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Sashinii t1_j68xcjw wrote

Reply to comment by kalavala93 in Myth debunked: Myths about nanorobots by kalavala93

Atomically precise manufacturing research isn't well-funded, so if it wasn't for AI (which I expect will significantly accelerate said research), molecular nanotechnology would probably take decades to be developed.

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SoylentRox t1_j69cerm wrote

The 'shape of the solution' would look like hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of separate STM automated 'labs', in some larger research facility. (imagine a 1kmx1kmx1km cube or bigger). In parallel millions of experiments would run, with the goal of finding patterns of atoms to serve as each reliable machine part you need for a full nanoforge. And other experiments investigating the rules behind many possible nanostructures to develop a general model.
For every real experiment there are millions of simulated ones, where the AI system is systematically working on finding a full factory design that will be able to self replicate the entire factory, and to find a bootstrapping path of the least cost to build the minimum amount of nanomachinery the hard way, with all the rest of the parts made by partially functioning nanoassemblers.
"the hard way" means probably atom by atom, using STM tool heads to force each bond.

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ecnecn t1_j69dq6f wrote

This tool by SalesForce called ProGen is a LLM that can create new enyzmes from prompts: https://github.com/salesforce/progen

It never learned all the billions of possibilites of tertiary structures or all amino combos, it just interpolates after it learned a few millions from databases. The created / proposed "artifical enzymes" function like their biological counterparts while having derivative structure (molecular configuration) that dont appear in nature but do the same job. This is extremely impressive and I am sure AI will solve greater Nanotech problems by interpolation and pattern recombinations as well.

It may sound super simplistic but you dont need Nanorobots at all with this tool you could create Repair-Enzymes (Membranerepairase ;P etc.) and deliver them with Microrobots or Attached to Nanoparticles that can be controlled by magnetic fields (such tech already exists in cancer research, you bind drugs to iron particles or the drug / iron combo to a nanostructure and control their movement through the body with electromagnetic fields)

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SoylentRox t1_j69ls82 wrote

I was referring to molecular assemblers - a machine that runs in a vacuum chamber at a controlled temperature. It receives through plumbing hundreds of 'feedstock gases' that are pure gases of specific type. It can make many (thousands+) of nanoscale parts, and then combine those parts into assemblies, and combine those assemblies etc.

Everything is made of the same limited library of parts, but they can be combined many different ways.

This makes possible things like cuboidal metal "cells" that are robotic, do not operate in water, and can in turn interact with each other to form larger machines, making possible something like the 'T-1000' from terminator 2. (it probably couldn't reconfigure itself as quick as the machine in the movie, but that doesn't matter since it wouldn't miss when shooting)

custom proteins are for medicine, and won't work at all the same way.

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SoylentRox t1_j69brvx wrote

Agree. Around 2014 I read nanosystems and was pretty enthusiastic about the idea.

But as it turns out, the complexity of solving this problem is so large that human labs just won't be able to do it. Forget decades - I would argue if they couldn't use some form of AI at least as good as what has already been demonstrated, it may never get solved.

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civilrunner t1_j69ncf0 wrote

I suspect all diseases will be curable through biotech and AI methods long before we have large scale atomically precise manufacturing capabilities.

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