Nano Future 2030

Let’s say it’s 2020. The previous year you heard they had created the first miniature nanofactory. Labs across the country have received copies of the machine. The copies are so small you need a microscope to see a tiny, blurred dot. Thankfully, research is ramping up as the machines spread through the research and business communities. We have waited long enough. Several labs are working on enlarging the nanofactory by building larger and larger subsystems and assembling them into larger versions of the nanofactory.

You’ve seen the stories. A hospital here, a research lab there, curing cancer with the first nano probes from these machines. A frantic effort is being made to get the first nanobots into hospitals everywhere. We are sure versions of the first nanofactory have found their way into offshore labs. The main problem is a lack of trained doctors. Someone has to control the things, it’s not magic. Maybe later versions will be smarter. But to begin with these things are remote control, cancer killers. Someone must monitor their behavior, their location in the body and do this for 6 to 48 hours or until the tumor is greatly reduced.

The probes work best on tumors that have not spread beyond the original site in the body. In the later stages of the disease, this first version of the cancer killer is not as effective since the probes are still controlled by a doctor. When you have thousands of small sites through out the body, the work load overwhelms the doctor’s ability to direct the nanobots. We need to get autonomous nanobots as quickly as possible.

That brings up Artificial Intelligence or AI. The only way for a nanobot to seek out and destroy the millions of individual cancer cells in a late stage disease, is to give it the ability to sense, reason, remember and adapt to its environment. That requires a goal directed mind inside the nanobot. Presently, most nanobots are directed from outside the body where fast computers control their behavior and the doctor can overrule or control the behavior of an individual nanobot. This slows down the cure dramatically compared to having millions of nanobots operating together to find and destroy cancer cells.

Some people still worry about technology running amok. It’s far worse to watch your mate succumb to cancer when a more advanced nanobot would have saved their life. In the end it is a matter of designing the machine properly or not. The idea of a machine with a mind does not automatically imply it harbors a desire to revolt and conquer the planet. There is no reason to build a mind with those goals and desires – or the ability to develop those desires. What we need is a limited mind that is eternally focused on simple problems that we define.

Have you not focused so powerfully on a problem in your life that you did not think of anything else for a considerable period of time? Anything as simple as getting the top off a jar or a search for word in a document can illustrate the type of mind we need. It is focused, limited to one subject, and has no inclination to think of anything that is not directly connected to the defined problem. That is the sort of mind we need in a nanobot. It does not know anything about the world outside your body. It understands blood cells, for example, in great depth. It does not think of you as a opponent which it can take over and run because that is a thought from a horror movie and has nothing to do with the limited job this nanobot understands.

The FDA has not permitted completely autonomous machines to this point. They will have to bend that rule before we can cope with all forms of cancer. Given a dedicated mind that is focused on body repair, we can hope to see autonomous nanobots within 5 years.

We like to think our hospitals are some of the best available. I suspect they are. But that is a relative measure. If you measure our medical knowledge by a higher standard, then they fall short. That higher standard is the ability to cure any disease without casing harm. You can’t do that unless you understand the body and have the tools to sense all biological data and to completely repair any organ in the body. That’s often accomplished in a less complex arena like computer repair. There, a skilled technician can measure all the things that matter and can replace parts until the device works. In a sense, that is what we need to do with the human body, have the tools to measure and have the tools to repair. The medical job is so much more complex, but there is no data that says it can’t be done. I’d like to see medical science move from this period of experiential practice and enter a period of actually knowing what is going on.

For example, in the mid 90′s my mother had high blood pressure and they discovered she needed a heart bypass operation. She could expect heart problems within the next year and could possibly die. I lived in Texas and had injured my back and was on the floor for six weeks. She and my sister came to visit before she went into the hospital. I gained 5 pounds that week. I got to see her and I’m glad my back was injured else I would not have had that week with her.

The doctor operated and the bypass went as planned. When it was time for her to awake, she continued to sleep. Her brain was dying.

During the operation, a blood clot had broken loose from the site of the heart operation and traveled to her brain. The blood supply to her brain was restricted. Some sections of her brain died. And no one knew a thing until she failed to awaken after the operation. As part of her brain died, her brain swelled inside her skull. More blood was squeezed off, more brain died.

In a few months she recovered enough to awaken. She did not recognize her daughter or anyone else. She did not have control of her body. She could not breathe, speak, sit, stand, feed herself, or do anything else for herself. She could still write with one hand although she could not control her eyes to look at the paper in her lap. And she was still a courteous person who greeted visitors although she did not know her old friends. A lot of what she wrote was not rational or sensible. She was a lost fragment of a person trying to cope with a world she did not understand. She lived 9 months. Her heart was strong, the operation had been a bittersweet success. She could have lived for twenty years in this condition. They decided physical therapy might help and she was admitted to a local hospital. One night the nurse did not tie her hands down. While unsupervised, she pulled the breathing tube from her throat and was dead when they next checked on her.

Was that advanced medicine? Not as I see it. The doctor was skilled. He said this was one of three tragedies he had had in his career. I don’t hold it against him at all. He was a good practitioner of the art as it existed in his day. But he had few tools of consequence. He did not know what was going on in his patient until it was too late. He did not even know she was dying.

From my engineering career I understand the need to know what is going on when you design or repair a complex system. You need to have tools that let you measure every important variable. To the extent that you can not measure the physical parameters, you are not designing, you are gambling. And it is a terrible way to design any product for production. The same thing is true when you try to repair a complex system like the human body.

Nanotechnology will provide both the sensors and the repair tools.

You could, and some certainly will, call this science fiction, but it is based on my 18 year engineering career, my one year designing and animating of Dr. K. Eric Drexler’s nanofactory, my lifelong love of science and science fiction and my three years writing science fiction. But my goal is to paint as accurate a picture as I can of what will happen over the next twenty years as it relates to our life and the changes we will experience due to the use of nanotechnology. I will only say what seems reasonable or highly possible, given my experience. You will not hear about ‘beam me up’ transporters, but more about how you will maintain your health and how you will prepare dinner in twenty to thirty years.

If you are young, you will easily live until nanotechnology is in wide use and the benefits are available. But if you are older there is a legitimate question about when it will get here. The earliest predictions are 15 to 20 years. The longest predictions reach 50 years. See my Nano & Nature Blog at http://www.nanofuture2030.com/?postid=6 for a more detailed analysis of the timeline. If you can hang on for 20 years, there is a good chance new medical knowledge will give you 10 more years. If you then reach 30 years, you have a good chance to be here when nanotechnology delivers the tools to fix almost all common diseases. So, don’t be so ready to toss in the towel.

I’ve heard people say that by 80 they will be ready to go, that they have no interest in living far beyond the average human lifetime. I suspect they never knew or have forgotten what youth and health are all about. I’ve certainly experienced the downside of growing old. My back is good for little more than walking around. My hair is thinning. My skin has wrinkles where it used to be supple. And these are minor things compared to what some people have to cope with. I can understand the desire not to lay around a nursing home for ten years eating cafeteria food and watching daytime TV in a bathrobe, and THEN die.

But think about most 18 year olds. They are certainly not ready to face death with anything but fierce resistance. What’s the difference? At 80 people can feel tired and the struggle of life may have worn them down. I think that if we can repair your body’s energy production systems, rebuild your digestion to pick up all the nutrients you need, safely boost your production of growth hormone, repair sun-induced skin damage, regrow your hair, build muscle mass, boost bone density and clean out the gunk from your brain and lymph system, you might feel better. In fact, you might feel close to the way that 18 year old feels. (Assuming you are a lot older than 18

Hi, my name is John Burch. I’m primarily an animator with a great desire to share thoughts on the future.

I’ve had the privilege of working with Dr. K. Eric Drexler in 2004 and 2005 on his nanofactory. I’ve been following the nano field for 15 years and it is good to see progress being made. I started writing a book on the impact of Nanotechnology on everyday life. It became clear that I should move it to the web and post the chapters in smaller bite-sized morsels. So, this blog should grow. And I will try to illustrate as many details as possible, although a picture takes a thousand times as much work as words.

Please feel free to comment, positive or negative.
Please do not post comments that are not civilized or on topic.
John