Is resistance futile? Taming the nanotech swarm

Novelist Jon Wallace considers the science fiction implications of engineering stories that have caught his eye. This month: will nanobots build better people, or demolish the race entirely?

Legions of microscopic robots fascinate scifi writers, from Star Trek’s Borg nanoprobes to the power-outage swarm of Revolution. In each case nanotech is a tyrant, reducing people to little more than slavery – to a soulless, technological ‘hive mind’ in the first; to a brutal, pre-electric dictatorship in the second. Our primitive understanding of microbiology hardwires us, it seems, to view artificial microscopic agents with suspicion - as contaminating fifth columnists, or agents of chaos.

Engineers have brighter ambitions for nanotechnology. Barriers to developing effective nanorobots are enormous, but baby steps are being taken. The Engineer reported this month on a miniature robot formed of a layer of biodegradable ‘Biolefin’ that, once swallowed, expands in the stomach, taking on a rectangular shape with accordion folds. It’s thought embedded magnets could allow it to be controlled externally, employed to remove foreign objects from the stomach, patch wounds, or deliver medication to a specific point in the digestive system.