The Speculist

Via Kurzweil AI:

University of Wyoming researchers have received a $100,000 National Science Foundation grant to further develop swarm of tiny robots that could help clean up oil spills or respond to a terrorist attack.

A swarm of small robots would cover a larger area more quickly than a single robot, and if one failed, the others could take up the slack. Eventually they hope to develop robots that could fly or swim.

(Read the original article.)

Such swarms will have many applications. They could help out quite a bit in firefighting and search-and-rescue scenarios. Imagine a sufficiently large (and sufficiently dispersed) robot swarm hovering around the US-Mexico border, programmed to report any movement where no movement should be. Such a swarm would be more effective in sealing the border than any number of Minutemen (or National Guard troops) could ever dream of being.

Of course, there's got to be a downside. What about the government using robot swarms to control us? What about robot swarms gone bad, evolving their own intelligence and sense of purpose competitive with our own? If you're interested in that kind of thing, Michael Crichton published a novel a couple of years ago about a robot swarm with marked gray-goo tendencies that causes all kinds of problems. An interesting page-turner, but the consensus these days is that the gray-goo scenario is imminently avoidable.

Crichton's robots were microscopic in size. The smaller we make the individual robots that make up the swarm, the more we'll be able to do with them. Eventually, swarms of nano-scale robots will be released inside our bodies to ward off the effects of disease and aging. And one day, we'll have swarms of nanobots acting in concert to create what will be the most useful product ever invented: Josh Hall's utility fog.

As Josh explains it:

Nanotechnology is based on the concept of tiny, self-replicating robots. The Utility Fog is a very simple extension of the idea: Suppose, instead of building the object you want atom by atom, the tiny robots linked their arms together to form a solid mass in the shape of the object you wanted? Then, when you got tired of that avant-garde coffeetable, the robots could simply shift around a little and you'd have an elegant Queen Anne piece instead.

You may as well make your car of Utility Fog, too; then you can have a "new" one every day. But better than that, the *interior* of the car is filled with robots as well as its shell. You'll need to wear holographic "eyephones" to see, but the Fog will hold them up in front of your eyes and they'll feel and look as if they weren't there. Although heavier than air, the Fog is programmed to simulate its physical properties, so you can't feel it: when you move your arm, it flows out of the way. Except when there's a crash! Then it forms an instant form-fitting "seatbelt" protecting every inch of your body. You can take a 100-mph impact without messing your hair.

Dang. I have got to get me some of that stuff.