X-Message-Number: 12723
From: "John Clark" <>
Subject: The Nanotech Fantasy
Date: Fri, 5 Nov 1999 12:54:19 -0500

In  #12710 On Thu, 4 Nov 1999 Charles Platt <> Wrote:

     >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.

I discussed this same topic with James Halperin when he was writing his
book "The first Immortal" and I gave 6 reasons to support my view that a
Nanotechnology repair line would be fundamentally easier (but still not easy!)
than a macroscopic repair line:

1) The parts a macroscopic repair line uses would be very expensive, the parts
   that Nanotechnology uses, atoms, are very cheap.

2) A macroscopic repair line must use many thousands or millions of different
   types of parts and it must learn how to use all of them. At the most,
   Nanotechnology uses 92 different parts (the elements) but in the real
   world almost everything we know of is made of only about 20 parts, and for
   life about 10.

3) All the many different parts a macroscopic repair line uses are fragile,
   and fragile in different ways, the machine must learn the proper handling
   techniques for them all or it will destroy the parts before it can use
   them. There is no way you can damage the parts Nanotechnology deals with.

4) None of the parts in a macroscopic factory are absolutely identical.
   Despite our best efforts, individual variation still exists, and so we
   must deal with each part slightly differently and compensate for the
   variation in the assembly process if we want the finished product to work
   properly, that often takes intelligence. On the other hand, according to
   the laws of Physics one hydrogen atom is absolutely identical to another
   hydrogen atom and can be treated in exactly the same way.  Atoms have no
   scratches on them to tell them apart.

5) Nanotechnology can manipulate matter without ever leaving the digital
   domain. You may have to deal with a rod 27 carbon atoms long, or 28 atoms
   long, but you never have to worry about a rod 27.5601334 atoms long.
   A Macro assembler wouldn't have that luxury when it tried to build a seat
   cover from a sheet of leather.

6) Most of the parts a macroscopic repair line uses would have to be very
   complex and the ways they interact with other macroscopic parts would be
   even more complex. Think of the windshield of a car, it interacts poorly
   with the engine block, and even with the windshield frame the interaction
   must be managed with great skill or you'll have a disaster. Nanotechnology
   is like building with Lego blocks, you can build structures of arbitrary
   complexity, yet there are only a few different types of blocks and they
   interact with other blocks in only a few different ways. It's easy to
   develop an algorithm to examine any Lego object and then build a duplicate,
   it's very far from easy to find an algorithm that would do the same with the
   complex parts in a car.

        John K Clark      

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