Nanobots could be transmitting your thoughts to a cloud by 2030.
By Veena Ramachandran:
Virtual assistant devices are in nearly every house nowadays. More affectionately known as Amazon Alexa and Google Nest, these devices occupy homes and respond to voice commands. If Alexa and Google Nest were released in 2014 and 2016 respectively, where will AI be by 2030?
According to some futurists, your body could be the host to thousands of tiny nanobots to prevent illness or even transmit your thoughts to a wireless cloud. These nanobots will travel inside you, finding pathogens before your body can do so.
So what are nanobots? Nanorobotics refers to the emerging field of designing and building robots ranging in size from 0.1 to 10 micrometers or are near the scale of a nanometer (one nanometer is about 10 times the size of a single atom, and 10 times smaller than the width of your DNA). Although it may seem unreal, nanotechnology has been around for quite some time. Nobel-laureate Richard Feynman, often referred to as the father of this field, described a theoretical process in 1959 that would allow researchers to manipulate singular atoms or molecules. This process would serve as the basis of nanoscience. However, at the time, microscopes weren’t advanced enough to see individual atoms. Finally, in 1981 scanning tunneling microscopes (STM) were developed, and achieved a level of precision and magnification that hadn’t been witnessed before. Now, researchers were able to look into individual atoms and the idea of nanotechnology seemed possible.
Given all this, a number of challenges are still present, and additional development is needed before we can use these advancements. Some researchers predict around 10 years for these challenges to be conquered and to begin using nanobots for certain surgical procedures. However others believe the sheer amount of money needed for this research seems wasteful, as it can be used in different places. Robot-assisted surgery is already more expensive than traditional methods, and the addition of nanobots is likely to require more money.
Futurist and Google director of engineering, Ray Kurzweil, is convinced that humans and nanotechnology will merge someday. In 2019, he told Engadget:
"The scenario that I have is that we will send medical nanorobots into our bloodstream. One application of these medical nanorobots will be to extend our immune systems. ... These robots will also go into the brain and provide virtual and augmented reality from within the nervous system rather than from devices attached to the outside of our bodies. The most important application of the medical nanorobots is that we will connect the top layers of our neocortex to synthetic neocortex in the cloud."
If the fantasy of nanobots becomes a reality, will you be one of the first to take the first steps to becoming a cyborg? Are you open to this type of change?
Image credits: K_E_N/shutterstock.com
Bibliography: https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/nanobots-will-be-flowing-through-your-body-by-2030
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