User:WillWare

From Wise Nano

Past author of NanoCAD, later a Nanorex employee, now back to doing mobile phone embedded firmware, but following nanotechnology news from time to time.

12 December 2007 -- I have become aware of lots of fascinating stuff in just the past 18 hours. I got an email letting me know that the Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems has finally been published. CRN has been working on a collection of scenarios of plausible nanotech futures.

Meanwhile the fabber stuff that I've found intriguing for years (Fab@Home, RepRap, MIT's Fab Lab) is prominently mentioned in the first scenario. I once suggested that fabbers might provide early less-destructive examples of the kinds of challenges society will face with advanced nanotechnology: conflicts over copyright versus open source, economic disruption as cheap goods enter the market and displace conventional manufacturing and distribution, new weapons and terrorist threats. These ideas appear in the scenario as well, so I feel a bit vindicated.