Most are probably too young to remember but nanotechnology was supposed to be the most super amazing thing ever.
It split into two.
The “very small scale structure manufacturing” part is alive and kicking. You are holding about a trillion perfect nanoscale devices in the palm of your hand right now.
The “we will make tiny robots that live in your body and fix you” club was always selling snake oil-and they knew it. The technology they were pushing just does not work at atmosphere temperature and pressure and immersed in oxidizing not quite neutral pH fluid.
Thankfully, there a much better way to make tiny machines that live in your body. That’s making/adapting/causing others to make proteins that do what you need them to do. Proteins are essentially bio-robots that can manipulate their surrounding by changes in their folds (conformation), for example by exposing binding sites in reaction to something binding to another binding site.
TLDR: nanotech is one of the largest industries in the planet. A lot of promises were made by idiots in the nineties, but biotech, another huge industry, has picked up the slack very well.
And if we count protein research as nanotech, afaik folding research is having its heyday.
It’s amazing what can be done with CRISPR and that branch of technology.
it didn’t disappear, just got to small for you to see 😉
Damnit, stole my thunder.
Mine too! Reddit moment where we all think we’re original.
It is still around, only the buzz around it died
- intensely_human ( @intensely_human@lemm.ee ) 22•7 months ago
It got smaller and smaller until we lost track of it.
I’m not sure which era you’re talking about exactly. Graphene and carbon nanotubes can’t currently be made both big and perfect, and are lame when imperfect. Nanoscopic robots have problems with sticking together and jumping around due to brownian forces, and also are just very hard to build. Chemical-based robotics has been a crapshoot because quantum chemistry is hard. The last one has been tackled with machine learning pretty well recently, where natural biological analogues exist.
As a result, about as far as we’ve gotten is nanoscopically fine dust. It has uses, but it’s only a technology the same way pea gravel is. It’s looking like a lot of the stuff nanobots were supposed to do is going to fall to biotech instead.
Love the phrase “quantum chemistry is hard” because it makes it sound as if it’s difficult for the average person, but I can only imagine it means that the smartest people alive are struggling with it haha.
Even worse. It’s possible some of it can’t be done with any reasonable amount of classical computation at all, regardless of skill or knowledge. Quantum computers are badly overhyped, but that’s one thing they could definitely be good for.
nanotechnology was supposed to be the most super amazing thing ever.
Like blockchain, 3d-printing, cloud and machine learning?
I feel like passionately arguing with you about 3 of your 4 examples
It would be possible to argue about all of them, as each has genuine use cases. Just not to the extend they were praised during the hype.
I fully agree
I’d like to argue why 3 of the 4 are absolutely amazing
Don’t forget AI!
“Machine learning” is what people who do AI for a living call AI.
I’d suppose people who work with nano machines don’t necessarily call them that either.
But it’s the buzz word that has been used to push it’s corresponding bubble
While we’re at it, how about cybernetics, too?
We can literally give sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, and make the lame walk again.
We also have the very cyberpunk distopian problem of people being left with implants that are no longer supported by the manufacturers [2] [3]
At least we don’t need Neuropozyne (Deus Ex).
Btw, what happened with the nanotubes-coated contacts that neurons are all too happy to connect to?
Prostetics have gotten extremely advanced in the last 20 years. People are controlling and getting real feedback from replacement limbs.
Yeah, both nanotech and cybernetics are everyday things. Still very expensive, but both have mostly reached enough milestones that they go by whatever their more specific puposes are. Like prothetics with feedback aren’t called cybernetics because cybernetics is too broad a term.
Unfortunately, even our most advanced ones are more limited than a lot of people think and have a high rejection rate of around 44% that’s never talked about. Some do genuinely like them, but many say they still prefer the relatively simple body powered prosthetics, or none at all.
This could change as advancements are made, but as of now they’re a bit of a scam.
Remember that old 80s future movie where a guy with no cyber mods was trying to compete in a fighting competition in order to prove that it was better to be fully human?
So we’re on the slope of enlightenment with nanotech, probably just past the peak with neural nets, and maybe right in the trough with cryptocurrencies. (The latter are up right now, but prototype tech Bitcoin still leading the pack tells me we haven’t arrived at any kind of balanced perspective)
It 'asent dissapeared guvn’ah, it’s jus very small innit
Micro-electro mechanical systems (MEMS) are extremely successful. You have them in your phone and lots of other devices. It turns out semiconductor manufacturing techniques could be leveraged to make some useful devices but that is about it. There is obviously a lot happening at these scales in biology, semiconductors, materials science etc but the grey goop of nanobots turned out to be a fantasy based on extrapolations that don’t seem to hold up well with physical materials thankfully. One less thing to worry about. Now we only have climate change, pathogens, war etc. Hopefully the machine learning bubble will blow over in a similar fashion, genuinely revolutionary in some areas but increasingly difficult/uneconomical to scale into others.
MEMS have done wonders