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micro-electronics will be superseded by devices on the biological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