Re: Communicating with nanotech


Rory McLean wrote:

Nanotech is by its very nature small, and it may not be known
that it is physically present. It would likely be a considerable
complexity to add ways to a nanotech system to communicate via
light or sound on a human-scale, and this might involve the
nanotech needing ways to detect humans, so that messages could be
directed towards them.

However, there is a human sense that also functions on
approaching the nanoscale, smell. Even very small quantities of
some substances can be clearly smelt. It might be possible to
use warning smells, to say things like "this nanotech system has
problems", through to 'run away now' smells, meaning "this
nanotech system is dangerous to humans".

The idea this grew out of was a comment made to me by a friend,
JD, that smell was the obvious human sense that nanotech would
use to communicate with humans.

If it's dangerous, it probably ought to be locked up.

Then detecting it will probably not be such a
big deal - workers can be augmented with headsets
that scan the environment, and indicate any hostile
areas with laser projections.

Nanotechnology is not necessarily small. If it needs
to communicate things like its fault status with humans,
there's always speech and diagrams - via the resident
computer system.
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