FAI FAQ draft: What is nanotechnology?

Because of their physical properties, carbon nanotubes usually allow ballistic conduction, meaning that electrons can flow through the tube without collisions (Lin & Shung 1995), which allows the carbon nanotubes to conduct electricity without heat dissipation (Chico et al. 1996)!

This sounds a bit sensationalist. The caveat is that this only happens on the scale of 1 micrometer at best.

Overall, I think it looks pretty good.

a new form of technology based on molecular “assemblers,” which would be able to “place atoms in almost any reasonable arrangement” and thereby allow the formation of “almost anything the laws of nature allow.”

This really just sounds like we're talking about the ability to create extra strong metal, or scaled up versions of the "stain-free pants" you mentioned, which doesn't really cover why MNT would be so powerful. For someone who has never heard of this subject, it will take more information before they realize why this is more important than, say, a new method to create higher resolution graphics on computer screens. Explain why MNT is worth discussing in a Singularity FAQ, instead of any of the other classes of technology that look feasible.

This should probably at least mention MNT computers and MNT weaponry. Nanofactories/assemblers could make a lot of stuff other than just nanobots. The emphasis on nanomaterials seems misplaced in that they have little to do with FAI. Maybe mention MNT critics and make some attempt at defusing them.

For example in nanomedicine they would allow us to intelligently access cancer cells and blood cells.

Needs comma.

This FAQ suffers a compression fallacy between chemistry (the products you've named that actually exist) and nanoscopic robots (which don't, and we have little to no idea how to get there from here, and the named products of chemistry don't actually help). Crediting the first as examples of the second is the sort of thing that gets chemists I know punching walls. I suggest taking care not to conflate chemistry with nanoscopic robotics.

Isn't an H atom more like 0.1nm in diameter? Of course it's fuzzy.

I agree with steven0461's criticisms. Drexler outlines a computer design giving a lower bound of 10^16 instructions/second/watt.

Should there be a ref to http://e-drexler.com/d/07/00/1204TechnologyRoadmap.html ?

Quibbling about words: "atom by atom" seems to have caused some confusion with some people (taking it literally as defining how you build things when the important criterion is atomic precision). Also "nanobots" was coined in a ST:TNG episode, IIRC, and I'm not sure if people in the field use it.

I'll note that something that took me a long time to understand about nanotech in my relative youth was that the difference in scale between nanotechnological structures and cellular structures mattered, which meant that nanotech was meaningfully different from biotech. (Roughly speaking, I think I was lumping all "very small things" into the same bucket.) Assuming that wasn't a complete idiosyncracy of mine, you might want to emphasize explicitly the important differences between custom-built self-replicating nanobots & custom-built self-replicating bacteria.

(“nano-” means “one billionth of”)

http://lesswrong.com/lw/fk/survey_results/

IQs (warning: self-reported numbers for notoriously hard-to-measure statistic) ranged from 120 to 180. The mean was 145.88, median was 141.50, and SD was 14.02. Quartiles were 155.

(“nano-” means “one billionth of”, so a nanometer is one billionth the size of a meter).

allow us to intelligently access cancer cells and blood cells.

I don't know what this means.

This would be an explosive technology

I can't think of a better word than "explosive", but we should try.

But the massive production of nanobots

This sounds weird to me. "The massive production" weakly implies complete confidence that a specific event of massive production will actually occur. "But massive production of nanobots does not require that they be self-replicating," would be better, or "But massive production of nanobots would not require that they be self-replicating," as it is hypothetical.

"Massive production" is distracting because of the similarity to "mass production," so maybe say "extensive production" instead.

It is worth mentioning the possibility of macro-scale self-replicators here, or are they an entirely different topic?

Where is all soft nanotechnology? There is sometimes a distinction between soft and hard nanotechnology, Drexler reprecenting hard.

This is not really my subject but from what I've read there seems to be a lot of nano-tech research (aside from nanotubes) that is focused on self-assembly - not as in "nanobot-self-replication", but more like protein folding, what would be classified as soft.

Edit: I just realized that the kind of of nanotechnology that is really relevant for the FAQ is the one Drexler is proposing, but it seems to me as the description is analogous to trying to explain the singularity but only describing Kurzweil's definition.