Page 132 - Nanotechnology an introduction

pottery and textiles—remained almost unchanged for many centuries at least until the early 18th century, largely untouched by the scientific method.
Subsequent attempts to improve them “scientifically” have actually led to a mixture of benefits and disbenefits, and rational expectations of the
impacts of nanotechnology must be tempered by this past history. The Industrial Revolution led to a focus on machine production rather than direct
human needs such as food and health. In this regard a fundamental difference between the Nanotechnology Revolution and the Industrial Revolution
is that the former is consumer-oriented, unlike the production orientation of the latter. The ultimate stage of nanotechnology, productive
nanosystems, in essence abolishes the difference between consumer- and production-orientation. Nanotechnology has the potential of refocusing
the way society satisfies its needs on the more human aspects, which is itself a revolutionary enough departure from what has been going on during
the last 300 years to warrant the label Revolution. Furthermore, the Nanotechnology Revolution is supposed to usher in what I.J. Good referred to as
the “intelligence explosion”, when human intelligence is first surpassed by machine intelligence, which then rapidly spreads throughout the entire
universe. This is what Kurzweil calls the singularity—the ultimate revolution.
12.2. Scientific Impacts

Nanotechnology implies scrutinizing the world from the viewpoint of the atom or molecule, while remaining cognizant of structure and process at
higher levels. Practically speaking, this should have a huge impact on applied science, in which domain the most pressing problems facing
humanity, such as food, energy and other resource security, fall (and which are covered in Section 12.3). Nanotechnology will hopefully give
humanity new impetus to the problems in a more rational way, according to which it is first ascertained whether the problem requires new
fundamental knowledge for its solution, or whether it “merely” requires the application of existing fundamental knowledge.

Nanotechnology is often considered not in isolation, but as one of a quartet: nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive
science (nano-bio-info-cogno, NBIC). Nanotechnology is itself inter-, multi- and trans-disciplinary and associating it with this quartet of emerging
technologies further emphasizes that catholicism.

There is already impact on science from nanometrology, the instrumentation of which is useful in fields other than that of nanotechnology itself.
12.3. Technical Impacts
This section covers the main anticipated fields of applications. Apart from the “big three” (information technology (IT), health and energy), there are
other areas that are also due to benefit from nanotechnology, notably chemical processing (e.g., through better, rationally designed and fabricated
catalysts). This will partly be given consideration under the heading Energy. General purpose material manipulation capability will doubtless enable
the anticipated future shortages of rare elements required for current technologies to be overcome.
12.3.1. Information Technologies

IT applications are often called indirect, since the main impact does not arise directly from the nanoscale features of a very large-scale integrated
circuit, but from the way that circuit is used. Nanotechnology is well expressed by the continuing validity of Moore's law, which asserts that the
number of components on a computer chip doubles every 18 months. Feature sizes of individual circuit components are already below 100 nm;
even if the basic physics of operation of such a nanotransistor is the same as that of its macroscale counterpart, the ability, through miniaturization,
of packing a very large number of components on a single chip enables functional novelty.
There is little difference between hard and soft in this case, because there is a continuous drive for miniaturization and whether a nanoscale
transistor is made by the current top–down methodology of the semiconductor industry or atom-by-atom assembly should not affect the function.
Other developments, notably quantum computing, that are not specifically associated with nanotechnology but have the same effect of increasing
the processing power of a given volume of hardware, will also compete.
This indirect nanotechnology is responsible for the ubiquity of internet servers (and, hence, the World Wide Web) and cellular telephones. The
impact of these information processors is above all due to their very high-speed operation, rather than any particular sophistication of the
algorithms governing them. Most tasks, ranging from the diagnosis of disease to ubiquitous surveillance, involve pattern recognition, something that
our brains can accomplish swiftly and seemingly effortlessly for a while, until fatigue sets in, but which requires huge numbers of logical steps when
reduced to a form suitable for a digital processor. Sanguine observers predict that despite the clumsiness of this “automated reasoning”, ultimately
artificial thinking will surpass that of humans—this is Kurzweil's “singularity”. Others predict that it will never happen. To be sure, the singularity is
truly revolutionary, but is as much a product of the Information Revolution as of the Nano Revolution, even though the latter provides the essential
enabling technology.
Information processing and storage constitutes the most “classical” part of nanotechnology applications, in the sense that it was the most readily
imaginable at the time of the Feynman lecture [56]. The physical embodiment of one bit of information could be in principle the presence or
absence of a single atom (the main challenge is reading the information thus embodied). The genes of the living world, based on four varieties of
deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), come quite close to this ultimate limit and the reading machinery is also nanosized.
Ever since the invention of writing, man has been storing information but the traditional technologies, whether clay tablets or books, are voluminous,
whereas the miniaturization of storage that has already been envisaged creates what is essentially unlimited capacity (including, for example, the
“life log”—a quasicontinuous record of events and physiological variables of every human being).

12.3.2. Energy

Nanotechnology has the opportunity to contribute in several ways to the problem of energy, which can be succinctly expressed as the current
undersupply of usable energy and the trend for the gap to get worse. The principle near-term technical impacts of nanotechnology will be:

Renewable Energies
There is expected to be direct impact on photovoltaic cells. The main primary obstacle to their widespread deployment is the high cost of
conventional photovoltaic cells. Devices incorporating particles (e.g., Grätzel cells) offer potentially much lower fabrication costs. The potential of
incorporating further complexity through mimicry of natural photosynthesis, the original inspiration for the Grätzel cell, is not yet exhausted. The main
secondary obstacle is that except for a few specialized applications (such as powering air-conditioners in Arabia) the electricity thus generated