This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "The Singularity Is Near" by Ray Kurzweil. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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What are nanobots? How might they change the world? Where is nanobot technology today?
According to Ray Kurzweil, nanobots could make sweeping changes in manufacturing and medicine. He explains how nanotechnology has the potential to overturn our entire materials-based economy and even eliminate scarcity.
Read more to learn about nanobot technology and what Kurzweil sees in our future.
Ray Kurzweil on Nanobots
According to Ray Kurzweil, nanobots have the potential to make massive changes in the way the world works. So, what are nanobots? First, we have to understand the broader field of nanotechnology. Nanotechnology—molecular machines that operate on the smallest scale—can let us build products from elemental base components by putting them together atom by atom.
We’ll discuss the basic premise of nanotechnology, Kurzweil’s assessment of our progress toward achieving it, and some of the ways that molecular machines could both enhance and disrupt our everyday lives.
(Shortform note: The “nano” prefix in nanotechnology refers to a scale that is one-billionth the size of a basic unit of measurement. For example, a nanometer, used to measure the diameter of atoms, is one- billionth as long as a meter. Nanotechnology, therefore, refers to technology that can manipulate matter and make use of structures between 1 and 100 nanometers in size.)
The idea for nanotechnology rose from two separate engineering concepts—hypothetical machines that build copies of themselves, and microscopic machines that can build larger constructs by assembling their molecules and atoms. Kurzweil argues that we know these machines are possible because they already exist inside our cells as the proteins and enzymes that facilitate life. Developing artificial nanotechnology requires duplicating and improving upon systems that nature took billions of years to evolve, perhaps with carbon-based diamond components more durable than biological micromachines.
(Shortform note: Using biological machines as inspiration, current research on making nanoscale devices is exploring the use of DNA as both a structural framework and as a way to control proteins. If successful, this research could lead to the creation of fundamental machine building blocks that could then be linked together in more complex arrangements. In 2022, nanotech researchers working with RNA instead of DNA made steps toward a potential treatment for Covid-19 that could attack any variant of the virus despite its high mutation rate.)
The Rise of the Robots
Kurzweil envisions a tabletop device that can produce trillions of nanoscale robots (nanobots) on demand. These nanobots could use basic chemical ingredients to construct anything you own a software design of, be it a toothbrush, a t-shirt, or a turkey sandwich. The only cost of production would be the cost of raw ingredients—perhaps including garbage for your bots to recycle—plus the cost of the software design for whatever it is you want to build. Nanobots would also have medical uses, such as targeting and destroying pathogens more efficiently than your white blood cells or repairing damaged tissue faster than you could naturally heal.
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Here's what you'll find in our full The Singularity Is Near summary:
- The upcoming technological shift that will change everything
- The revolutions in bioscience, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence
- How Kurzweil's predictions held up over time
