Nanorobotics Nanorobotics is the emerging technology field of creating machines or robots whose components are at or close to the microscopic scale of a nanometer (one- billionth of a metre). The names nanobots, nanoids, nanites, nanomachines or nanomites have also been used to describe these devices with key research players such as Hewlitt-Packard, General Electric, and Northrup Grummand, promoting technical R&D, and investing as if current nanotech is an arms or space race. Since nanorobots would be microscopic in size, it would probably be necessary for very large numbers of them to work together to perform microscopic...
inexpensive products could cause widespread environmental damage. Attempts to control these and other risks may lead to abusive restrictions, or create demand for a black market that would be very risky and almost impossible to stop; small nanofactories will be very easy to smuggle, and fully dangerous. Does not this Janus-faced appraisal merit further concern? Imagine the use of nanobots to help with BP's disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, with self-replicating qualities, or the abuse of these qualities by terrorists - nano-weapons. The scenarios are easy to multiply exponentially. Or are these notions simply more fiction than science?