Tag Archives: femtotech

Smaller-than-nanotech science–Star Trek of the 21st century

The structure of the perioic table.
Image via Wikipedia

Reading one of my Google alerts for nanotechnology I stumbled on this article and couldn’t quit reading it (even though I only vaguely grasped tiny bits of the concepts). This guy’s  talking about a science of engineering that’s far below nanoparticles in scale. It’s called femtotech (sounds kind of like a cross-gender geek hard at work building a new kind of computer somewhere).

Take a look at this article and video on how tiny you can go with nanotechnology. A British science outfit transcribes the periodic table onto a guy’s single hair–and says they could fit a million of these tables on a single small sticky note. Now think WAY smaller. Now what was that about angels on the head of a pin…?

Ben Goertzel, an artificial intelligence expert who publishes books and blogs about mind and consciousness, in this article examines the question of whether this femtotech can ever really become a practical science. In other words, can we overcome the inherent instabilities of “degenerate matter” (to get this, you’ll have to read the article in the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies) to be able to make things with it. Check out some of Ben’s other titles: Artificial General Intelligence (Cognitive Technologies), The Path to Posthumanity, The Hidden Pattern: A Patternist Philosophy of Mind, Mind in Time: The Dynamics of Thought, Reality, and ConsciousnessCreating Internet Intelligence, and From Complexity to Creativity. Just reading the titles is exciting.

Ben Goertzel giving a talk at the Singularity ...
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Think this guy might be a good resource for future blogs. Thanks, Ben, for your patience in writing so well for the non-technical reader on these astounding discoveries.

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