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I think the question that OP (and myself) is asking is "given Magic Robots (tm), could we essentially cure cancer?" Obviously, as you note, there are enormous

I think the question that OP (and myself) is asking is "given Magic Robots (tm), could we essentially cure cancer?" Obviously, as you note, there are enormous (or rather, extremely tiny, but very hard!) problems with this. However, it's not all doom and gloom. I could imagine that going in the 3D dimension for example, could enable another 100X increase in transistor count. In addition, you shouldn't need to actually do the computation onboard for cancer applications, just transmit it via some method, say RF to an outside computer that can do the compute work. Finally, cells are something like 10-30 um in diameter, which gives a lot more room to play with than 1um (the linked paper has scale of about 100um I believe).

pvaldes 6y ago
Anytime I see a title starting with "scientists" did X... the history is BS "Smart weapons" kill innocent people all the time, no matter how many times we repeat smart in their model name. GPS still lead truck drivers directly to the bottom of a lagoon. If we can't teach a huge machine full of circuits to distinguish between an ambulance or a tank, how we can realistic trust that tiny machines, with no space at all for complex circuits, will be able to diferenciate between a tumor or our hypothalamus? What would happen if the patient approach a magnet accidentally? Will the army of nowaybots be displaced enough cm to try to fry your pancreas assuming that they are in a different location?