Many here have commented on the lamentable weaknesses of this development in terms of size constraints and so forth, and on possible medical applications, which could indeed be fascinating and useful for saving lives, but what about the much darker potential of technology like this developing heavily:
Basically, if we're worried about modern mass surveillance, try to imagine a situation in which nano-scale surveillance is possible of large numbers of people, with devices that attach to nearly anything, are virtually invisible and could potentially even have the capacity to record location, audio and video of anything they're applied to, including both targeted civilians and large areas in which you could never be sure whether or not some government/police controlled army of microscopic bots is watching, tracking and listening. Don't tell me that exactly that wouldn't occur to both corporations and governments as this develops further.
I'm reminded of the novel The Golden Globe, by john varley. In that novel very powerful AI handle most day to day operations of society, and it is mentioned by one of them that - technologically speaking - they could create the single most despotic and privacy-eliminating regime in human history. A place where even an individual's thoughts and emotions are no longer secret, let alone snooping on every word they ever speak. The AI then says it could do this, but it will not, and has intentionally blinded itself to all such data streams. The central intelligence refuses to examine the incoming data as it believes doing so would violate its subjects human rights. In-novel this is why the AI doesn't just tell our protagonist where the big bad is, but I've found it an interesting possible trajectory for the future. Where every word we say is monitored, but it is strictly illegal to view said monitoring.
I wonder if that is the most realistic version of a future were we still have private lives.
> I wonder if that is the most realistic version of a future were we still have private lives.
I think it's almost impossible for someone to build these data streams and not look at them. Look at the mass amount of surveillance every major country is participating in. Government officials in open and democratic countries have lied about the amount of surveillance they are doing, get caught, and keep the surveillance going. I think the more probabilistic future where we have private lives comes from futures where that technology is never built. This is to say, privacy is almost certainly dying.
Unless a still unknown counter-technology comes along to make privacy and individual empowerment much more concrete. Or, more conservatively, existing or near-extrapolation derivative technologies democratize enough to make surveillance far too costly for state actors without blowback.
Is there anything besides (massive) engineering challenges standing between more advanced devices like this physically eating away at cancerous tumors in the same way physicians use special maggots for wound debridement?
Calling those robots is a bit misleading, because they lack self-control. Control logic we know is large for very small robots. If you want a micron-scale robot you only get about 100 transistors for its "intelligence"[1]. There are certainly things it could do, but probably not autonomously navigate, map and recognize tumors.
We just don't have the expertise for those kinds of thing, at least not yet. A plethora of sensors (that can detect cancerous cells) and this sort of technology would be needed. We'd essentially be trying to create artificial cells, a monumental task nature took billions of years in refinement (even if we can find shortcuts sometimes) -- too many very complex systems (energy, better sensors, better movement inside the body, "cognition", etc.).
Maybe in 50 years of continued research? 100 years? I don't know.
[1] The state of the art is about 100 transistors per square micron. This assumes you could drive and interface with them adequately. Cells accomplish all they do without any transistors at all, it's all protein-based sensors and DNA-encoded behavior, I believe.
I think the question that OP (and myself) is asking is "given Magic Robots (tm), could we essentially cure cancer?"
Obviously, as you note, there are enormous (or rather, extremely tiny, but very hard!) problems with this. However, it's not all doom and gloom.
I could imagine that going in the 3D dimension for example, could enable another 100X increase in transistor count. In addition, you shouldn't need to actually do the computation onboard for cancer applications, just transmit it via some method, say RF to an outside computer that can do the compute work. Finally, cells are something like 10-30 um in diameter, which gives a lot more room to play with than 1um (the linked paper has scale of about 100um I believe).
Anytime I see a title starting with "scientists" did X... the history is BS
"Smart weapons" kill innocent people all the time, no matter how many times we repeat smart in their model name. GPS still lead truck drivers directly to the bottom of a lagoon.
If we can't teach a huge machine full of circuits to distinguish between an ambulance or a tank, how we can realistic trust that tiny machines, with no space at all for complex circuits, will be able to diferenciate between a tumor or our hypothalamus?
What would happen if the patient approach a magnet accidentally? Will the army of nowaybots be displaced enough cm to try to fry your pancreas assuming that they are in a different location?
100 transistors might be enough for a “triangulation” circuit. Hold three RF emitters around the tumor outside the patient’s body and the robot will navigate to the point equidistant from all three emitters and start destroying tissue. You could move the orbs around to eat away the tumor, then filter them out of the bloodstream with a dialysis machine.
Maybe the route toward what I'm envisioning (and hoping for) is genetically engineered or enhanced cells. Modify and existing system that already does a lot instead of trying to recreate a cell from the ground up.
This isn't far from what immunotherapy is doing. Cancer can only thrive when it avoids an immune response, either by looking sufficiently like a healthy cell to remain below the radar or actively suppressing actions of the immune system.
Immunotherapy looks for ways to counteract this 'feature' and allow the immune system to do its job and murder the bastards.
We're still effectively in the early days of this approach to treating cancer and results are mixed, but it shows incredible promise and I feel that it ultimately will be the way we beat most if not all cancers.
I sense robots not made out of similar materials may be easier for dealing with a cancer. It’s “out of band” - cell’s for instance seem to communicate through chemicals so the robot cells are likely to respond (or not) to the things in the biological system.
As for more traditional robots with ~100 transistors, why do they need to be autonomous? Why not mesh network them and control them as drones?
We've been making artificial cells for quite some time, but they're purpose is more of a model than anything else. A way for us to study what happens when you take away everything and just start from the very basics.
What you're talking about sounds more like artificial tissues and organs, which is an active area of study, although I don't immediately see how we might "engineer-out" cancer. There exists a world in which we develop tissues that age slower, but the more likely (not that it's happening anytime soon) scenario is very cheap organs that we can swap out for ours.
If you think of transistors as analog computational devices, 100 is not that small. There are animals with ~200-300 neurons, so it's at least within the range of possibility to have a fairly autonomous robot with only 100.
A neuron contains thousands if not millions of transistor-equivalents in the form of gene level and ion level switches. I'm not saying that you couldn't do it with 100 transistors, or that everything in a neuron is needed for this application, but I just wanted to clarify.
Right, the transistor is not fully simulating a neuron, just a first order approximation of the electrical impulse response. It's close enough for government work, as they say.
Can we get batteries that are small enough and powerful enough to do it? This example is powered by lasers, it looks like they have to shoot a laser first at the front legs then again at the back legs in order to get it to walk. If we are able to shoot a laser at the robot walking on the tumor without damaging the surrounding tissue, why not just shoot it at the tumor?
They could be powered by little rectennas, think RFID tag. Hit the bots with a radio frequency and it indict a charge and they power on and do their thing. Turn the radio off and they go inert.
So they could be injected into a tumor and powered by an external radio source.
In they're only powered by light a fiber optic filament could be injected in the activation site. So long as the light passes through enough tissue to power them you don't need to stick a halogen bulb up someone's butt.
A tuned antenna is correlated to frequency, a shitty antenna can be any size. In a microscopic robot needing likely µA of current an untuned antenna could be sufficient for power.
But that's me speculating, I don't know how to power an injectable micro robot. If I did the link might have been about me! RF might be completely inappropriate for power.
Maybe let's bite the bullet and try chemical power? Natural nanobots (cells) work fine powering themselves off ATP, so why couldn't human-designed ones?
I'd think somehow turning heat energy into power would be ideal since human bodies naturally produce and regulate heat. Or maybe some sort of chemical breakdown where the energy could be relayed as a power source.
That would make it worse not better as thr temperature differential is the power source. Something which binds to and cracks blood sugars would be closer in terms of exploiting bodily resources for the task but would still have many challenges at that scale.
It's still not a given that we have universal markers for cancers; cancers evolve in each patient in a variety of ways, making it hard to come up with a single protocol that works for everyone. Hence lots of work is needed on the biology part.
It's not clear we need universal markers though. We need that for targeting with things like drugs. Cancer in general though kills by physically impinging on or resource starving other body systems. There's a certain amount of "we know it when we see it" to that (and we're pretty good at seeing it).
If you could direct a swarm of micro-robots towards the sites of metastasized cancer growths (which kill you because we can't go in and cut them all out without killing the patient from the surgery) then the prognosis would change substantially.
The holy grail would in essence be, having a system which can get to all the places cancer can, at the same sorts of size scales cancer operates - rather then needing to be in the limited range of things we can surgically intervene on.
This is awesome, but I think these will need an EOL/self-destruct mechanism. What happens if these things just linger in the body after performing a function like destroying cancer cells?
Randomly chose this off the bookshelf at a Borders in 1990 or so...turned out to be the most exciting book I've ever read. Then Terminator 2 came out and was 10x as amazing because I saw how it COULD really happen.
Yeah, it's sad that this stuff has stopped being an incidental thing but rather a large factor in a lot of people's (mis)thinking. I don't know exactly what scientists should do about this.
By vaccine conspiracy theories, I'm assuming you mean the aspect about microchips secretly being added to vaccines. But doesn't it actually add validity to the technological aspects of these concerns when a newly published paper details successfully adding 1 million microchips capable of injection into the human body? How wouldn't it?
Obviously this doesn't touch on the nefarious underpinnings of the vaccine debate, but in what other scenario would presentation of new research validating the technological capabilities of something be a reason to scoff at? Sounds like a classic case of cognitive dissonance where you've been presented with fresh evidence that adds support to something contrary to your beliefs but are disregarding what's actually been presented and instead are digging your heels in.
Yes, it does add a tiny bit of validity to the technical aspect. Which is a bad thing, because it encourages those people. Even worse, the headline sounds like it adds much more validity than it actually does, so the bad encouragement is magnified based on their lack of understanding.
There is no cognitive dissonance in saying "ugh, those morons are going to act like this proves their entire claim right, when it actually takes the claim from being incorrect in 44 different ways to being incorrect in 'only' 43 and a half different ways". Nobody is disregarding the evidence here.
Basically, if we're worried about modern mass surveillance, try to imagine a situation in which nano-scale surveillance is possible of large numbers of people, with devices that attach to nearly anything, are virtually invisible and could potentially even have the capacity to record location, audio and video of anything they're applied to, including both targeted civilians and large areas in which you could never be sure whether or not some government/police controlled army of microscopic bots is watching, tracking and listening. Don't tell me that exactly that wouldn't occur to both corporations and governments as this develops further.