Special Topic: Molecular Manufacturing

Hi All:

Steve Vetter recently attended a workshop on Atomically Precise Manufacturing (APM), and will be sharing the remarkable ideas and potential of APM, including the results of the workshop. Briefly, APM is a plan to begin manufacturing things with atomic precision. A place for every atom, and every atom in it’s place. The potential is incredible, including materials with 10x the strength of steel or aluminum, computers that vastly outperform any computer today, and medical robots that can swim in your bloodstream.

These ideas have been quietly percolating for nearly 60 years, but now funding is finally being given to them, on a rapidly increasing pace. So, it is now likely this will all happen in your lifetime. Come get a glimpse of the future.

*A quick taste of the potential includes the following:

• A sugar-cube sized computer that has more computing power than all computers on the Earth today, including all the embedded processors in cars, etc.
• Complete, computerized robots that are smaller than a blood cell.
• Materials with 10- 100 x the strength to weight ratio of steel or aluminum.
• Telescopes that can read resolve a car driving on a planet orbiting Alpha Centuri.
• Rapid manufacturing of essentially anything, at the cost of potatoes.
• Factories with the side effect of pulling as much CO2 out of the atmosphere as we wish.
• And for those that avoid meat for purely ethical reasons, perfect copies (atomically identical) meat that was never part of a living animal.

This sounded like a geeky topic of general interest to our AI software community. Join us for an informal presentation on manufacturing at the biological level. I am sure we will all get some very unusual ideas on which to ponder.