Various environmental activists claim that if we fabricate nanotechnology devices that get loose in the environment, we’re all going to die. Yawn.

Nano is interesting, but so is biology, physics, chemistry, and geology (excuse me, “Earth Science”). For some curious reason, all these have nanostructures in them already, from viruses to quantum dots to organic molecules to zeolite crystals. Some of these things are dangerous, particularly viruses and certain organic molecules. Our real problems seem to be focused on the behavior of our fellow humans more than on the presence of dust, poisons, and pathogens in the atmosphere.

The generalization of nanotechnology from circuit manufacturing to “everything” means that the smaller, faster, cheaper we’re used to in computers will now appear in food, cars, vacations, hair styles, education, and government services. Smaller food is way overdue, particularly in the restaurants where I eat.

Nano, due to the fabrication technologies involved, fundamentally upsets all kinds of habits, commercial relationships, and language elements. Some of us might recall the late 70's and early 80's, when “tri-state bus” might have meant the Greyhound running from New York to New Jersey to Pennsylvania. If you are the “average guy” you’re idea of building a storage shed is to grab a hammer, some two by fours, a sheet or two of plywood, and some nails. It doesn’t involve sitting down at a Computer Aided Design workstation to render a 3-D image of the shed. At the risk of sounding old fashioned, the “average gal’s” idea of making food is to light up the stove and put something in the pan. We’re already at the point where it’s cheaper to eat out than it is to cook at home, unless you are accomplished at eating all the food you make.

Imagine running down to your home improvement store to buy some light bulbs, and the sales clerk rolls out a sheet of OLED plastic and asks you how many square feet of lighting material you would like. You are used to the idea of going to the clothing store and trying on various items until you get a fit: now you stand in a scanner and then watch your jeans sown together from your exact dimensions and specifications. You go to your favorite hamburger stand and sit down to gleaming silverware on a tablecloth, and order from a ten page menu. . .that is, if you haven’t preordered from your palmtop computer.

The idea of “browsing the isles” is obsolete. Nano enables “manufacturing in place” for things as prosaic as food and as technologically intense as airplane parts. Chemical factories can be fit in the volume of a microwave oven. 3-D printers (layer after layer of material built up from “inkjet” technology) are the solution of choice if vehicle parts are complex amorphous (non-crystalline) metallic or ceramic shapes. “Self assembling systems” means that you inflate a “template”, spray it with the right material, and on deflation you have your storage shed — designed to withstand a direct hit from a Category 5 tornado.

There are usually kiosks at malls that have cameras, scanners, and printers for putting your ugly mug on an ugly mug. One would not expect someone working retail all day to be that technologically accomplished. Now multiply that by all restaurants, clothing stores, home improvement retailers, and car repair shops. Do you trust your mechanic to properly manufacture your brake pads just before they’re installed on your SUV? Is this really different from “glasses in about an hour?”.

The amount of computing buried under this is enormous. For the brake pad to come out right, it is first necessary to sequence the deposition of materials in such a way that the part is fabricated to spec. Then it is necessary to subject the part to non-destructive testing, in order to identify any faults that might have formed during the fabrication run. If faults are found, the machine will have to “remediate” the part by decomposing it back into it’s original constituents. In short, manufacturing, quality assurance, distribution, and pollution control are all in a cabinet you can put your arms around.

There’s no telling how many programmers are out there, but Moore’s law doesn’t apply to talent. Computing costs have been reduced to irrelevancy. Advances in the fabrication of silicon are now advances in the fabrication of anything that is either crystalline or organic, which specifically includes filters and reactors for liquids and gasses, which are themselves neither of the former. The intelligence required to design these processes, operate them, and repair them when they fail rises as fast as the device geometries shrink. We are at the threshold of having one gigabit flash memories. True nanotechnology is one thousand times denser than that, implying a 1 terabit flash memory. Will we need 1000 times as many engineers, chemists, physicists, and programmers as we have now to create and maintain all the resulting technology? Or will the existing number simply be paid 1000 times as much?