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From: josh@aramis.rutgers.edu
Newsgroups: sci.nanotech
Subject: Utility Fog
Message-ID: 
Date: 18 Aug 89 00:53:43 GMT
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Utility Fog -- the Machine of the Future

The origin of this idea was that I have a half-hour commute, and thus
plenty of time to think idly about random things like nanotechnological
applications, but over a background of cars, traffic, etc.  So it occurred
to me to wonder what a nanotech seatbelt would be like.

Suppose you have your car filled with molecular-sized robots, floating
around in the air.  *Lots* of them.  Now when an accident occurs, they
need only reach out and grab the assembler/robot next to them, forming
a 3-dimensional interlocking structure.  And incidentally transforming
the air in the car from a gas to a solid.  Assuming the network extended
down into your lungs and other airspaces in your body, you could drive
into a brick wall at 100 mph without serious injury.

So what else is like a car wreck?  Your house being struck by the shock
wave from a nuclear (or conventional) bomb.  Surround and fill your house 
with a gas of such assemblers, and when the bombs fall, the area around 
your house becomes a low, sloping, *solid*, dome, easily reflecting the
shock wave.  Indeed, it wouldn't be too hard to reflect visible and IR
radiation, since the assemblers are just about the right size to pull
off some serious optical polymorphism:  mirror, transparent, or any
color of the rainbow, just a matter of how far you bend that arm and
whether these conducting patches touch or not...

Indeed, why build a house in the first place?  Just have the gadgets
hold hands in the places the walls are supposed to be.  Like green
grass on the floor, and perching purple pteradons for decor?  Easy.
Any object can be simulated at a level too fine for human senses to
detect the deception.  Instantly, since the individual assemblers are
already there, they just need to grab hold in the right pattern.

This includes machines, of course, at least gross physical machines.
Nanotech-level machinery would either have to be permanent or part of
the assemblers themselves.  Your "personal computer", for example,
might consist of some space-time-slice of the dynamic network running
on all the robots' control computers.  (You might even, if you were
a follower of Hans Moravec, want to download into the Utility Fog.
Talk about having your head in the clouds...)

Whether you do that, or use a somewhat more conventional neural
connection (the Fog would have no trouble obtaining a constant,
detailed electroencephalogram for example) you wind up with a
more-or-less direct control over your physical environment.  Want a
chair, a tiger, a person?  Poof, they're there.  *You* want to be
somewhere else?  Assemblers there link up in the image of you, and
those around you link up in the image of the place.  Telepresence.

The Utility Fog seems to combine the properties of the Robot Bush
and the Krell "monsters from the Id" machine in Forbidden Planet.
Instead of simply controlling the matter around you, it'd *be* the
matter around you, and you'd control it directly.  The only exception
would be items whose actual molecular structure mattered, such as 
food.  These could be synthesized on the fly from atoms handed in 
bucket-brigade fashion from hidden reservoirs.

It would also probably be a good defense against Grey Goo.

--JoSH