from
about 10 terabytes a month to 10,000,000 terabytes a month in the last 15
years. Trying to guess the limits of what we'll be able to do in the next 100
years is unfathomable to me.

~~~
paraschopra
> Evolution wasn't trying to engineer the ribosome.

Evolution isn't purposeless. Sure, it is a random process but it has a
purpose. And that's of survival of the organism (or if you like Dawkins, genes
that encode the organism).

> The biological forms that have come out of that are completely random.

Wow, biological forms are NOT random. They are what they are because of the
environment they are habituated in. The exact implementation (animal) may not
be deterministic but if you set the right fitness function, evolution will
produce what you wanted it to produce. Evolution is like a blind tinkerer who
knows he needs to fix but doesn't know where to hit the hammer to fix it. He
only gets feedback once he has hit the hammer. From the feedback, he can
definitely avoid hitting at the wrong spot again and again. I wouldn't call
this process _random_.

My original argument is about engineering macro v/s nano machines. Evolution
is great at doing nano work because it is an inside out process.

PS: Thousands of moneys _will_ produce a Shakespearean work if their survival
depended on it! (Just kidding)

~~~
anamax
> Evolution isn't purposeless. Sure, it is a random process but it has a
> purpose. And that's of survival of the organism (or if you like Dawkins,
> genes that encode the organism).

Is survival a "purpose" or is it just the consequence that is selected for?
(Survival isn't a property like length or color.)

~~~
WingForward
Good point.

As long as we're quibbling/clarifying, it seems we're mixing up natural
selection and evolution here.

------
mortenjorck
I hate to complain about headlines, but I feel this needs saying:

Headlines such as the one this author has chosen strike me as unpleasantly
Digg-like. Exhortations to "stop talking about it and start laughing at it"
are anti-intellectual; it's a call to glib derision rather than reasoned
rejection.

~~~
dasil003
Yeah it's just like the whole "Fail" meme. It's indicative of how demanding
people are becoming that they no longer can be bothered to write a sentence or
even conjugate a verb to express their disgust with some flaw that catches
their attention for a microsecond.

I think Louis C.K. captured the essence better than anyone
(<http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1885790,00.html>)

------
fragmede
The name is all about the funding. There are many 'nano'-technology grants,
which focus on devices that are tens of thousands, or even millions of
nanometers large. Micro-techology, however, doesn't get the same funding from
the NSF et al. MEMS
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microelectromechanical_systems>) has come a
long way in a very short time, and, research-dollars willing, will shrink
further, so the author is wrong when he says nanotechnology will take another
century.

~~~
yummyfajitas
For the same reason, it's "machine learning" rather than "non parametric
statistics".

~~~
akshayubhat
well you could argue that Theory of CS is same as Mathematics of Computation.
or Biology is just Chemistry and Chemistry is just Physics.

Traditionally statistics is more geared towards hypothesis testing and
analytics. While Machine Learning is about making prediction.

------
Symmetry
I really wish that the author would have, when complaining about "Drexler's
Book", been clear about which one he was talking about.

Also, "Mechanical objects on microscales do not exist" is gratuitously false,
we even have really simple mechanical objects (like cantilevers) on the 100nm
scale now.

~~~
pedrocr
"This is an honest summary of Drexler’s Ph.D. thesis/book"

~~~
spot
why summarize and criticize a book published in 1986?

~~~
jacquesm
Not that I necessarily agree with this particular summary in everything, but
the point of summarizing something it to make it easier to digest the core of
the argument before criticizing it.

For that to work you have to have a really good understanding of the subject
matter though, and I think he does Drexler great disservice when he says "He
seems to lack the imagination, and of course, the physics to figure out what a
real nanosized doodad might look like.".

That to me is the hallmark of someone with an ax to grind rather than an
objective reviewing of a book written quite a while ago.

Of course Drexler didn't have the physics to figure out what a real nanobot
might look like, nobody did, and nobody does.

Drexler could not have easily foreseen some of the obstacles a direct
translation of mechanical concepts would encounter, but there are more ways to
skin a cat, and biology seems to have found at least one of them.

Now it's up to us to find either another path or to harness biology to produce
those structures that we can not produce by direct means and to build up a
library of tested components to do our 'nano engineering' with.

I see Drexler more as a visionary than as a 'hard applicable science' guy and
that's the way to approach his book. If you're looking for a 'ready to build'
nano bot or a hard treatise on nano engineering you're not going to find it,
if we had had that at that time then we wouldn't be where we are today.

Incidentally, I think that the 'proponents' of nano tech have done a very bad
job at raising expectations (Drexler among them), I do believe that long term
nano technology will become a reality and will become a mainstay of our
technological arsenal. Just like electronics, which were practically non-
existent one hundred years ago are today.

~~~
spot
i understand what summary is for. what i don't "understand" is why he chose as
the target a book that's 24 years old in a fast moving field. actually i do
understand: it was a strawman!

i agree with your assessment.

~~~
slocklin
This is a non-moving "field." It is nothing but a marketing word for third
rate research on things which used to be called "tribology" and "chemistry."

------
zeteo
"We don’t even have micromachines. Mechanical objects on microscales do not
exist."

That's not exactly true. See, for example

<http://www.dartmouth.edu/~news/releases/2005/09/14.html>

for a 60 micrometers by 250 micrometers robot from 2005.

Of course, that's not nanotechnology, and the article's main point might well
be valid. Still, there seems to be a good deal of exaggeration in it.

------
wihon
Flying cars have long been a symbol of the possible technological height of
human transportation. But we're not exactly surprised by their absence.
Similarly, can't Drexler's '90s idealism be regarded as the possible peak of
nanotech? Does the fact we don't have tiny toasters in our bloodstream really
negate the acheivement of nanotechnology in medicine and materials science?
Personally, I don't think so. This article is too deliberately inflammatory,
and doesn't properly look into anything beyond what is now an ancient thesis -
as far as fast-moving research areas are concerned. This makes his dismissal
of nanotech as sweeping as Drexler's predictions.

~~~
nivertech
Flying cars are possible today, but not economically viable. I know at least
one startup building a flying emergency vehicle for urban areas. But this one
just looking like a van, but actually has many things common with helicopters.

------
reasonattlm
Refutation: <http://www.zyvex.com>

Much longer refutation: <http://www.rfreitas.com>

------
krschultz
Alternate view: A bunch of nano machines.

<http://mems.sandia.gov/gallery/images.html>

~~~
daten
Those are actually "micro" machines. That's a very different scale.

~~~
shadowfox
The author says this too:

> "We don’t even have micromachines. Mechanical objects on microscales do not
> exist."

------
raquo
(off topic a bit)

I think every Russian HNer laughed out loud when they saw this title. Nanotech
here in Russia is a synonym of enormous and inefficient government spending on
vaporware since they started considering it a "National project". To be fair,
I have no idea how true it is, but it does look very much so, especially with
frequent appearance in news but no details about actual results.

------
Eliezer
_Is_ this guy actually talking about _Nanosystems_? I don't think he read the
same book I did.

I want my 60 seconds back.

~~~
mchouza
He is speaking about Drexler's PhD Thesis, that was the draft of _Nanosystems_
, and it's freely available:

<http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/27999>

But I also want my (120) seconds back.

------
akshayubhat
wow this article is so wrong that I wont even comment about issues with it.

Anyone who wants to read good research in nano tech can browse through this
journal: <http://pubs.acs.org/journal/nalefd>

This is same as saying to someone working on EINACS and early computers that
they are a laughing stock and nothing but huge calculators. Reminds me of an
article by Scott Aaronson : "Whats taking so long Mr. Babbage" :
<http://scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=446>

------
abecedarius
If you follow Drexler's blog and see what he actually says, you'll see plenty
of realistic near-term topics like [http://metamodern.com/2010/08/13/progress-
in-peptoid-toolkit...](http://metamodern.com/2010/08/13/progress-in-peptoid-
toolkit-development/) [http://metamodern.com/2010/05/20/a-programmable-
nanoscale-as...](http://metamodern.com/2010/05/20/a-programmable-nanoscale-
assembly-line/) [http://metamodern.com/2010/03/12/the-molecular-approach-
to-a...](http://metamodern.com/2010/03/12/the-molecular-approach-to-
atomically-precise-fabrication/)
[http://metamodern.com/2010/03/01/ribo-q1-genetic-
manufacturi...](http://metamodern.com/2010/03/01/ribo-q1-genetic-
manufacturing-expanded/)

You can test the OP's picture of Drexler this way considerably more easily
than by studying _Nanosystems_ yourself (which is hard).

------
ajdecon
As someone who's done a fair amount of work in materials science and
"nanotechnology", I have to admit there are some valid points in here.
Drexler-type nanobots are still just as far away as when he wrote his book,
and a large amount of the "nanotechnology" work out there is called such
mainly to get funding.

But the author here overstates his case quite a bit. "Millitech"? There are
many microscale mechanical systems out there, both in the lab and in
industrial applications. Accelerometers are one example; the actuated mirrors
in DLP projectors are another. If there's no microtechnology out there, I know
a lot of MEMS engineers who are going to be surprised to here it.

A lot of what's called nanotech now could have been called physical chemistry
thirty years ago, especially a lot of the "let's put nanoparticles in it!"
projects out there. But there's some pretty real nanotech out there too, even
if it doesn't qualify under the self-replicating nanobots definition. One
example I can think of is the work being done on nanoscale printing--not
lithography, but actual physical printing of materials into nanoscale
patterns. And there's some pretty cool controlled nanoparticle engineering
work out there too.

------
tocomment
Why don't we have anything that can manipulate objects at the nano-scale?
Couldn't we use atomic force microscopes to push some atoms together and at
least make some interesting molecules (even if this process couldn't be scaled
up)?

Also what ever happened to Feynman's idea of building half size remote
controlled arms, which we then use to build half sized of that remote
controlled arms, all the way down to a very small scale? Has anyone ever tried
that?

~~~
asmithmd1
That is one of the authors points -- no one has done self replication on a
macro scale and nanotech just assumes self replication at the molecular level

~~~
Symmetry
That's not really true, we self-replicate all the time (thanks mom and dad).
What we don't know how to do is design things that self-replicate from
scratch, but we do already have plenty of existence proofs.

Also, self-replication is actually easier at the molecular level because all
the parts are perfectly regular.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Somebody just created artificial DNA, put it in another cell, and it self-
replicated. So yes we DO know how to do this now.

~~~
plato
We know how to train the brain of a human being to learn physics (well not
always), but that doesn't means that we understand how that brain really
works.

The life if full of examples of things we know how to use but that we don't
understand. Sometimes it's just impossible to control that things. Think in
the stock market or economics. Chemist has been studying this type of things
for centuries and you can see the result: there are chemical products
everywhere you look.

What the post attack is the concept of creating nanomachines that doesn't
degrade (Cosmic rays! oxidation! temperature!!) and do exactly what we want.

And about the "artificial DNA", it's something so simple... Really! the
problem is in the emergent properties of DNA, proteins and environmental
effects, this is where you loose control. Even nature has problems with that,
life forms die, had cancer...

------
DotSauce
What about liquid glass coating? First step.

"coating one millionth of a millimetre thick – 500 times thinner than a human
hair – can be applied to virtually any surface to protect it against water,
dirt, bacteria, heat and UV radiation."

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-
news/7125556/Liqu...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-
news/7125556/Liquid-glass-the-spray-on-scientific-revelation.html)

~~~
Dylan16807
Other than that being plain old chemistry, the numbers don't line up. 500
times thinner than a hair is 100+ nanometers, not 1 nanometer.

------
nextbigfuture
You did not fund molecular nanotech and let billions of funding go to buying
new buildings at universities and for chemistry research. Molecular nanotech
has been excluded from funding since the 2003 start of major funding. When you
buy your Ford SUV, do you send your complaints about it to Ferrari when you
did not buy a race car? [http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/09/eric-drexler-ralph-
merkle-o...](http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/09/eric-drexler-ralph-merkle-or-
robert.html)

------
Tichy
"Imagining self replicating nanobots or nano machines is ridiculous"

Aren't biological cells replicating nanobots? Or are they bigger than nano
scale?

------
geuis
"Imagining self replicating nanobots or nano machines is ridiculous." The
author does not seem to understand that all of cells of life are nano
machines. If you insist on a definition of a machine being a collection of
gears and bolts, then you must expand your definition.

------
commieneko
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke’s_three_laws>

This seems to cover the topic...

------
AndrewDucker
So, viruses don't exist then?

Because those seem to operate perfectly happily in a nanoscale environment,
manipulating things around them.

~~~
markkat
Yep, and we can make those using bacteria machinery. But, it is actually
pretty different when compared to some of the possibilities set out by
nanotech folk. Viruses passively work in a system where their structure is
intrinsic to the system. Most nano-techs can be better explained as catalysts,
surfactants, anti-bodies, etc. Technologies and phenomenon long studied in
existing fields.

~~~
Tichy
I agree that it seems unlikely that we'll achieve nanobots that are more
complicated than biological cells. An example of an unrealistic idea would be
a remote controlled (or even autonomous) submarine diving through blood
vessels, broadcasting what it sees to the outside world in HD quality.

Still, lot's of interesting things should be possible...

~~~
russell
Such devices are already possible because the scale needed is mm not nano. For
example the devices to do angioplasties are pretty big because blood vessels
are pretty big. There is also a lot of commercial and research work being done
on "remote control" treatment delivery, esp. for cancer treatment. (By remote
control I mean externally guided as opposed to joystick control.)

------
api
There sure is nanotech. It's called biology, and it's five billion years old.

------
JohnIdol
what a bunch of bull

~~~
castis
how so?

