Utility fogs:
Further than twenty years into the future, things become extremely hard to accurately to predict, but utility fog is too exciting an idea to ignore! The concept is that nano bots react to requirements to change their structure on a molecular level, to mimic pretty much anything the user wants. The impacts on sustainability in particular would be spectacular, as the following video explains:
Utility Fog: The Stuff that Dreams Are Made Of
July 5, 2001 by J. Storrs Hall
Nanotech pioneer J. Storrs Hall’s original concept, the Utility Fog, consists of a swarm of nanobots (“Foglets”) that can take the shape of virtually anything, and change shape on the fly. Here he discusses the technical details and feasibility of this nanoconcept.
Originally published 1993 by J. Storrs Hall. Published on KurzweilAI.net July 5, 2001.
https://www.kurzweilai.net/utility-fog-the-stuff-that-dreams-are-made-of
Hall, J. Storrs. “Utility fog: The stuff that dreams are made of.” Nanotechnology (1996): 161-184.
We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little lives are rounded with a sleep. Except machine you wouldn’t need to sleep. It could make you feel perfectly rested. Machine you doesn’t eat. It could give you the sensation of being well fed. Hopefully we would have worked out how to convince our neurons we were tasting nice things, and here’s a suggested as to how:
https://foglets.com/rf-remote-brain-wave-altering/
The next physical issue with these developments is an age old classic: entropy. All this technological activity will require serious processors. If people were to upload themselves, we would require incredible servers to store and power them. All this uses energy, which isn’t such a problem (energy is everywhere and the sooner we can get away from fossil fuel, heavy carbon output energy and onto greener or effective safe nuclear energy, the better) but use of energy generates heat, serious amounts of heat, Next thing we know we are heating up at the atmosphere and in the same sustainability hole as we are now. If only our excess heat and carbon could be deposited in space (a typical human ‘sweep it under the carpet’ approach) but entropy causes its own, different problems in a vacuum, where thermal energy cannot be moved away from a subject or body. Indeed, space suits keep astronauts cool, in the frozen void of space, because the vacuum means there is nowhere for their heat to go and it becomes a smothering thermal vest. Entropy is a big hindrance to many technologies and nano-tech printing foglets would be no different.
On the 30th May 2017 Tim Evans released a wonderfully designed video of augmented realities for his M.Arch portfolio, called the “Post-Human Fun Palace”. It is a short film toying with how a nanobot future might work for us (set 2036- 2066):