Excerpt from article:

"A common trope of science fiction is the depiction of nanobots, small robots moving in the body fixing wounds or healing diseases. Unfortunately, we will never be able to create these types of machines. The mechanisms inside a robot a few nanometers large will instantly melt together, while the small metallic arms and claws seen in science fiction would bend and stick to the surface of the particle."

^ can anyone with an interest in nanorobotics qualify this statement?

I kinda want little microbots fixing my wounds and keeping me young. Lol.

Naonobot in real life are called microbes or cells.

They will still be very useful to detect cancer and diseases.

Also never say never, people who use the word never nearly always get proven wrong.

I reckon a more modern idea should be designer cells and ‘viruses’ which work in our favour.

Touche.

The reality will be that, when we're in control of arranging atoms, all illnesses will be cureable.

True. I'm actually surprised he said never. The field still feels like it's in its infancy.

Arranging atoms? How's that going? I think we're just getting good at doing some things with stem cells.

There's no laws of physics preventing nanobots from going into the body and repairing damage. There's plenty of papers and some videos describing the nanomedicine process in detail. Robert Freitas talks about this with Ray Kurzweil in this video.

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.

You know that not every technology you can think of it actually possible according to the physical laws of the universe, right? There is no way to manually "arrange atoms."

Everything (other than light) is made of atoms, so what do you think theoretically prevents people from creating technology that would be capable of rearranging atoms?

What about a chemical reaction? You’re fucking arranging atoms!

You need something the size of an atom that is more rigid/more manipulatable than atoms. Too bad everything is made of atoms so there is no such thing.

You know that is not what they are talking about.

The scanning tunneling microscope also moves single atoms.

As I've already said: the scanning tunneling microscope moves single atoms, and that's a technology that's existed for decades, so what you're saying is wrong.

I am thinking working nanotech will have more in common with biology and chemistry than mechanical or electrical engineering.

I don’t think you know how a STM works.

I'm well aware of how scanning tunneling microscopy works.

Here's a quote from the article "Atom Manipulation with the Scanning Tunneling Microscope":

"Manipulation of single atoms with the scanning tunneling microscope is made possible through the controlled and tunable interaction between the atoms at the end of the STM probe tip and the single atom (adatom) on a surface that is being manipulated. In the STM tunneling junction used for atom manipulation, a host of interactions that depend on the electric potentials between the sample and probe tip, the tunneling current, and tip-adatom distance come into play in the atom manipulation process".

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I am all for it, medical nanobots, if they could help me avoid undergoing colonoscopy. But there must be downsides to nanobots. I never hear anyone talk about them. Except for gray goo scenarios.

Yeah, I have no particular thoughts or strong feelings on nanobots (they would be great obviously but the medical revolution will happen with or without them), but the use of the word "never" makes him look like a tryhard at best and stupid at worst. Look at me I'm such a tuff skeptical badass I tell it like it iz, get bent you starry-eyed optimists holy shit I'm so fucking cool

Idk about this article. It's not very detailed just drops an opinion and leaves with no explanation for that opinion.

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.

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.

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)

With nano-scale 3d Printing I am pretty sure we could make some kind of small robot

I dont know the article is very short and just two small blocks.

https://arsl.ethz.ch/research/acoustic-microrobotics.html

The famous ETH Zurich University is already testing Micro and Nanorobot models.

That's a really bad short article. Actual nanobot designs don't have "small metallic arms and claws", they are not made of metal but dense covalent macromolecules (usually "diamondoid", ie substituted diamond-like lattices), or some variation on graphene.

Proposals by Drexler, Freitas, Merkle and others in the field (as opposed to Sci-Fi BS) generally have been tested with the same ab initio quantum chemistry and molecular mechanics tools used by computational physical chemists to study and design real chemical reactions, later corroborated with experimental data.

Unfortunately, much of the introductory material is very dated, especially in style and presentation. Probably a good place to start for the technically inclined in Drexler's MIT dissertation, which is the basis for the book Nanosystems (one of the best sources), and can be freely downloaded here:

https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/27999

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Some chapters of Nanosystems are also available online:

https://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/nanosystems.html

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Then you can check out some videos on current experimental research at the Foresight website.

https://foresight.org/technologies/nanotech-molecular-machines/

Freitas's and Merkle's websites look very dated but they contain some interesting links.

http://www.rfreitas.com/

http://www.ralphmerkle.com/

I hope that helps.

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.

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

Would it be fair to say they don't know what they are talking about in this article?

This is true, and I'd hope that superintelligence finds some quirks to exploit molecular nanotechnology.

However, I will say that I'd strongly recommend people not get excited about "Santa Claus machines" or femtotechnology or computronium. The laws of thermodynamics probably aren't changing regardless of intellectual capability, and there's not any physical way to realize these things.

Yes, I see no other way to put it. To be fair, this is more the rule than the exception. I've seen just as bad or worse from people who should have (and probably did) know better. The fact that big bucks from the National Nanotechnology Initiative were at stake sure didn't help. See, for instance:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drexler%E2%80%93Smalley_debate_on_molecular_nanotechnology

That's a reasonable question. There are a few, very limited experimental examples of positionally controlled chemical reactions. Regarding more general capabilities that may be available in the future, here's, for instance, an interesting and relevant peer-reviewed theoretical analysis:

http://www.molecularassembler.com/Papers/TarasovFeb2010.pdf

That link is from Freitas's website. You can also see the abstract in the publisher's site, but the full text seems to be paywalled:

http://www.aspbs.com/ctn/contents-ctn2010.htm#v7n1

https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/asp/jctn/2010/00000007/00000002/art00002;jsessionid=132a35vdij2o1.x-ic-live-02

I call BS, this just means it's an engineering problem. It is silly to assume we are omniscient enough to absolutely know what may not be discovered in the future.

I have a very detailed scientific book written by Erik K Drexler who goes into exactly how they would work with detailed maths and diagrams together with simulations. You can believe some gummy bear on the internet spewing their uneducated opinion or you could keep an open mind based on this book written by an accomplished man. I know which side I am leaning.

I'd love to read it.

Btw I didn't say I believed him, in fact I don't want too. I just wanted the forums opinion.

This is it: https://www.amazon.com/Nanosystems-P-K-Eric-Drexler/dp/0471575186/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=2NH4KYQJHLBCC&keywords=Drexler+nanosystems&qid=1674955358&sprefix=drexler+nanosystems%2Caps%2C348&sr=8-1

Looks like there is one copy left in stock. It is really heavy going tho, you need at least uni level education and probably a lot more.

Edit to add, ISBN is: 0-471-57518-6

Don't have a uni education but I'm a cloud infrastructure engineer. I'll probably be fine.

I've been thinking about this for a while and the only logical conclusion that I can come to is that death will always be inevitable. I think I'm going to kill myself to get it over with now if I'm being honest. Because no matter what I do or how long I live it's still going to end abruptly when I'm not ready, so I don't see any real point to continue living further.

No, we know that the laws of physics can't be broken.

Yes but it is not like cells arent mechanical in nature. A cell is filled with molecular machines and with advanced synthetic biology it is possible to design the unevolvable.

For example cells can secrete proteins to nanostructure 3d inorganic substrates with unique properties, but nature only makes limited use of such. Humans can engineer novel proteins to create novel nanostructures for arbitrary purposes.

There have also been critiques of diamondoid nanomachines. For example from Richard Jones author of Soft Machines: Nanotechnology and Life.

In any case it is not like we need mechanical diamondoid arms to fix cells. Cells recycle individual molecular machines and organic molecular machines are capable enough to edit genes and fix dna.

Besides outside the brain you can carry wholesale cellular replacement and even wholesale tissue and organ replacement.

Also the diamondoid machines are likely highly susceptible to some types of radiation. A cosmic ray dislodging an atom will like gum up the gears. In space which is a high radiation environment the diamondoids are likely to breakdown by the millions.

I think they could work on specialized vacuum environment but like Jones I also suspect theyd have problems in environments like inside the human body.

In any case it is likely unevolvable molecular machines through advanced synthetic biology are just as capable if not even more capable than the theorized diamondoid machines.

Says who?! Things change all the time first it was Newton's laws of physics then Einstein's....

You'll be fine but it's a long, dry book. I'd start with "Engines of Creation", which is way more fun to read and provides all the basic notions. The Wikipedia entry mentions an "updated version" (from 2007), feely available online. The link is to a web archive of a pdf, but it works. I only recall reading the 1986 version, which I think is still very much relevant despite its age. A more recent introductory text by Drexler is Radical Abundance (2013), but I haven't read it. I say, read Engines, then skim through Nanosystems and keep it for reference, and get deeper into sections you find particularly interesting or where some frequent doubt or objection is addressed.