Back in the dawn of the 21st century, the American Chemical Society founded a new journal, Nano Letters, to feature letters-length papers about nanoscience and nanotechnology. This was coincident with the launch of the National Nanotechnology Initiative, and it was back before several other publishers put out their own nano-focused journals. For a couple of years now I've been an associate editor at NL, and it was a lot of fun to work with my fellow editors on putting together this roadmap, intended to give a snapshot of what we think the next quarter century might hold. I think some of my readers will get a kick out of it.
4 comments:
"... papers about nanoscience and nanotechnology ..." Is quantum entanglement an essential feature of nanoscience? Is string theory necessary for fully understanding quantum entanglement? Please google "guendelman milgrom youtube".
All the stuff you guys write about and project into the future are real and productive. However, I just read an interesting retrospective by the master science writer Philip Ball about what people were thinking about/hoping for/terrified about for nanotechnology:
https://aeon.co/essays/no-suffering-no-death-no-limits-the-nanobots-pipe-dream
I had completely forgotten about Drexler and grey goo. Prediction is hard, especially about the future.
Good read indeed about Drexler c.s.
On the other hand, warnings of what could happen may not always be worthless.
With Drexler most scientists did have some misgivings.
While the singularity won't be reached imo, I do think AI can turn out to be far more disruptive to life as we know it than nanotech was thought to be. Thinking about what could happen is not always wrong. We should have done so when we started burning fossil fuels ..
Agree that even though AI has persistent weaknesses, it is going to disrupt vast swaths of human activity, much good, much not.
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