Word: chipping
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...that chipmakers double every 18 months or so the number of transistors that can be crammed onto a silicon wafer the size of a fingernail. They do this by etching microscopic grooves onto crystalline silicon with beams of ultraviolet radiation. A typical wire in a Pentium chip is now 1/500 the width of a human hair; the insulating layer is only 25 atoms thick...
That does not, however, mean that we will one day, as a species, submit to the indignity of the chip--if only because the chip is likely to shortly be as quaint an object as the vacuum tube or the slide rule...
From the viewpoint of bioengineering, a silicon chip is a large and rather complex shard of glass. Inserting a silicon chip into the human brain involves a certain irreducible inelegance of scale. It's scarcely more elegant, relatively, than inserting a steam engine into the same tissue. It may be technically possible, but why should we even want to attempt such a thing...
...disability, acquired or inherited. If I were to lose my eyes, I would quite eagerly submit to some sort of surgery that promised a video link to the optic nerves. (And once there, why not insist on full-channel cable and a Web browser?) The military's reasons for chip insertion would probably have something to do with what I suspect is the increasingly archaic job description of "fighter pilot," or with some other aspect of telepresent combat, in which weapons in the field are remotely controlled by distant operators. At least there's still a certain macho frisson...
MOLECULAR MEDICINE Streaming through the body by the billions, nanobots could chip plaque from arteries, gang up on bacteria and viruses, scour toxins from the bloodstream, repair broken blood vessels--and dozens of jobs doctors haven't dreamed...