What is the most powerful part of your personal computer? Eric Drexler, founder and chairman of the Foresight Institute, thinks the answer could lie in the gunge that is stuck behind some of the keys. Well, the gunge isn't smart but it contains bacteria that pack an astonishing amount of digital information into a tiny space.
"Nature is giving us a little hint here," says Drexler. We may not be able to use bacteria to perform our computations, but they clearly show that molecular machines can exist, and can be put together quite cheaply. "Everything in your body was built by molecular machine systems," he adds.
Molecular machines could also be used to build tiny computers, atom by atom. And if each computer takes up less than a cubic micron, then you have room for at least a billion of them on your desktop.
Things that work at this sort of scale are in the field of nanotechnology, a term Drexler coined in the 1980s. He wrote about the idea of molecular manufacturing in a scientific paper in 1981, then published a popular book about the field, Engines of Creation, in 1986. It is now available as a free download from the Foresight Institute website.
A molecular machine that can construct almost anything can obviously be used to make a copy of itself. This should be the key to an explosion in productivity. The less entertaining corollary is that it could perhaps turn the biosphere into another 1980s idea, "gray goo".
Although not much seems to have happened in nanotechnology over the past 20 years, the Americans are funding a lot of research and development. Speaking at the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies conference in Santa Clara last week, Drexler put the figure at $1 billion a year. The US government's National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) accounts for about $700 million.
And after 9/11, one of its important new areas of research is "the use of nanotechnology for chemical-biological-radioactive-explosive detection and protection."
In the UK, the Institute of Nanotechnology is tracking the field. It is offering a seminar next month on the convergence of nanotechnology and biology, just before the EuroBiochips 2003 conference.
Intel and other chip manufacturers, in their quest to put more and more transistors on small pieces of silicon, are already working at the nanotechnology level. Intel's latest 90-nanometer chip manufacturing process uses "nanoengineered silicon", and the company is doing long term research on carbon nanotubes and silicon nanowires. However, chips made that way could be a decade away.
Whether the microchip industry will move to molecular machine manufacturing remains to be seen. But Drexler has no doubts that "the future of digital systems is molecular, and the future of the material world is digital".
Doom or utopia? "I don't know," says Drexler. "I don't think we can say. The future is open and depends on the choices we make. Let's try to make the right ones."
Useful links
Engines of Creation
www.foresight.org/EOC
Eric Drexler talks about A World with Advancing Technology [MP3 file]
www.foresight.org/SrAssoc/spring2002/audio/Drexler.mp3
Gray goo
http://info.astrian.net/jargon/terms/g/gray_goo.html
www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0142.html
US NNI
www.nano.gov
Institute of Nanotechnology
www.nano.org.uk
Center for Responsible Nanotechnology
www.crnano.org
EuroBioChips 2003
www.eurobiochips.com
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