Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!deimos.cis.ksu.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!nanotech
From: raburns@sun.com (Randy Burns)
Newsgroups: sci.nanotech
Subject: Simulations of Nanotech Tools
Message-ID: <Nov.6.18.08.19.1989.4224@athos.rutgers.edu>
Date: 6 Nov 89 23:08:21 GMT
Sender: nanotech@athos.rutgers.edu
Lines: 49
Approved: nanotech@aramis.rutgers.edu


I finally got around to reading The Engines of Creation 
the other day (my first copy that I got a couple years ago
got lost when I was only 1/4 through it).  I have couple of 
questions:

  1) who is the most thoughtful critic of the feasibility of 
     nanotech? (And don't tell me J. Rifkin!) Have the potential
     problems been explored by anyone with some substantial
     engineering experience and put together in a cogent fashion?

  2) I got the distinct impression that Drexler was expecting some
     substantial breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. Having
     worked at Teknowledge, I'm now rather skeptical of this. How
     important would AI really be to make nanotech work?

  3) What are the likely intermediate steps towards the construction
     of an assembler? I somehow have trouble imagining an existing
     government or corporation funding the creation of an assembler 
     since the consequences are so unpredictable- who might be 
     organized  to put a few million dollars into this? (The best I 
     can think of us maybe one the the more recent microcomputer 
     software millionaires doing it as  a way to be remembered).

  4) What kind of literature has been written on the social consequences
     of nanotechnology?


Thanks!


[1. A week ago the first real conference on nanotechnology was held.
    There was a panel discussion on just this question.  Everybody there
    seemed to see a pretty clear path to nanotechnology.  
   
 2. AI is not terribly important, though we will need an easily foreseeable
    advancement in CAD/CAM and simulation capabilities.  No AI papers,
    for example, were given at the conference.  

 3. Proto-assemblers, as envisioned by Drexler, would be something like
    a custom (chemically synthesized) molecule used as a tip on the
    end of an STM probe, used to do site-by-site catalysis of chemical
    reactions on a workpiece molecule.

 4. There were three talks and a panel discussion on the subject at
    the conference.  I'll be posting summaries and my own comments
    on the whole thing soon.

 --JoSH]