X-Message-Number: 12710
Date: Thu, 4 Nov 1999 10:24:49 -0500 (EST)
From: Charles Platt <>
Subject: The Nanotech Fantasy

While I am as interested as anyone in progress to reduce the scale of 
computer components, surely I should not have to remind anyone of the 
very obvious distinction between hardware and software. Moore's Law has 
never been applied to software; indeed, the idea is ludicrous (unless we 
are measuring the steady increase in code bloat).

Achieving nanoscale hardware is Step One. Almost certainly, it is the 
easy part, relatively speaking. Making it do useful things, safely enough 
to be tolerable, will be much harder. 

Industrial robots routinely assemble cars that are all basically the same 
on a particular production line. Robots do not, and cannot, and will not 
for the foreseeable future, repair car which are wrecked in many 
different ways.

I'll believe in brain repair by nanotechnology just as soon as I see those
car-repairing robots. In the meantime I remind everyone that virtually no
substantial breakthrough has been made in coding efficiency during the
past 50 years, and progress in robotics remains frustratingly slow.
Certainly I foresee nanomachines building very useful single-purpose items
for us, such as virus killers. But it's absurd to leap from this to the
idea that repair of one of the most complex, least thoroughly understood
biological systems will happen soon afterward, just because we acquire
tools that are small enough to do the job. 

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