It's old and common enough to not be noteworthy on its own. You do still hear about it sometimes, but only in the context of a new innovation or application. Even then it's usually subcategorized.
this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024
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Asklemmy
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It got smaller and smaller until we lost track of it.
This comment is the only reason Iโm here. Every thing else is noise.
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.
I mean... you're surrounded by trillions of perfect nanotech devices. They're called MOSFETs, and they make literally the entire modern world go round.
It's too small to be used by the average human being, which is why you don't see it anymore.
It's also too small to be seen by the average human.
Oh right. I guess you need a microscope too.
MEMS have done wonders
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.
Some Stephen Hawking level intellect is currently in a basement acting like an angry Jim Carrey because his math just chooses not to work.
The sophon are stopping nanotechnology from making progress #3bodyproblem
Stop us harder, san-ti. ๐ฅต
it didn't disappear, just got to small for you to see ๐
Damnit, stole my thunder.
Mine too! Reddit moment where we all think we're original.
Should still be somewhere. Maybe in the carpet or the sofa...
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