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. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=12710