How tools grow up to be toys
New technologies are always a little scary. In Michael Crichton's recent novel, Prey, microscopic cameras designed to diagnose disease in humans somehow turn into a crafty, carnivorous robotic swarm that eats people alive. (Monsters are more complicated than they used to be.)
Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, has warned that the merger of biotechnology and nanotechnology could endanger the human species. Fiendish scientists might, in theory, engineer lethal, molecule-size, self-replicating "nanobots." Eric Drexler, a pioneer in nanotech, fears that synthetic pathogens could someday drift across the planet like pollen and destroy the biosphere.
Here at the Who Knew? desk we've long since stopped sleeping at night. We just cower, 24-7-365. But we also try to remind ourselves that people have warned of technological doom since approximately the invention of the wheel. ("Everyone will go too fast and crash!")
No one can ever know precisely how technology will be used. Guglielmo Marconi thought the radio would be a tool for ship-to-shore communication. Inventors always imagine technology being put to a high-minded, serious use, but people often end up exploiting it for their personal needs, even—egad—their amusement. Technology, when fully mature, is often just a toy.
So it will be interesting to see what happens with a gizmo many technology-watchers predict will end up on people's desktops in the future, the digital fabricator—or "fabber."
Industrial fabbers already exist, making small, three-dimensional objects with complex shapes—car parts and replicas of human bones, for example—from digital models. Neil Gershenfeld, director of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms, says that with a personal fabricator you could make your own cell phone, your own clock radio, even a computer. It would be analogous to a printer. You'd design something on your desktop computer, hit "Print" (or "Fab"), and out would pop your new creation. "It's like taking the tools of the factory and putting them in your own home," Gershenfeld says.
Physicist Freeman Dyson thinks that people might someday combine biotech and fabbers to create new life-forms, like flowers, or even very unusual pets. "You could imagine growing furniture if you could persuade a tree to grow in the right shape," Dyson says. "It's the same thing that happened with computing. The computer was originally intended only for serious, practical applications." Dyson works at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, and remembers the early, truck-size computer built there in the 1940s and '50s. It was designed to study the weather and the processes within nuclear explosions. Important things. Practical things.
No one envisioned all that genius winding up inside a Game Boy.
—Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer
