1986 through 2016: Thirty Years of Nanotechnology and Foresight
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Securing a future worth having by advancing understanding of emerging revolutionary technologies
A Roadmap
The lack of a clear development path from current nanoscience and incremental nanotechnology to advanced nanotechnology was, by 2005, identified as a major challenge for advocates of advanced nanotechnology and also a major impediment to serious consideration of the social, economic, and political challenges that advanced nanotechnology will bring. To address this lack, Foresight partnered from 2005 through 2007 with Battelle and the Waitt Family Foundation to produce a roadmap from current capabilities to advanced systems.
The background for the roadmapping process:
Foresight sees the creation of technical and policy roadmaps as key to accomplishing a number of objectives in the nanotechnology field. Roadmaps help to coordinate the thinking and activity of key stakeholders including governments, corporations, research institutions, policy professionals, investors, educators and the media. They provide a framework for articulating the pathways and steps which must be taken to progress from the present state of development to a desired future goal. They illuminate what we should be focusing on today and provide an important basis for defining current research and commercialization agendas. The Roadmaps link on the Resources page provides examples of roadmaps from several industries.
Foresight will be creating our own roadmaps, often in conjunction with partners, as well as highlighting roadmaps developed by other groups that are related to nanotechnology.
The first roadmap to be developed by Foresight will be entitled Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems. Both biological examples and analyses based on molecular physics indicate that productive molecular machine systems can enable economical, large-scale fabrication of products built with atomic precision. However, a daunting implementation gap separates the nanostructures of today from the complex productive nanosystems of the future. How can this gap be narrowed and eventually closed? The development of adequate tools to build these systems will require several intermediate stages, each building on the results of the previous stage. Biopolymers (DNA, protein) can provide a basis for the design and fabrication of atomically-precise, self-assembling composite structures — they can form molecular components that bind and organize diverse nanostructures (nanotubes, macromolecules) to form molecular machine systems. This engineering capability will enable the design and fabrication of an initial generation of productive nanosystems. These in turn can be used to build non-biomolecular self-assembling structures, including a more advanced generation of productive nanosystems. Further steps can lead from the production of 1-dimensional polymers to 2- and 3-dimensional covalent structures, from self-assembly to simpler, mechanical construction methods, and from microscopic systems to desktop-scale factories.
This roadmap aims to provide guidance regarding the challenges and opportunities for productive nanosystems, describing strategic objectives for current research and their relationship to long-term goals for advanced nanotechnology. Its scope includes:
- Current capabilities in design, modeling, fabrication, and testing
- Overall readiness for developing next-generation productive nanosystems
- Strategies for developing more advanced systems
- Potential products of systems at successive levels of development
- Policy issues raised by productive nanosystems
"Productive Nanosystems: A Technology Roadmap" was released by the Battelle Memorial Institute and Foresight Nanotech Institute to the attendees of the conference "Productive Nanosystems: Launching the Technology Roadmap", held October 9-10, 2007, and is available for downloading as two PDF files:
The roadmap was the work of a unique, cross-disciplinary process that involved several dozen participants from several dozen organizations. The work was "Supported through grants to the Foresight Nanotech Institute by the Waitt Family Foundation (founding sponsor) and Sun Microsystems, with direct support from Nanorex, Zyvex Labs, and Synchrona. Working group meetings [were] hosted by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, in cooperation with Battelle Memorial Institute."
The roadmap points the way for strategic research initiatives to deliver on the promise of atomically precise technologies (APT), which "hold the potential to meet many of the greatest global challenges, bringing revolutions in science, medicine, energy, and industry." It represents the "first attempt to map out the R&D pathways across multiple disciplines to achieve atomically precise manufacturing." This is a very substantial document divided into three main parts. The road map proper provides the big picture and policy recommendations, the second part explores contributing technologies in more detail, and the third presents a set of papers, extended abstracts, and personal perspectives provided by the participants in the Roadmap process.
Partial coverage of the Conference and the Roadmap in the last Foresight Update (first series) was supplemented by Chris Phoenix live blogging the conference in the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology blog. An initial effort to follow research directly related to the roadmap identified research from someone who later won a Feynman Prize (Leonhard Grill, 2011 Experimental. A further effort has been made over the years since to cover the most relevant technical contributions in Nanodot posts.
Looking Back, Moving Forward to a World of Human Flourishing Enabled by Advanced Technologies
On the occasion of a Foresight Conference (Foresight 2010: the Synergy of Molecular Manufacturing and AGI that came 20 years and 3 months after Foresight's first Conference, then-Foresight President J Storrs Hall looked back on 20 years of progress toward the 1989 vision of advanced nanotechnology:
The neat, clear vision of nanotechnology we had in 1989 rested on two key aspects that would make it a transformative, rather than merely an evolutionary, technology:
- The ability to construct and observe at the atomic scale, and the construction of machines at that scale
- These machines could be production machinery for more machines, shortening capital formation times and increasing economic growth rates
The reality of nanotechnology is shaping up differently from the neat visions of those times, but shaping up it is. read more …
That 2010 Conference focused on the synergy between atomically precise manufacturing and artificial general intelligence, a synergy that Drexler had emphasized 24 years earlier in Engines and Foresight's founding.
Since 2010 Foresight has held three technical Conferences and participated in two Silicon Valley events devoted to emerging technologies:
Foresight Institute 25th Anniversary Reunion Conference, June 2011
"Illuminating Atomic Precision", January 2013, wrap-up
"The Integration Conference", February 2014, wrap-up, photos
B.R.AI.N.S salon on Human Biology and Freedom, April 2014
Building biological molecular machines as an open source path to advanced nanotechnology
Bench to Market: Idea Evaluation and Commercialization for Product-market Fit, June 2015
Feynman Prizes in nanotechnology were awarded yearly from 2010 through 2016 and Distinguished Student Awards were made for 2012, 2013, 2015, and 2016.
Using the unique Design Shop brainstorming process that Foresight had first adapted for its "Group Genius" May 1999 Senior Associates Vision Weekend (see here, here, and here), Foresight began a series of small, highly interactive 2-1/2 day meetings focused on long-term prospects for revolutionary technologies:
The coming year 2017 will bring back the Vision Weekend and see the launch of the Foresight Fellowship program to support researchers, scientists, inventors and innovators who work on technology whose massive potential is undervalued, who care about improving the state of the world and who have the courage to follow their own path.
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