Why Our Brave New Future is Getting Smaller
and Smaller
Source: Information
Technology
November 24, 2000
CULPRITS we cannot see will have a big impact on our world of the
near future. In the next 10 to 15 years, "the wall" of micro-electronics will be
superseded by devices on the biological scale.
A computer that processes trillions of times faster than every
computer ever made combined. Butterfly wings used for color displays.
Semiconductors that make themselves on your desktop. Nanoscopic powders that
soak up oil spills. Artificial muscles that control machinery. Paint that
displays moving images. Reprintable paper.
Nanotechnology.
Australian researchers are working in broadly allied disciplines
to pole vault over American, Japanese and European competitors. But as always, a
lack of funding from private and public purses could stymie Australia's biggest
potential industry.
In the United States, President Bill Clinton devoted $500 million
to primary research into nanotechnology - much of which will be spent to mimic
Australia's CSIRO multi-disciplinary approach, says researcher Dr Vijoleta
Braach-Maksvytis.
A co-inventor of the biosensor, a device for finding things in a
biological environment, Braach-Maksvytis sees universes of possibilities in a
petrie dish. She advocates the establishment of a nanotechnology network to
bring together Australian researchers and developments.
Braach-Maksvytis says we should leave it to nature to do the
prototyping for us - after all, it has several billion years already invested.
Just as man learned to fly by watching birds, so we can develop
faster, cheaper and cleaner processes by imitating biology.
"Our current research cannot deliver on all those demands,"
Braach-Maksvytis says.
"We're hitting the wall and there's no idea how to get around it.
"Nature's worked out a lot of the problems we're grappling with."
Braach-Maksvytis says the top-down approach of assembling devices
from big building blocks will be supplanted by self-assembly at the atomic
scale.
"Nature works from the bottom-up - take a handful of ingredients,
fats and DNA, add a pinch of salt and water you have us, trees and scallops,"
she says.
"Looking at nature for the fabrication method can do away with a
lot of the problems we face." Braach-Maksvytis envisages a world where
semiconductors assemble themselves on a desktop, where ultra-high resolution
color displays are modelled on butterfly feathers, and carbon dioxide is eaten
by artificial photosynthetic devices. A world where deep space research would
take a quantum leap forward with self-assembling antennas used in satellite
dishes, and DNA could be used as wire - "those molecules can form a gorgeous
variety of structures ... for computing".
Quantum computing researcher Dr Michelle Simmons says we are only
a few years from developing a computer that processes faster than every computer
in existence. It could compute problems that would take today's computers longer
than the lifespan of the planet.
Today's computers, based on 50-year-old architecture, consist of
lots of switches that are either on or off. Quantum computers have an uncanny
ability to be in many states at once - on, off, and kind of on - so they compute
very much faster.
Simmons, the Queen Elizabeth II Research Fellow at the University
of New South Wales, says programming quantum computers will require a similar
radical shift in thinking. Software toolkits may lag behind hardware.
She says current micro-scale technology has about 20 years before
it comes to a screeching halt.
Quantum computers have applications in computing weather patterns
and genetic engineering. But the change will be as profound as the introduction
of the silicon chip, Simmons says.
"In a classical computer, power grows linearly. In the quantum
world ... every time you add a Q(uantum)-Bit you're doubling power," she says.
Simmons' group will spend the next five years developing a two
Q-Bit computer that can be scaled indefinitely to bigger systems.
She says a 30 Q-Bit computer - more powerful than today's most
powerful supercomputer - could be developed within the next 20 years. Scientists
are even talking about a million Q-Bit computer, she says.
Casting a weather eye over the warm glow of optimism is associate
professor John Weckert, from Charles Sturt University. The applied ethics
researcher says "we're crazy if we don't draw on the last 2000 years of
philosophy" as a guide.
Weckert sees privacy problems becoming "more prolific" as data
mining becomes accelerated through the use of quantum computers. Monitoring and
surveillance of citizens through sensors embedded subcutaneously and tracked by
satellite is a real possibility. Advances in prosthetics may mean we become more
machine and less human, he says.
"There's the potential for these particular issues becoming more
severe as computers become smarter and smarter and faster and faster," Weckert
says.
"If we have all sorts of other devices implanted in us we may not
know what is human."
by Nathan Cochrane
http://www.it.fairfax.com.au/hardware/20001128/A36081-2000Nov24.html