Word: nanobot
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...benefits, such as vastly expanded wealth, longevity and knowledge. We will have the ability to overcome most diseases, clean up the environment and alleviate illiteracy and poverty. However, deeply intertwined with these gains will be profound new risks. New concerns will include such questions as "Who is controlling the nanobots?" and "Whom are the nanobots talking to?" For example, organizations (e.g., governments, extremist groups) could distribute trillions of undetectable nanobots that could then monitor, influence or even control our thoughts and actions. Nanobot self-replication run amuck could have the potential to create a nonbiological cancer. And as for intelligent...
...same nanobots that will scan our brains will also be able to expand our thinking and our experiences. Nanobot technology will provide fully immersive, totally convincing virtual reality. By taking up positions in close physical proximity to every interneuronal connection coming from all our sense organs (e.g., eyes, ears, skin), the nanobots can suppress all the inputs coming from the real senses and replace them with the signals that would be appropriate for a virtual environment. By 2030, "going to a website" will mean entering a virtual-reality environment. The implant will generate the streams of sensory input that would...
...Nanobot technology will be able to expand our minds in virtually any imaginable way. Our brains today are relatively fixed in design. Although we do add patterns of interneuronal connections and neurotransmitter concentrations as a normal part of the learning process, the current overall capacity of the human brain is highly constrained, restricted to a mere 100 trillion connections. Since the nanobots will be communicating with one another over a wireless local area network, they can create any set of neural connections, break existing connections (by suppressing neural firing) and create new hybrid (i.e., combined biological and nonbiological) networks...
...than humans? It depends on what you consider to be a computer and what you consider to be human. By the second half of the 21st century, there will be no clear distinction between the two. On the one hand, we will have biological brains greatly expanded through distributed nanobot-based implants. On the other, we will have fully nonbiological brains that are copies of human brains but vastly extended. And we will have a myriad of other varieties of intimate connection between human thinking and the technology it has fostered...
NANOTUBES Carbon molecules form a hexagonal mesh that curls into a cylinder like a tube of chicken wire. About 100 times as strong as steel and 50,000 times as thin as a human hair, they can serve as the structure of a nanobot. Acting as semiconductors, nanotubes are also ideal for building a nanobot's tiny microprocessor brain...