Nanotechnology in artificial intelligence

Educating the public about nanotechnology and other complex but emerging technologies causes people to become more “worried and cautious” about the new technologies’ prospective benefits, according to a recent study by researchers at North Carolina State University.

The nano medicine may helpm any people believe that informed citizen input should influence public policies about modern science and technology, but several prominent academics warn against relying on citizen deliberations to promote public engagement in policy-making. These scholars contend that citizens do not enjoy the process of deliberating and individual and collective opinions developed during group deliberation are often worse than if deliberation had never taken place. Following the Danish practice known as “Consensus Conferences,” we tested this skeptical perspective about citizen capacities by holding Citizen Technology Forums (CTF) in six cities in the United States throughout March 2008. Volunteer participants became informed about human enhancement technologies and they generated written reports about their concerns and recommendations regarding the development trajectory of these technologies. We find that participants dramatically increased their factual understanding about human enhancement technologies and they reported feeling more internally efficacious and trusting of others after deliberating; however, they also became more wary of the potential risks and benefits of these technologies and more concerned about potential inequities in the distribution of these benefits.

Nanotechnology is a relatively new field of research and scientific development. It has been speculated about for decades and the wonders and advantages of nanotechnology have been extolled by many. But not all.

The scientific community, in its never ending quest for information and knowledge, consistently fails to seriously acknowledge the dangers of "invisible" technology, such as nanotechnology, going haywire. Nothing is ever to go wrong according to them yet it always does somehow.

In this respect, nanotechnology is not different from other new disciplines. We, as humans, don't seem to have the capacity to really learn to understand something before we start to mess with it on a big scale.

And when things do go wrong - just imagine an autodidactic nano-intelligence on the loose - we end up fighting the symptoms, pointing fingers at each other, and deny any or all culpability.

Forethought of possible consequences is usually far from our minds as we are caught up, or pushed by superiors, to make the research investment profitable as soon as possible.

computer science to nanotechnology

Smaller, lighter computers and an end to worries about electrical failures sending hours of on-screen work into an inaccessible limbo mark the potential result of Argonne research on tiny ferroelectric crystals.

"Tiny" means billionths of a meter, or about 1/500th the width of a human hair. These nanomaterials behave differently than their larger bulk counterparts. Argonne researchers have learned that they are more chemically reactive, exhibit new electronic properties and can be used to create materials that are stronger, tougher and more resistant to friction and wear than bulk materials.

Improved nano-engineered ferroelectric crystals could realize a 50-year-old dream of creating nonvolatile random access memory (NVRAM). The first fruits of it can be seen in Sony's PlayStation 2 and in smart cards now in use in Brazil, China and Japan. A simple wave of a smart card identifies personnel or pays for gas or public transportation.

Computing applications

RAM – random access memory – is used when someone enters information or gives a command to the computer. It can be written to as well as read but - with standard commercial technology - holds its content only while powered by electricity.

Argonne materials scientists have created and are studying nanoscale crystals of ferroelectric materials that can be altered by an electrical field and retain any changes.

Ferroelectric materials – so called, because they behave similarly to ferromagnetic materials even though they don't generally contain iron – consist of crystals whose low symmetry causes spontaneous electrical polarization along one or more of their axes. The application of voltage can change this polarity. Ferroelectric crystals can also change mechanical to electrical energy– the piezoelectric effect – or electrical energy to optical effects.

A strong external electrical field can reverse the plus and minus poles of ferroelectric polarization. The crystals hold their orientation until forced to change by another applied electric field. Thus, they can be coded as binary memory, representing "zero" in one orientation and "one" in the other.

Because the crystals do not revert spontaneously, RAM made with them would not be erased should there be a power failure. Laptop computers would no longer need back-up batteries, permitting them to be made still smaller and lighter. There would be a similar impact on cell phones.

Achieving such permanence is a long-standing dream of the computer industry.

"Companies such as AT&T, Ford, IBM, RCA and Westinghouse Electric made serious efforts to develop non-volatile RAMs in the 1950s, but couldn't achieve commercial use," said Argonne researcher Orlando Auciello. "Back then, NVRAMs were based on expensive ferroelectric single crystals, which required substantial voltage to switch their polarity. This, and cross talk inherent in the then recently devised row matrix address concept, made them impractical.

"Working on the nanoscale changes this," said Auciello. "It means higher density memories with faster speeds and megabyte (the amount of memory needed to store one million characters of information) - or even gigabyte (one billion bytes) - capacity. It's not clear how soon such capacity will be available, but competition is heavy, stakes are high, and some companies claim they will have the first fruits of this research within two years."