One of the startups that fizzled out was Nanorex, which is where Nanoengineer was made. Thankfully they were open to releasing the source code and version control repository when they decided to shutdown. The results of that are here: https://github.com/kanzure/nanoengineer
Because positional, precise molecular manufacturing still doesn't exist, I have been increasingly interested in using DNA synthesis (using phosphoramidite chemistry) to combinatorially build proteins that lock together in pre-defined shape based on ligand-specific binding affinities between the blocks. The Nanosystems book left out a lot of biology that can be hijacked to help out goals like these.
Our lab is working on ways to screen large libraries of designed proteins for engineered orthogonally interacting libraries. The thought would this would be a start of a modular resuasable library for molecular self-assembly. If you are interested, we're definitely hiring!
Yeah I really enjoyed your 2014 review of large-scale DNA synthesis techniques. I have been funding a project similar to POSAM except instead of DNA hybridization arrays the goal is genome synthesis. Basic summary is use inkjet printheads which can print 100s of millions of drops per second.
I also blatantly steal your diagram on the following page, so fair warning.
As I see it, proteins are our best bet of making custom nanomachines. They're proven to work. The hard part is understanding protein folding and predicting protein function from the amino acid sequence.
Ideally we can find a way to engineer proteins that have known shape and conformations and binding, without having to increase our knowledge about protein folding or DNA folding. Maybe certain amino acids fold more heuristically-predictably than other amino acids? And ligand binding affinity is much simpler to engineer compared to the computationally expensive molecular dynamics simulation of protein folding. There's probably other options here, too.
There is the fact that proteins are constrained to function as part of organisms that are capable of self-replication. This constraint means that proteins (mostly) are not very stable wrt oxidisation and UV degradation, and only work properly in aqueous solution.
It's anyone's guess how significant these constraints will be from the viewpoint of developing artificial protein machines (maybe rapid (bio)degradation is a good thing!), but there's definitely large swathes of chemical design space outside of arbitrary chains of known amino acids, and we might be able to discover entire classes of molecular machines that don't have the drawbacks of bioinspired proteins.
Probably. But to do that, we need to be able to do work on that level; existing proteins seem to be just about enough for us to run proper experiments and eventually bootstrap production of nanocomponents better suited for our needs.
We had such arms for decades already. Just because nobody bothered to make a laundry folding product out of them doesn't mean we can't do it with a robot arm. For better or worse, many (if not most) interesting projects aren't viable as business products.
You see: poor people are accustomed to doing these chores by themselves, while the rich can always use their paper money to hire naturally occurring biological robots.
Yeah I guess that is pretty crazy. OTOH, there was a study of a virtual machine where someone filled RAM up with random opcodes and running the machine forward in time brought about self-replicating programs because of random self-copying sequences of opcodes. So maybe self-replication is simpler than we've been making it out to be?
(To be clear, the first "self-copying sequences" didn't look like self-replication in CoreWars or whatever, but evidently they did observe the construction of self-replicating programs over time.)
Doesn't nature have a lot of inherent stochasticity down at the molecular level that makes it very difficult to do positional, precise molecular manufacturing, due to everything jittering around randomly?
Well if you have stiff enough molecules, then the distance a given molecular structure moves due to thermal fluctuations can be smaller than an angstrom. In addition, if one cools said system down, thermal fluctuations become less of a problem.
Actually assembling individual atoms together to make stuff is still very much an unsolved problem. Freitas' work on mechanosynthesis tooltips shows that we may need to control more than just position to precisely react atoms and that 'fat fingers' is still very much a problem.
The ribosome, DNA replication complex and ATP-synthase (and other complex enzymes) qualify as precise molecular manufacturing, if you relax the definition a little.
Ribosomes are already being engineered, see expanded genetic code.
How far could we go by modifying existing biological molecular machines? Probably quite far.
Nope, I wasn't involved with Nanorex, just the recovery of the files and then "maintaining" the software ever since I learned about the company's imminent death.
I think it's because the examples are so plentiful.
Big leaps forward seem to broadly cause people to either significantly underestimate them (the home computer mid 1980s), or to significantly overestimate their near-term impact (the state of all things stem cells 15 years ago).
It occurs almost every time there's a big headline about growing organs, curing HIV/AIDS, curing various forms of cancer, curing alzheimer's, and so on. It occurs with almost everything to do with gene therapy right now.
Robotics has been under an almost constant state of overestimation for more than a century, while the industry has still delivered amazing technology in that time. Artificial intelligence has been treated the same way for decades. I think these two instances are heavily caused by fear, people are projecting far beyond what's rational.
You see it in batteries a lot. Solar suffered from it for decades. Storage / memory seems to see the effect in action with nearly every breakthrough (the gulf between the date of first public awareness and reaching a commercial economy of scale representing that typically huge gap of time).
I think the "plentiful examples" exhibits very strong confirmation bias.
Yes, exponential growth trends result in overestimating short-term, and underestimating long-term, changes.
However very few phenomena show persistent long-term exponential growth characteristics. For all the obvious reasons. The growth rapidly becomes ridiculous and/or unsustainable.
Just to flesh out my parent's point, while the internet existed and was widely available in 1995, its impact over 3 years was far less impressive than expected, but its impact over 20 years is far more impressive than expected.
The internet "bubble" is the surest sign of this. Many people thought that everyone would buy groceries via the internet by the late 90s. Grocery delivery via the internet can be a good business, but it wasn't ready 3 years after web browsers got popular. The experience wasn't good enough, the cost of operation was too high, and not enough people were there to use it.
Today though, I can speak a few sentences to a wireless black glass box I keep in my pocket, and groceries will arrive at my house in the hour. Beyond that though, I can instantly feel a tingling buzz when someone on the opposite side of the globe wants my attention. Major celebrities have lived their entire careers on the internet. World leaders converse and issue statements via a short-message public-ish broadcast system we can all see instantly. Multiple currencies powered solely by shared public work and cryptography are in wide use. Major mathematical discoveries have been made by free associations of mathematicians in blog discussion threads.
That's just the tip of the iceberg, but it's already far more profound than online groceries. The effects of the internet over decades are essentially unfathomable, but we were far too optimistic about them in the short term.
Information technologies are the exception to many diminishing returns rules. This has several implications.
Non-informational technologies often don't see such trends. Where they do they often manifest network effects (telephony, railroads, autos and fuel/road/repair infrastructure), or ...
Nominally non-information goods with very high informational content benefit from Moore's Law growth. This can include very high tech manufacturing or control systems (aircraft engines), R&D and process control (pharmaceuticals), an similar goods.
Even within high-eech and information goods, where the rubber meets the road, improvements are limited and the Jevons law limits overall efficiencies. Healthcare spending has exploded over the 20th century. Life expectency gains have been modest. Aircraft and ship speeds are lower today than 40 years ago. Greater data access runs into limits of human attention, and the fact that there are only 1,440 minutes in a day. An iPhone is in some regards amazing. In others it merely replaces pen and paper, books, radio, and live performances of entertainment.
I love that curve and thinking about how it maps to other "futuristic" tech.
Space flight is probably coming out of its trough of disillusionment right now, as is renewable energy (solar/wind).
Genetic engineering is deep in the trough with anti-GMO sentiment, the supposed failure of the human genome project to pay out, and general paralysis in the field. Nuclear power is also probably still deep in the trough with Fukushima and us still being stuck on overgrown submarine reactors.
The interesting thing is in research at least, 'nano' is starting to deliver. We've had artificial molecular switches, motors, transistors, and other components for years but we have not been able to put them together. Now we're starting to organize these components to make 'machines' and systems. Not very complicated machines, but machines nonetheless.
A great example of this is rotaxane containing metal organic frameworks. A rotaxane is molecule consisting of a ring on a rod. Make your molecule just right and you can get the ring to move back and forth using electric charge which allows you to store bits. Recently, there has been success of organizing these rotaxanes spatially by putting them in a self-assembling molecular space frame type structure called a metal organic framework. This is getting us closer to making ultra-high density data storage that just self-assembles. Some well respected researchers(not Drexler) are even starting to seriously consider robot arms capable of moving individual atoms.
There is even a name for this sort of research: supramolecular chemistry. In short, 'nano' is coming back, it's just not going to be called nano.
I feel the term "nanotech" is meaningless. Everyone piled into the term and it has became too broad an umbrella and includes what one would usually describe as "materials science", "biochemistry" and "molecular biology" among others. "Data science" feels like another similar, ultimately meaningless umbrella term.
The way electronic Turing-complete machines resulted in a new industry segment with market leaders dedicated to vertical integrated products in the field is very unusual.
Usually it happens a lot more like LASERs. There is no giant LASER segment of the economy. There are just lasers in barcode readers, medical gear, machine tools, lasers in robots, lasers in survey gear, lasers in hand held power tools, lasers in pointers, all manner of things not sold by LASER Inc a giant conglomerated manufacturer or even made by a LASER economic segment of dedicated LASER companies.
My gut level guess is Data Science will be more like LASERs and less like computers, as will nanotech.
Everyone will be doing nanotech, they'll just call it plain old ore refining, or plain old medical care, or plain old IC manufacturing, and they'll be no Nanotech Inc company or even market sector.
The counterargument is that as more and more industries start to do their engineering at the nanoscale (whether coming from above, as in materials and electronics, or from below as in biochemistry and pharmaceuticals), the physics of their systems will become more similar. This will cause their design rules to also become more and more similar, so it's plausible that you could end up with a small number of players possessing engineering expertise that can be applied to a very wide variety of sectors.
I don't think it's a counterargument, it's more a prediction for the late-game of manufacturing technology. For the mid-game, I suspect it will be like it's with chemistry, agriculture, pharmaceuticals and biotechnology nowadays - there is no unified sector encompassing all the areas above, but there are big companies, like Monsanto, 3M or DuPoint, doing all four at once, exploiting the relative similarities of the fields.
I would totally disagree with the term "Data Science." It maybe used loosely but it certainly is more than statistics and more akin to science. Any inter discipline study has these issues.
It is science since you are taking data to answer a question. If your not answering a question or using a scientific method it falls short.
I think the danger with opaque terms like "nanotech" and "data science" is they are so ill-defined that they become Rorschach tests. This is very good at attracting buy in--people see what they want to see and the get cover by joining a larger movement and get to ride the trend's growth. But then eventually everyone's doing "nanotech" or "data science" and people need to use other terms to clarify.
Data science is already much more than statistics. That's why the term was invented in the first place.
Additionally, your definition of science seems pretty lacking. Merely using data to answer questions isn't what defines science. Some questions are scientific and some are not.
Yeah. This is the basic point many people decrying nanotechnology as a pipe dream are missing - that life itself is nothing but nanotechnology, only one that we didn't design and we don't know how to control yet.
Clearly it is possible to use self-replicating microscopic things (cells) to produce macroscopic objects. Life does indeed prove this.
But, you know, it takes billions-of-years evolved plantlife about 20 years to produce a simple structural element able to support maybe a thousand lbs and 20 feet long (ie, to grow a tree). We notably do not see anything in nature that does "molecular assembly" from microscopic cells to differentiated macroscopic objects in a time-scale of less than months.
Well, having already a working process, speeding it up will be easier. In nature, you don't really have dedicated nanoassemblers that do only structure scaffoldings with no other considerations - they have to support a whole organism. So when, for instance, growing a skeleton, you need it to go slow enough that the more complex parts like veins and nervous system can keep up. But if we needed biology to grow us a particular object, we can learn how to put the relevant process on overdrive and ditch the rest.
Also, even if the initial version of nanotech worked as fast as tree grows, you could still put a lot of products in parallel, so for most intent and purposes, after few months of waiting, you'll be getting new copies daily. We do that a lot with traditional manufacturing today.
> But, you know, it takes billions-of-years evolved plantlife about 20 years...
Well, evolution is really stupid and really slow. Having brains, we can now iterate many orders of magnitude faster, so I wouldn't worry. Comparing things to evolution is comparing to the simplest and dumbest possible process imaginable that still works.
They're really different points of view, with different goals. There's studying how life works at various levels, and there's designing systems from the ground up. Both complementary!
The only technology that has consistently grown at an exponential rate of doubling each year is IC/computing. It is utterly unreasonable to expect other sciences and technologies to exhibit similar growth. There doesn't exist a Facebook for nanotech because nanotech doesn't grow and scale like computational resources.
Now, if you consider nanotech as a new term for some or all of the traditional fields of materials science and pharmaceuticals, then it is bullshit to claim that the hype died out. The traditional materials science companies soldier on and continue to grow at very impressive rates (stocks returning an annual 10-30%): P&G, Dow, Du Pont, 3M, etc.
The barrier for entry for startups is too high. Forget about building a manufacturing line, running a manufacturing line for a couple of days can cost in the order of millions of dollars. It is hardly a thing that one can do in one's parents' basement or garage. That is how most materials science-y and pharma companies have all been in the business for 50-100 years or more. Naturally, the successful companies in this area will be rather few in number.
I don't know that you could measure it with something like Moore's Law, but aerospace capabilities grew at an astonishing rate at the beginning of the 20th century. From the Wright Brothers' first powered flight in 1903 to the first commercial flight in 1914 to flying around the world in 1924 to fighters and bombers and rockets in WW2 to breaking the sound barrier in 1947 to landing on the moon in 1969 . . .
That sort of progress over 70 years strikes me as very comparable to the progress made in computing since the 1950s. Small wonder the science fiction writers of the previous generation thought we'd have flying cars by now!
I would expect to see such an explosion of capability in a brand new field, in a society that had a lot of resources to dedicate to exploring it. It could happen with anything we really, really cared about, I think. Aerospace and computing both saw tremendous amounts of commercial, scientific, and military research during their accelerated growth phases.
I don't know about nanotech. I'd say that sort of energy in this generation seems to mostly be going into building our society a hivemind. And I'm not gonna say that's wrong.
IT happened. It's much more sexy nowadays, providing immediate and tangible results, so media are all hyped about it. Maybe in a way it's better they shut up about nanotech - now we can do some real progress while having less frauds competing for research money.
"Nanotechnology" was originally about building "assemblers" to move atoms around and build structures at the atomic level. Then the name was take over for surface chemistry technologies, and then it was used to describe finely divided powders. Hence the declining interest in the term.
I'm tempted to say, thank god, now that all the idiots are out of the way the real science can get funded, tested, and refined. But that offers up a question, does a whole lot of popular buzz really help out a field, or does it usually just turn out to be noise? Is there a measurable "actual progress" delta during times of increased popular attention and is it positive?
I did my PhD work on colloidal semiconductor quantum dots right at the peak of the nano fad. I would say that popular buzz doesn't help or hurt, it's mostly noise. Academically, we're expected to spend some time on outreach, so if your field is in the public eye at the moment it does make outreach easier.
Believe it or not, the hype among scientists was even worse than among the public, to the point of (in my opinion) hurting good science. Everyone was shoehorning "nano" into their proposals, regardless if their work was legitimately nano[1], and that really hurt the SNR for manuscripts and grant proposals.
[1] I define nanotechnology as dealing with something sufficiently small to access properties not seen in bulk materials. For many materials, restricting one or more dimensions below 100nm will lead to side-dependent properties. There was a lot of stuff during the Great Nano Hype that was claimed to be nano, but was say 500nm—that would be "submicron".
As an alternative medicine/new age wellness woo moneymaker, any product at all that's labelled "colloidal semiconductor quantum dots" would clean up. (I'm thinking little colourful stickers, perhaps with a bit of glitter in a varnish suspension.)
I decided when I heard about the maple water fad that if I ever Break Bad, I'm going to sell snake oil patent medicines to the Whole Foods crowd. Walking down their alternative medicine section was… inspirational. I especially liked the colloidal silver[1].
of course there is, you just don't hear about it. Incremental progress is not always news-worthy, but it certainly matters and is happening all of the time.
I'm not talking about slow, incremental progress. I'm talking about the times when the new field is in actually in the spotlight. Does anything get done?
The only real example I can think of where huge amounts of public attention actually got results was in aerospace. We actually did get to the moon. After that, I struggle to think of examples.
I would say the moon landing garnered public attention that had much different incentives than other industries, like nanotech. The moon landing was not just about advancing technology, but also overshadowing Russia's first entry into space with Sputnik, and showing our superiority.
Even so, getting to the moon was not something that public attention and funding just 'made happen'. Luckily, it happened to coincide with the invention of microchips and computer power shrinking down enough to fit in the nose of a shuttle. All of this required incremental progress that wasn't always in the limelight. Sure, the actual moon landing phase was, but not everything leading up to it.
Also, I would say Tesla is very much in the spotlight and making progress because of it, as one example.
I just finished "The Forever Peace", a book in-part about with the economic implications of nanotech. Using nano-forges, machines that take raw materials like carbon as input and can turn them in to diamonds, America is able to gain an extremely huge foothold.
I found it extremely interesting, and finished it in 2 days.
If you haven't already, check out "The Diamond Age" as well. Different story but deals with the sort of "idealized" form of nanotech that people dreamed of when the concept was getting a lot of hype in the 1990s (along with socio-economic conflict and plain old sci-fi, action, and adventure).
There's also the classic of Eric Drexler, who coined the very term "nanotechnology", "Engines of Creation". I highly recommend the read. It's very good at extrapolating possibilities and issues, though I personally don't agree with the conclusions about 'defense against nanotech attacks' outpacing the offensive capabilities.
The Diamond Age is a great book. Neal Stephenson is known for researching concepts he writes about, so the technology present in the setting is based on Drexler's thesis.
I wouldn't call it "a dream" in a sense that it's utterly unrealistic; physics says that these systems can work.
Nanotech "assemblers" are coming in a sense, but they got the scale wrong. They're called 3d printers and they operate at the macro scale, but they are not really any less disruptive.
As far as true nanotech goes, we've had it for about 4.5 billion years. It's called biology. You are basically made of nano-assemblers holding hands. Genetically engineered biology and "wet artificial life" are engineerable nanotech, but if you want to see Turing-complete universal assemblers in action right now go plant a tree.
In other words, I sort of think nanotechnology is a useless neologism for biology and bioengineering and I doubt that anything other than carbon-based systems are going to do much better than biology... and those are basically synthetic biology.
Where's the disruption exactly? Everytime I look at the 3D printing scene its a bunch of neckbeards printing Star Wars figures and other useless knick-nacks. What industry has cheap 3D printing attacked? The argument seemed to be "Oh we'll make spare parts and such," but that never happened. It was supposed to make a new market, but seems to have completely fizzled out.
Yeah but that has absolutely nothing to do with home 3D printers that make cheap junk using plastic. We've had 3D printing, in some form or another, for decades for industry.
If someone is interested in real technical description of molecular manufacturing, you may read Eric Drexler's "Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing and Computation".
Most parts of this book can be read on the author's website http://e-drexler.com/d/06/00/Nanosystems/toc.html , and if you know how to google you can find the whole book.
The book contains a careful physical analysis of molecular machines. The technical material is unchallenged to the present day.
I guess they're calling it "3D XPoint" now, which is a shame because memristor has such a cool retro-future sound to it. 3D XPoint sounds like what a bunch of bored marketing execs would whip up over a short lunch.
While I'm at it, what ever happened to 3D printing? It was supposed to change everything, except its expensive and everything it makes looks like piled spaghetti. The resin/liquid based printing never took off and the few that did were troublesome and crazy expensive for materials.
Or that quantum computer that company was selling, except it was huge and cooled with liquid nitrogen and no one could prove it was doing quantum anything.
I'm also skeptical of the new VR fad. Yeah FPS addicts will probably love it, but grandpa and grandma aren't putting giant tissue boxes on their faces to watch a movie or skype with the grandkids.
All the cool stuff from just a year or two ago are either dying, forever in the "we're working on it" stage, or were just vaporware. Nano hype has been here from the 80s and, unsurprisingly, has gone nowhere.
3d printing has been around since the 90s, but just recently did the public start to hear about it. It didn't change everything, but now 3d printers are affordable for hobbyists. Aviation companies are using it to make weird ultra-light parts for that can't be made any other way, but save huge money on fuel costs. Various companies are using it to make low production runs of widgets directly because it's not worth the cost of injection molding/CNC machining.
The whole industry is about to be disrupted though. HP has a new machine coming out in 2016 that does the same thing as industrial 3d printers except faster, cheaper, and in color. They have probably made a bunch of 3d printing processes obsolete. These machines might be fast and cheap enough to put in every kinkos in the country to locally produce moderate value plastic stuff(action figures, keychains, overpriced as seen on TV products), offer customized products(3d selfies, your face on an action figure), or consumer 3d printing.
In short, big companies are starting to get into the 3d printing game. The days of kickstarter 3d printers and 3d printers made by a bunch of guys in a garage are over.
Actually, Intel has been almost totally opaque about what 3D XPoint is, except it's not a phase change media like that is used in optical disks, and per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10366907 "We learned that 3D XPoint used a bulk material property change (rather than a stored charge) to address each cell."
Maybe, but you would have said the same thing when I was skeptical of practical gaming applications of the Kinect. Now, its not even bundled with the Xbox and pretty much dead. Nintendo can't sell motion games anymore either. Four years ago this all would have been unheard of.
I'm not buying into hype, I'm simply pointing out that if your grandparents aren't willing to do something, that doesn't mean you won't be willing to do it. We're not talking about an age-dependency, but a culture-dependency. I couldn't care less about commercial VR.
Companies that claimed to be doing "nanotechnology" in 2005 or 2015 are basically fraudulent. "Nanotechnology" is a well-defined term: it means, as kanzure said, "positional, precise molecular manufacturing." Unfortunately, lots of gold-digging hucksters jumped on the term to tout anything involving small particles, extending the term to the point where it could plausibly be used to describe the process of smoking meat.
I've read a lot about graphene recently (including claimed breakthroughs [1] by IBM and Graphene 3D Lab regarding the cheap production of carbon nanotubes). Perhaps some of this tech just requires more patience to fulfil its promises?
Nanotechnology couldn't come to fruition since nano-fabrication at this point in time just doesn't exist in an effective form. Having to manually assemble a complex nanomachine one molecule at a time isn't viable. Until there's a way found to make the machines assemble themselves from the simplest possible unit then we're going to be stuck with just nanomaterials which is great IMO. Nanodust has many uses and we're discovering many dangers (health hazards) now.
"And while Facebook, like the most celebrated of Silicon Valley’s startups, went from idea to ubiquitous product in less than a decade, most nanotechnology applications taking much longer to find a market."
Does anyone, even here on HN, think that it is really absurd to make these comparisons? Comparing Facebook with an advanced technology? Come on.
> "Does anyone, even here on HN, think that it is really absurd to make these comparisons? Comparing Facebook with an advanced technology? Come on."
It is a bizarre comparison, but the author appears to be using it as a colloquial way to describe a runaway success, which makes sense even if the industries are not directly related.
From the limited knowledge I have on nanotech, I'd suggest the closest it's come to a runaway success so far has been in superhydrophobic coatings. If a food-safe and long-lasting superhydrophobic coating was discovered, I could imagine the market would be huge. Consider plates/bowls/cutlery that you'd never/rarely need to wash up, that could take off massively.
That's sort of the point, isn't it?: Showing how the market's idea of a "successful megabusiness" is sort of incompatible with the fundamental science required to enable that stuff at all.
Really, we're all still riding the 1970's VLSI wave, finding new stuff enabled by that basic technology. But we still feel the need to talk about whatever is coming next.
I think everyone is stuck wondering how to make the tooltips from the tooltips paper: http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/nanotech/Optimal%20tooltip%2...
All of that was motivated by goals of making nanofactories like shown in this eye candy video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEYN18d7gHg
Because positional, precise molecular manufacturing still doesn't exist, I have been increasingly interested in using DNA synthesis (using phosphoramidite chemistry) to combinatorially build proteins that lock together in pre-defined shape based on ligand-specific binding affinities between the blocks. The Nanosystems book left out a lot of biology that can be hijacked to help out goals like these.
Long-term we might be able to coerce enzymes into creating molecular machines anyway: https://groups.google.com/group/enzymaticsynthesis