Schedule Note.

Listen to this Issue.
   Give those tired eyes a rest.

Quote of the Week.
   A billion-times increasing in processing power yet to go?

Nanotech -- A Step Back.
   A broad look at nanotechnology from twelve different perspectives.

Of Holes and Singularities...
   What is a "singularity," and what might it mean to us?

NBIC and -- US!
   Artificial organs -- not entirely sci fi anymore!

Cool Gadgets...
   Arcane arts move mainstream.

Of Technology & Tinker Toys.
   What once took many, now takes but one.

About "The Harrow Technology Report."

Schedule Note.

 

The next issue of "The Harrow Technology Report" will publish on Sept. 15, 2003.  I hope your summer is going well.

 

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Listen to this Issue.

Do you prefer to let your ears do the work of keeping you in-touch with, and thinking about where technology is taking us?  If so, "The Harrow Technology Report" is also available in an audio-on-demand, M-P-3 version. 

If you have an M-P-3 player on your system (and most do, such as Window's Media Player, RealPlayer, etc.), the link below will either stream the file to you, or, depending on how your system is configured, it might download the file before playing it.  Alternatively, if you specifically want to download the file, simply use the right-hand mouse button on the link, and choose "Save Target As..."

Also, find out how you can listen at whatever speed is most comfortable for you through the FAQ at http://www.theharrowgroup.com/help.htm .

Here's where to listen to this week's issue!  http://www.theharrowgroup.com/articles/20030825/20030825.mp3

    

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Quote of the Week.

 

If you think that some of the fruits of nanotechnology research are far away, then consider these excerpts from "Electronics: A Voyage of Discovery" in the May 1, 2003 issue of IndustryWeek.com (http://www.industryweek.com/CurrentArticles/
asp/articles.asp?ArticleId=1425):

"'Nanotechnology is becoming a big part of the next generation of electronics, data storage, and the facilitator of new ways of doing computing,'

[according to] Clayton Teague, chief of the Manufacturing Engineering Laboratory of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, Md.

That view is affirmed by R. Stanley Williams, HP Fellow and director of Hewlett-Packard Co.'s Quantum Science Research Labs in Palo Alto, CA:

'While noting that the power efficiency of computing has improved by a factor of a billion from the ENIAC computer of the 1950s to today's handheld devices, Williams says that fundamental physics indicates that it should be possible to compute even another billion times more efficiently.

 'That would put the power of all of today's present computers in the palm of your hand,' Williams says. 'That says to me that the age of computing really hasn't even begun yet.' '

-----

...HP's strategy is to reinvent the integrated circuit with molecular rather than semiconductor components.

 -----

[Industry Week's 2002] award recognized HP's demonstration of the highest-density electronically addressable memory reported to date. The laboratory demonstration circuit, a 64-bit memory using molecules as switches, occupied a square micron of space. That's an area so tiny that more than 1,000 circuits could fit on the end of a strand of a human hair.

The bit density of the device is more than 10 times greater than today's silicon memory chips. It combined, for the first time, both memory and logic using rewritable, non-volatile molecular-switch devices. The lab fabricated the circuits using an advanced system of manufacturing called nano-imprint lithography, essentially a printing method that allows an entire wafer of circuits to be stamped out quickly and inexpensively from a master.

 -----

...By 2005 IBM could be, possibly with its data storage partner Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, producing postage-stamp-sized memory cards, each of which could hold several feature films or possibly an entire CD collection, says Tom Albrecht, manager of micro and nano-mechanics at IBM's Zurich research lab.  

 -----

...Williams talks in terms of extending Moore's Law by 50 years."

 

Tens of gigabytes of storage in a postage stamp -- potentially within two or three years?  Moore's Law continuing for ANOTHER 50 years?  How would THAT change how you work, live, and play...?

 

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Nanotech -- A Step Back.

 

It's both fascinating and instructive to peer at some of the nanotechnology work that is going on in the labs, as well as at some that is already being used in manufacturing plants; indeed, we do that here on a regular basis.  And if we assume that the results of nanotech research will come even HALF-close to meeting today's expectations, we're likely to experience a world as different from today as was our grandparents', as recently tasted by 50 million people in the U.S. Northeast and Canada -- imagine a world without electricity, phones, air conditioning, jet planes, computers, or the Internet, and you'll get a flavor of what we have in-store.

If this magnitude of "changes" is indeed about to assail us, it can be helpful to occasionally sit back and take a broad, rather than a technical look, at:  what nanotech is all about; what changes the field is likely to trigger; what we need to do to stay on top of and profit from such change; how we must safely deal with the ethics around the (considerable) risks that any such fundamental advancement in technology will bring; why nanotech holds the potential to shift the global balance of military and economic power; and similar issues.

That's the story that "Nanotechnology Now" magazine has just compiled through posing a set of questions to twelve individuals (myself included):

·  Sen. George Allen, U.S. Senator (R.-Va.)

·  Morten Bogedal, CEO, Nordic Nanotech

·  A.S. Daar, Professor of Public Health Sciences and of Surgery, University of Toronto

·  Neil Gordon, Partner, Nanotechnology, with Sygertech

·  Tim Harper, Founder & President, CMP Cientifica

·  Jeffrey Harrow, Principal and Technologist, The Harrow Group

·  Lerwen Liu, President, ABACUS Partners

·  Cathy Murphy, Guy F. Lipscomb Professor of Chemistry, Univ. of S. Carolina

·  Vic Pena, Co-founder & CEO, nanoTitan Inc.

·  Ottilia Saxl, Ion European Board & Founding Director, The Institute of Nanotechnology

·  Bo Varga, Principal and Strategic Consultant, The Strategic Synergy Group

·  Dennis Wilson, Chief Technology Officer, Chairman of the Board, and Founder, Nanotechnologies, Inc.

Nanotechnology Now has just published the entire set of questions and responses in Issue 2 of their "NanoNews" newsletter.

To read all twelve sets of responses, you'll need to register for their free trial subscription through a link in the introduction to this Harrow Technology Report "Special Report" at

http://www.theharrowgroup.com/articles/20030825/
SpecialNanotechnologyNowInterview.htm   .

Or, to read just my responses without registering, bypass the introduction to this Harrow Technology Report "Special Report" at

http://www.theharrowgroup.com/articles/20030825/
SpecialNanotechnologyNowInterview.htm#Where  .

[Note that these long URLs (similar to other long URLs that appear in these issues), will have "wrapped" across two lines.  If you're reading this on the Web they should still "click," but if you're reading through an Email program you'll have to 'put it together' in your Web browser's address bar.]

 

If nanotechnology (and its NBIC brethren) are indeed going to 'change everything,' then the more we each know, the better we (and our businesses) will survive and prosper.

 

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Of Holes and Singularities...

 

Consider this speculation on what might happen should computers, or computer networks, "awake" with intelligence beyond that of a human's:

"What are the consequences of this event? When greater-than-human intelligence drives progress, that progress will be much more rapid. In fact, there seems no reason why progress itself would not involve the creation of still more intelligent entities -- on a still-shorter time scale.

The best analogy that I see is with the evolutionary past: Animals can adapt to problems and make inventions, but often no faster than natural selection can do its work -- the world acts as its own simulator in the case of natural selection. We humans have the ability to internalize the world and conduct "what if's" in our heads; we can solve many problems thousands of times faster than natural selection. Now, by creating the means to execute those simulations at much higher speeds, we are entering a regime as radically different from our human past as we humans are from the lower animals.

From the human point of view this change will be a throwing away of all the previous rules, perhaps in the blink of an eye, an exponential runaway beyond any hope of control. Developments that before were thought might only happen in "a million years" (if ever) will likely happen in the next century. (In Greg Bear's ["Blood Music", _Analog Science Fiction-Science Fact_, June, 1983, expanded into the novel _Blood Music_, Morrow, 1985, he] paints a picture of the major changes happening in a matter of hours.)"

"Any intelligent machine of the sort he [I. J. Good] describes would not be humankind's "tool" -- any more than humans are the tools of rabbits or robins or chimpanzees."

Vernor Vinge,
Department of Mathematical Sciences at
San Diego State University
Presented at NASA's Vision-21 Symposium in 1993
http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~phoenix/vinge/vinge-sing.html

Intelligent computers that will be smarter than a human (or of all humans) are still within the realm of science fiction.  But the idea is also, to some, a portent of things to come based on the established double-exponential technology growth that has driven how each of us work, live, and play -- for decades. 

To others, though, the idea of "self-aware" computers is balderdash. 

Yet this is NOT an area that we dare ignore, because, as Vernor indicates in the quote above (which is just a tease into his interesting paper on the subject), if self-aware computers DO come to pass, it will change ALL the rules. 

So let's introduce ourselves to this contentious issue which is often called, "The Singularity":

 

Of Black Holes And...

You may be familiar with a "black hole," where the gravitational force is so strong near its surface that it acts as a one-way (inwards) door to everything including light -- which is why it appears black to us from the outside -- we simply can't (currently) see anything beyond the "event horizon" that surrounds a black hole.  (http://science.howstuffworks.com/black-hole.htm/printable)

Similarly, a growing number of people, some with the highest of scientific credentials, believe that a technological event of sufficient magnitude could produce an equivalent state, where the amount and rate of change resulting from this event will cause such vast and massively accelerated change to how we work, live, and play (compared to today), that we simply can not reliably conceive of what's on the other side (of what might take place in the years after such a technological event.) 

As with the core of a black hole, this potential technological event is increasingly being called "The Singularity."  And often, "The Singularity" event is expected to be the "awakening" of our computers.  As Vernor stated, this could lead to "... a throwing away of all the previous rules, perhaps in the blink of an eye -- an exponential runaway beyond any hope of control."

Will inanimate computers that approach the interconnection level of the human brain suddenly spring "awake?"  Or is there some other "spark" needed to generate what we perceive of as self-awareness, or "intelligence"?  That's very much at the heart of the Singularity debate, and we won't know the answer until it happens.  But it is both fascinating and thought-provoking to follow the arguments, both pro and con.  Because, as reasonably predicted by an (expanded) interpretation of Moore's Law, and further powered by the beginnings of the Convergence of Nanotechnology, Biology & medicine, Information sciences, and Cognitive sciences (NBIC), our computers may reach this point in 30-50 years!

There are many good starting places where you can learn more about this debate:  A large composite pdf file of works by Ray Kurzweil, at http://www.kurzweilai.net/RayKurzweilReader.pdf , can be an excellent place to learn more about the background and support for Singularity predictions.  Or explore "Singularity Watch" at http://www.singularitywatch.com/ and their free newsletter "Accelerating Times" at http://www.singularitywatch.com/#mail  .  Or, you can begin with this Google composite http://directory.google.com/Top/Society/Philosophy/
Current_Movements/Transhumanism/Singularity/  suggested by Jeff Martin.  The list, of course, is endless.

 

The Fence.

Personally, I currently sit on the fence.  On the one hand, as a technologist who can see, taste and feel the results of what Moore's Law has wrought, I have no doubt that our computers will indeed reach the level of interconnection complexity that matches that of the human brain (at least as we perceive that today).  And I can conceive that at that or some future level, "something" might (might!) happen as it did in Nature. 

On the other hand, I'm also aware that there remains much(!) about the human brain that we don't yet understand.  After all, it was only 128 years ago when, in 1875, the British Dr. Richard Canton first discovered that the brain produced electrical signals (http://biocybernaut.com/tutorial/eeg.html).  And even today, we can only decode them at a very crude level.  So there may be many more layers to the "intelligence" onion that, even today, we can't yet observe or measure or even contemplate -- we don't necessarily even know the questions to ask!

Hence the important Singularity debate.  A debate that's worth following so that, whichever way it goes, we

Don't Blink.

 

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For almost twenty years, as I've been sharing my research on the ever-faster-moving and converging technologies that are changing how we work, live, and play, I've also been working directly with businesses and organizations, large and small, to help them understand and address how these changes may affect them, their customers, and their customers' businesses, through a series of:

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NBIC and -- US!

 

Let's explore yet another example of how NBIC (the coming together of Nanotechnology, Biology & medicine, Information sciences, and Cognitive sciences) is going to be changing more than our latest and greatest next computer -- it seems likely that the offshoots of NBIC research will, among many other things, be "embracing and extending" -- YOU AND I!

Many people have an innate belief that doctors and hospitals can cure almost anything.  Indeed, given the dramatic rate of advancement in medical science, each year does provide doctors with new insights, drugs, and treatments to address previously incurable diseases.  Yet many untreatable diseases and conditions still plague us; some are (relatively) minor like a bad bout of Flu I suffered through this winter, but others can quickly become deadly serious, such as acute kidney (or other organ) failure that can lead to a "spiral of death," literally overnight. 

This "spiral of death" is described in the July/Aug. Technology Review (http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/
print_version/fairley0703.asp):

"Chemotherapy or an infection knocks a patient’s kidneys out of service, and within a day or two, inflammation spreads throughout his or her blood vessels.

Blood pressure crashes, starving the body of oxygen, and in short order the lungs, liver, and other organs begin to fail.

Replacing the kidney’s most basic function by using conventional dialysis to clear urea and other wastes from the blood is of little help [because real kidney cells perform many other, still dimly-understood functions such as directing the immune system]. More than half of those caught in the grip of acute kidney failure die."

 

Kidney In A Cartridge.

The answer, then, might be to use real, living kidney cells to perform ALL of the functions they were designed for, while the patient fights the massive infection and recovers; or to act as a temporary replacement for the damaged kidneys while they heal; or as at temporary replacement until a natural transplant organ can be procured.  Indeed, thanks to a decade of work by University of Michigan's Dr. David Humes, 60% of such critically ill patients in his small clinical study survived (while only 10% - 20% of that group would have been expected to survive conventional treatment.)

The difference was that the patients in this study were "plugged-in," not to a normal dialysis machine, but to a cartridge about the same size as an in-line water filter, which contained a billion living kidney cells housed within 4,000 hollow plastic fibers. 

 

 

This is not a replacement organ because it's not implantable, and its cells only live for "a few weeks."  But it clearly can be a temporary lifesaver.  Similar experimental techniques, also described at http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/
print_version/fairley0703.asp , are already producing "bioartificial livers," although some concerns and investor jitters have forced more than a few such research efforts to fold. 

Nevertheless, new designs are moving forward, also using the idea of "hollow [and porous] fibers [bringing oxygen and nutrients to these cells, and delivering and removing the patient's plasma for "liver processing"] woven through human liver cells harvested from transplant rejects"

 

Forget The Plastic?

Speaking of the hollow, porous plastic fibers that enable those devices to work,  reader Kenneth LaCrosse brings our attention to the July 3 NewScientist.com (http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993916) which describes a technique for doing away with the plastic by building real, living arteries and veins! 

As you might suspect from the first part of this discussion, if you're trying to build, say, an artificial kidney or liver, it isn't enough to dump a bunch of the appropriate cells into a lump and expect them to grow, or even to remain alive -- cells require blood flow to deliver their nutrients and remove waste, and also to deliver the blood that needs the attention of the cells in the artificial organ.  That's why many natural organs have developed highly ordered three-dimensional structures as a result of Nature's experimentation and natural selection and optimization over the millennia. 

 

Faster!

On a somewhat more rapid time scale, scientists at MIT and Harvard have taken a first step along the path to creating tiny branching artificial vascular structures that can provide the 3D structure needed for artificial organs.  Specifically, they studied and copied how Nature has designed the network of artery and vein capillaries within a liver (some as small as 10 microns in diameter).  Then, they "...optimized our design to improve" upon Nature's work a bit, and etched the paths onto two silicon wafers (as in two halves of a mold).  The wafer "molds" were then used to create the 3D vascular structure out of a biodegradable polymer.  Two such "halves" of the vascular structure were then sealed together with a microporous membrane between them, and voilà -- they had a set of empty "tubes" that replicated the complex vascular structure that Nature uses to keep cells thriving in normal livers.

Next, flat "endothelial cells," which normally line the inside of our blood vessels in a single smooth layer, were introduced to the "tubes" on one side of the membrane, where they happily set up residence covering the tubes' inside walls.  On the other side of the membrane, liver (or kidney) cells were introduced, where they as well coated the tube walls.  The result, once the biodegradable polymer membrane separating the two halves of each tube was degraded and washed away, was:

"...to leave a living shell of vessels similar to a natural vascular network. This method would provide an efficient means of supplying the liver or kidney cells with enough oxygen and nutrients to survive...  The one-layer systems of kidney and liver cells were successfully implanted into rats for two weeks - 95 per cent of the cells survived."

"Eventually, we want to be able to replace whole organs with several layers of these constructs. The critical mass for liver is one-third, probably 30 to 50 stacked layers."

 

The Long Road Ahead.

There's still a long way to go before we find organ vending machines in the O.R., but this is a good example of the promise of NBIC.  As each of NBIC's component fields and technologies continue to grow and intertwine and yield dramatically new knowledge and techniques, myriad previous barriers are poised to fall. 

And as we've just seen, some of these innovations seem likely to prevent US from falling when we become ill.

Wait until you, or a family member, is literally given a new lease on life because of our growing knowledge of NBIC technologies.  We'll look back on what's yet to come in the same way that, today, most of us can't imagine our dying from infections that are routinely cured with a small bottle of antibiotics. 

Which was itself a "sci fi" dream just one lifetime (74 years) ago, before Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin.

Clearly, we've only just begun to journey down this road, and we're traveling faster every year. 

So, again --

Don't Blink!

 

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Cool Gadgets...

 

WiFi is an overarching industry term and compatibility certification for the alphabet soup of wireless networking '802.11x' standards, such as a, b, and g (http://www.wi-fi.org/), and it's certainly getting popular.  "Hotspots" abound, both commercially and through self-interest groups; a significant (and growing) percentage of new notebooks come with WiFi access built-in; global "war-driving" events have taken place to map available WiFi hotspots (http://www.wardriving.com/about.php); and "war-chalking" efforts have left arcane marks (that might have historically been associated with witches and wizards) on building walls to alert the interested that they're passing through an area rich in "mana," or in this case rich in WiFi coverage.  (http://www.warchalking.org/)

 

Even commercial carriers, such as Verizon, are realizing that this grass-roots networking is NOT something to ignore; they're reported to be adding WiFi access points to payphones around Manhattan! (http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/news/article.php/2204901), 

WiFi is so popular, in fact, that it's no longer necessary to wander around with a notebook to search for a hotspot -- established computer accessory manufacturer Kensington now offers a standalone, in-your-palm device that will detect WiFi hotspots with no notebook needed, for less than $30! (http://kensington.com/html/3720.html)

If at least one light is illuminated, there's a WiFi signal where you're standing (it filters out other devices that share WiFi's spectrum) while the number of lights indicate the signal strength, according to Kensington's literature (I haven't yet tested this myself).

I must admit that this does bring to mind images of wizards peering intently into palm-sized crystals while searching for doorways into alternate dimensions: 

But even if you don't wear the flowing robes, if you ARE searching for a place to grab a quick Email update or more, THIS "crystal ball" just might similarly spot nearby "doorways" that will allow you to enter the ethereal dimension of cyberspace.

 

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Of Technology & Tinker Toys.

 

Finally, does your PC have an Ethernet connection?  If so, in all likelihood it looks like a somewhat overgrown version of the telephone socket on the wall into which you plug your telephone:

Typically, this jack appears on a PC's back panel, either on the outside of a PCI card,

or on the external motherboard I/O panel

that contains the many ports that (still, even after USB has become accepted) cause a "rat's nest" of cables behind the PC that would make even the most haphazard of rats proud. 

The jack then connects to circuitry on the motherboard or on the PCI card to "do its thing."

But what about Ethernet-enabling SMALL devices?  Some printers do come with Ethernet jacks, allowing them to be "peers" on your network so that any PC can print to them without being dependent on any "host" PC.  (Compare that to the case when a printer plugs into the USB port of a particular PC -- it's really that PC that is sharing the printer out onto the network.  So if that PC goes down, so goes the printer.) 

Ethernet-direct-connected printers and other peripherals can make for easier network management (even in a small office or at home.)  But most sub-$1,000 or so printers do not include Ethernet by-default; you either pay extra for a card that slips into the printer, or you use an external printer-to-Ethernet server box, such as these from HP (http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/
en/sm/WF02a/18972-236253-64302.html).

Ethernet jacks are often left out of lower-cost devices due to cost and complexity issues.  And especially for physically smaller products such as portable printers, remote sensors, and more, space for the Ethernet jack plus its support circuitry can weigh in as problems.  Yet it might be very valuable to have those small products "on the network..."  

 

An Answer!

Well, the problems of size (and depending on the device, of complexity) now seem to have been addressed, since reader Pete Tuckerman has brought our attention to this rather special Ethernet jack:

Because this isn't only the Ethernet JACK -- this "jack" contains the ENTIRE Ethernet circuitry, including a built-in Web server!  The tiny "jack" from Lantronix is now the entire solution! 

Details are at http://www.lantronix.com/products/eds/xport/index.html , and through the "Resources" box on the right of that page.  (By the way, how do you configure something so small?  Over the Web, of course!)

 

The Tinker Toys...

I don't presume that this is the only such solution (although it may be), but it is a wonderful example of how our "Tinker Toys" continue to shrink.  I recall when an Ethernet board was just that - a large board full of components.  Over the years, it shrank to the small PCI card pictured above, and the circuitry is even smaller for on-motherboard solutions.  Yet even in those instances, the Ethernet circuitry only provides communications at the lowest level -- the full "Ethernet solution" still requires the rest of the computer to provide the TCP/IP protocols, Web Server, and other capabilities. 

Today, it's all in the jack. 

What used to take a large box of Tinker Toys, now takes just one.

And that is the signature of how technology industries have been and are moving forward, driven first by the Convergence of Computers, Communications, Content, and Consumer electronics, and now poised to accelerate from the birthing pains of NBIC (the Convergence of Nanotechnology, Biology & medicine, Information sciences, and Cognitive sciences.) 

As the song said,

"We've only just begun..."

 

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About "The Harrow Technology Report."

 

"The Harrow Technology Report" explores the innovations and trends of many contemporary and emerging technologies, and then draws some less than obvious connections between them, to help us each survive and prosper in the Knowledge Age. 

"The Harrow Technology Report" is brought to you by Jeffrey R. Harrow, Principal of The Harrow Group. http://www.TheHarrowGroup.com .

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Copyright (c) 2001-2005, Jeffrey R. Harrow. All rights reserved.

Jeffrey R. Harrow maintains that all reasonable care and skill has been used in the compilation of this publication.  However, he shall not be under any liability for loss or damage (including consequential loss) whatsoever or howsoever arising as a result of the use of this publication by the reader, his/her/its servants, agents or any third party.

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