Nano Blogosphere Comments on Spectrum's Singularity Report

The Foresight Instituteâ''s Nanodot blog has commented on Richard Jonesâ'' â''Rupturing the Nanotech Raptureâ'' and has rightfully pointed out the somewhat problematic assertion contained in the contents page leading to the article that states â''Tiny robots that can fix all our bodily flaws sound lovely, but they violate the laws of physics.â''

Nanodot illustrates how other statements of Jones seemingly contradict this position. While I blog for Spectrum, I am not involved in their editorial team, so I can only venture a guess that the subheading was not written by Jones. So, this is not so much self-contradiction, but rather Jones simply doesnâ''t hold this rather polemic position.

Surely Jones expresses many of the problems in physics for diamondoid mechanosynthesis such as van der Waal force and Brownian motion, but he presents these as rather significant challenges, among others.

On the other end of the nano blogosphere comes TNTLogâ''s response to Nanodotâ''s comments, which wonders about the Foresightâ''s own contradiction in now arguing that â''the diamondoid mechanosynthesis approach is only in the very early stages of computer simulationâ'' while ten years ago it was presented rather as an advanced technology.

However, despite all the debate, it seems that discussion of mechanosynthesis has become a little less contentious over the last few years at least since the rather polarizing debates between Richard Smalley and Eric Drexler back in 2003.

Maybe science, which is inherently skeptical, will continue to be the guiding principle as opposed to dogma. Perhaps one of the more encouraging examples of this has been last yearâ''s release of a Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems, which was accompanied at its release by Drexler himself conceding that even if self-replicating assemblers may be feasible, they may not be the best method for achieving APM, and that further refinements of the vision are to be expected.