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Message: <blockquote data-quote="abri" data-source="post: 2630719" data-attributes="member: 1080">Ok, now one answer from a guy that actually works with nanotechnology every day... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":cool:" title="Cool    :cool:"  data-smilie="6"data-shortname=":cool:" /> It's not what people imagine... At all. Nor do we want them to...And no nanobots is going to transform rock into bread, EVER!  Transforming elements is something counterproductive (ie, the amount of energy required far outweight any gain, and we're talking several order of magnitude diference here.)What nanobots can do (and honnestly the term bots is really misleading) is attach to a chemical group and start or catalyse a chemical reaction. Their "programing"  is actually adding functional groups to their surface. The real advances in nanotechnology are in develloping new materials with custom or thought as imposible properties.Now for the sentient computer part around 2020... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f615.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":confused:" title="Confused    :confused:"  data-smilie="5"data-shortname=":confused:" /> Good joke... There are theoritical limits to computer speed and we're already getting near it. Sentience is NOT a function of pure processing power: we could make computers that make a decent attempt at looking sentient, but the list of reasons why it wouldn't work/shouldn't be tried is quite long.BTW, the question of what would man do in a society where labor is abolished as been around since the 18th century. It really is based on a unfounded assumption: technology decrease the amount of work required. It just ain't so. The type of work slowly changes, but we still work. It's only recently that we have had this impression, because we compare ourselves with the worker of the industrial revolution, or see that the amount of work for factory workers has decreased since this revolution. But that's a biased way of looking at the problem: the period from the industrial revolution to a few decade back as been an exception to history. The amount of work suddenly rose and then decreased back to a regular level.ps: ask any informatician if it is a good idea to have computer writte their own program and repair themselves and you've just given him nightmares. You do not want a program to analyse what's wrong in another complex program, not without human supervision anyway.</blockquote>

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