Essay on Nanotechnology and the Future

This growing field of technology has made tremendous progress up until today and it is predicted that in the next 25 years, nanorobots will be used for relevance in life sciences and medicine.

This is making it easier for scientist and doctors to find diagnosis for patients. And find cures for some of the stronger diseases. so could you ask yourself ,in the next decade or two could we just might find the cure to some of the big problem diseases in our society, such as cancer, ALS, and hundreds more. the answer could be right before our very eyes.

Promise and Peril by Ray Kurzweil is an essay about the future of technology and what benefits and risks it will present to the world. It focuses on the fields of genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and robotics, or GNR. Kurzweil wrote this essay as a response to an article Bill Joy wrote called Why The Future Doesn't Need Us. Joy also focuses his article on the topic of GNR technologies, but writes from a pessimistic point of view, as opposed to the optimistic stance taken by Kurzweil. Joy foresees future advances and paints a portrait of a world where technology is ultimately harmful to humans and could possibly challenge the survival of our race. He introduces the concept of relinquishment, where humankind as a whole chooses to dismiss

In his work, “Introduction: Nanotechnology, Society, and Ethics”, CalPoly Associate Professor of Philosophy Patrick Lin writes, “Let’s take a step back and consider any given technology we have created: gunpowder, the printing press, the camera, the automobile, nuclear power, the computer, Prozac, Viagra, the mobile phone, the Internet. Undoubtedly, these have brought us much good, but each has also changed society in important, fundamental ways and caused new problems, such as increased pollution, urban sprawl, cyber-crimes, privacy concerns, intellectual property concerns, drug dependencies, new cases of sexually-transmitted diseases, other unintended health problems, mutually-assured destruction and much more. The point here is not that we would have been better off without these inventions. Rather, we should come to terms that our creations can have unintended or unforeseen consequences” (Lin, n.d., p. 1). Lin’s point goes across the board for all technologies, there will be unforeseen consequences, some will be good and some will certainly be perceived as bad.

Wood, S., & Jones, R. (2003). The social and economic challenges of nanotechnology. Swindon: Economic and Social Research Council.

Technology can be amazing if used in the right way and not used to harm people. The genome project leaves endless results of what is achievable through technology. Could someday, someone build an entire human from xenotransplantation. Could someday, there be a drug where you will never die anymore. The life expectancy from the last one hundred has already risen fifty percent to seventy-five years due to medicine. Who says this can’t keep growing now that it’s almost possible to have a xenotransplantation where you could get a “brand new heart or lungs that were grown in a pig.” Also, the fact that we can now predict what disease a baby is going to or can have by ten weeks after they are conceived, makes me wonder are we ever going to have worry about getting a surprise new health condition in our life.

BZRK, a novel by Michael Grant, is a science fiction story, about the misuse of nanotechnology. In the novel BZRK, nanotechnology is used for negative reasons, by the Armstrong Fancy Gift Corporation. This is an analogy of a world with nanotechnology in a modern day era. The technology developed the ability to make microscopic robots that can enter the human body through natural openings to change structures at a molecular level. They created it for medical purposes, for example, “to send his tiny minions in to kill cancer cells” (Grant, 72). Nanotechnology is being negatively used to take away freedom and chose for human beings. This good technology is used the wrong way to control the human mind and commit murder. Many of people with access

Throughout the 21st and 22nd century, technology was an integral part of humanity’s functioning as a species. It had guided us, shaped us, and created pathways for us in life that would’ve otherwise ceased to exist. The newest innovations are touted as the “latest and greatest” but as we innovated, we also became increasingly interdependent; we intertwined our lives with our tech, and became more reliant on it in the process. When humanity had fully automated their lives, the very electronics that supported their day-to-day routines also posed a hidden risk. In the right possession it was a wonderful tool, but when it fell into the wrong hands it was easily manipulated into a deadly weapon.

Although microscopic, nanobots are complex in structure. According to Jason Mick, staff writer for the technology news source Daily Tech, nanobots are, “A mere quarter of a millimeter, powered by tiny piezoelectric motors, capable of swimming in the human bloodstream” (Mick). The tiny motors are what power the nanobots, but scientists still have to work on ways to control the bots and move them to the

　　　　ARMA poses many advantages on the topic of regenerative medicine but like all technology it comes with its own positive and negative consequences. Although nanobots and stem cells make an amazing pair they can present harmful effects, but the benefits definitely outweigh the negative consequences. This technology can cause some harm and damage when it enters the body.

Envision a world where nano sized robots can burrow themselves into your skin just by touching something or perhaps explode within you on command. Consider perchance, a world were humans have collective thoughts and can generate the processing power of a super computer. Sounds like something out of an awesome dream or a nightmare, depending on how you perceive it. These are just some of the ideas that are presented in transhumanism. Transhumanism can be explained as the belief that the human race can advance past its current physical and intellectual confines through the use of technology (Bostrom, 2014). In the current world we live in, we are limited by a number of factors, many of these include the scientific limitations and the properties of physics. On the other side of the limitations, lay the concepts of morality and ethical issues. Along with those concepts include how this technology correlates to our current world. In the novel The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson, humans live alongside nanobots (and various other technology) in a transhumanist world. In this advanced world, the ideas of morality and ethics are still present within the human race. In many aspects, the morality and ethical issues that humans encounter today are reencountered in this transhuman world.

This excitement can be good, bad or in some cases, misleading. The medical field has vastly made its way into a huge money pit of enduring “technological advances”. But, the advances are sometimes not always what they seem to be. Looking ahead, the questions we need to ask ourselves would be: are we getting to excited too quickly when it comes to the amount of anticipation we have about the advances in the medical field? Is there a chance we look for the potential of these “revenge effects” with it all? While trying to discover an answer to these questions, I feel as though people need to take a step back and realize that we will never know right now, what these advances will do for us in the near future whether its change us negatively or positively. Harmful or safe, watchfulness should always be done when it comes to medical technology. Thankfully, the knowledge and skills used with the equipment, has and will continue to save millions and millions of lives now and in the future. The diagnosis of new vaccines and miracle drugs has increased the existence of this population by about twenty years.

Nanotechnology is found in our every day lives, from the tires on your cars to the medicines that can save your life. Every day this concept improves our lives. It gives us the ability to discover new and helpful things. Research shows that the problems with healthcare will be minimized. Nanotechnology will help solve medical problems by identifying the problem and locating it so that is can be treated. It will eventually give us the technology that only exists in the movies. It will give us the ability to go farther in space and discover if there is truly other life out there. Nanotechnology will eventually help us to do what many only dream of. The one thing that it will give us that will impact us the most is improve performance of many of the things that we buy and use every day. It will widen our perspective on life. Nanotechnology is defined as “Research and technology development at the atomic, molecular or macromolecular levels, in the length scale of approximately 1 - 100 nanometer range. Creating and using structures, devices and systems that have novel properties and functions because of their small and/or intermediate size. It is the ability to control or manipulate on the atomic scale.” (National Nanotechnology Initiative).

Since the beginning of time, the human population has strived to live simpler lives. We have spent generations, creating innovations within technology to ensure our lives would always be more simplistic than those who lived centuries before us. People now have the ability to update their Facebook status’, map the human genome to target strands of DNA that can be disastrous to one’s health, send out amber alerts nationwide, and create plants that are resistant to pesticides. Many fields, such as medicine, law enforcement, and entertainment have benefited greatly from advancements in technology which has inevitably changed the way society operates. However, with the abundance of technology available, society has developed an unhealthy relationship where we now rely on technology too heavily. Technology has rendered our minds incapable of the ability to play, communicate, and live our lives in the moment, despite its positive additions to our society.

Can you imagine a machine so big it dwarfs entire planets? Can you imagine a machine with a single goal, a single purpose? Can you see it, hovering in space, blotting out the stars, so big it bends thought? Can you imagine a machine so complex that no human has ever even tried to understand it, and yet the machine exists because humans built it in the first place?