Nanobots: How far along are we?
There are a lot of movies and shows where Artificial Intelligence is involved. This has led it to become an integral part of science fiction and has inspired a lot of inventions. With the advent of Chat GPT, such advanced AI tools are freely available to the public and people are finding new uses for them everyday. Another area that has frequently popped its head into movies and shows are nanobots.
Personally, one of my most favorite depiction of nanobots, came from Big Hero 6 where the main character invented “microbots” that could be controlled using the users thoughts!
Personally, I really liked the idea of using nanobots for construction and how they were used in the movie. Its unfortunate that things just aren’t that simple, in the real world.
Limitations
There are a lot of limitations if we were to consider inventing a nano robot similar to the movie, and no, size isn’t one of them.
- Energy requirements
The energy needed for pulling off something like the movie is simply astronomical at this scale. Apart from that, there would be no way to transfer the energy to each nano bot separately, contrary to what’s shown in the movie, where the bots seemingly operate without any visible power source.
2. Manufacturing
These bots need to be small enough to operate at the cellular level and we don’t have the tech to manufacture them yet. There have been other ways where, the bots are not robots in the literal sense (they are not mechanical in nature), but are instead organic. Such nanobots are still largely in testing but many of them have found exciting uses in the real world.
3. Communication
In the movie, Hiro basically controls the bots using mind control.
In the real world we need much more advanced communication algorithms and sensors. We might be able to add Artificial Intelligence into the mix here too! What if instead of giving individual commands to the whole swarm, we let it figure it out itself?
We have this to some extent. A swarm of drones can be controlled using AI.
Current applications
The current applications of nanobots are not that interesting compared to what we see in the movies. However, they still have a huge impact.
In medicine, researchers are trying to use organic nanobots for targeted drugs delivery in the body without making any cuts. They are also used in electronics to enhance performance. Recently researchers have even managed to construct a board using nanobots!
That’s all from my side! I’m really excited to see how this develops over the next couple of years.
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