Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!purdue!gatech!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!nanotech From: josh@aramis.rutgers.edu Newsgroups: sci.nanotech Subject: Utility Fog Message-ID: Date: 18 Aug 89 00:53:43 GMT Sender: nanotech@athos.rutgers.edu Lines: 60 Approved: nanotech@aramis.rutgers.edu Utility Fog -- the Machine of the Future The origin of this idea was that I have a half-hour commute, and thus plenty of time to think idly about random things like nanotechnological applications, but over a background of cars, traffic, etc. So it occurred to me to wonder what a nanotech seatbelt would be like. Suppose you have your car filled with molecular-sized robots, floating around in the air. *Lots* of them. Now when an accident occurs, they need only reach out and grab the assembler/robot next to them, forming a 3-dimensional interlocking structure. And incidentally transforming the air in the car from a gas to a solid. Assuming the network extended down into your lungs and other airspaces in your body, you could drive into a brick wall at 100 mph without serious injury. So what else is like a car wreck? Your house being struck by the shock wave from a nuclear (or conventional) bomb. Surround and fill your house with a gas of such assemblers, and when the bombs fall, the area around your house becomes a low, sloping, *solid*, dome, easily reflecting the shock wave. Indeed, it wouldn't be too hard to reflect visible and IR radiation, since the assemblers are just about the right size to pull off some serious optical polymorphism: mirror, transparent, or any color of the rainbow, just a matter of how far you bend that arm and whether these conducting patches touch or not... Indeed, why build a house in the first place? Just have the gadgets hold hands in the places the walls are supposed to be. Like green grass on the floor, and perching purple pteradons for decor? Easy. Any object can be simulated at a level too fine for human senses to detect the deception. Instantly, since the individual assemblers are already there, they just need to grab hold in the right pattern. This includes machines, of course, at least gross physical machines. Nanotech-level machinery would either have to be permanent or part of the assemblers themselves. Your "personal computer", for example, might consist of some space-time-slice of the dynamic network running on all the robots' control computers. (You might even, if you were a follower of Hans Moravec, want to download into the Utility Fog. Talk about having your head in the clouds...) Whether you do that, or use a somewhat more conventional neural connection (the Fog would have no trouble obtaining a constant, detailed electroencephalogram for example) you wind up with a more-or-less direct control over your physical environment. Want a chair, a tiger, a person? Poof, they're there. *You* want to be somewhere else? Assemblers there link up in the image of you, and those around you link up in the image of the place. Telepresence. The Utility Fog seems to combine the properties of the Robot Bush and the Krell "monsters from the Id" machine in Forbidden Planet. Instead of simply controlling the matter around you, it'd *be* the matter around you, and you'd control it directly. The only exception would be items whose actual molecular structure mattered, such as food. These could be synthesized on the fly from atoms handed in bucket-brigade fashion from hidden reservoirs. It would also probably be a good defense against Grey Goo. --JoSH