What Next?
The Coming Revolution In Manufacturing
by John Walker
Autodesk Technical Forum -- May 10th, 1990
These are indeed extraordinary times we're living through.
Few people are lucky enough to live at a time when their chosen field
of interest becomes the center of a technological revolution that
changes the face of the world.
We've all shared that good fortune; the success of Autodesk in so
short a time is evidence of of how rapidly and how completely the
evolution of computers has changed the way design and engineering are
done and has reshaped the very terrain on which businesses compete.
Yet all of these remarkable events were predictable, at least in
general outline, more than 25 years ago. I remember, like yesterday,
the afternoon in the spring of 1968 when, after I first learned about
the technologies used in the crude integrated circuits of the time, it
hit me. There was no fundamental physical reason you couldn't put a
whole computer on a single chip. It was just a matter of engineering,
money, and time.
Now I certainly didn't know when it would happen, and I doubt anybody
anticipated price and performance reaching their current levels, but
the direction and the goal was clear. It made engineering and
economic sense; there was no reason it wouldn't work; and each
intermediate step along the way would clearly pay for itself in
commercially successful products. That pretty much made it
inevitable.
This is the kind of reasoning I'm going to be using in this
presentation--projecting readily predictable trends forward and asking
the question "How far can we go, and what happens when we get there?"
Some of the conclusions that seem almost inevitable have profound
consequences that are not just interesting, but important for
companies like Autodesk who wish to grow and prosper in the coming
years.
WHAT'S BEEN HAPPENING
=====================
Let's start by looking at the key trend that's driven the entire
silicon revolution. It's really very simple: making things smaller,
or in engineer-speak, device scaling.
As you make a circuit smaller, it:
* Goes faster
* Uses less power
* Costs less
In the early days of transistors, it was observed that when you made a
device smaller, you got the best of everything. It ran faster, it
used less power and ran cooler, and since you could pack a lot more of
them on a single wafer and the cost of processing a wafer was the same
regardless of what was on it, the price per device went down.
After the first primitive integrated circuits were made in the late
1950s, the incentive to miniaturise became even more compelling. By
reducing the size of devices further, more complex circuitry could be
packed onto each chip. And remember, all chips cost roughly the same
to make, regardless of what they do or how complicated they are.
Integrated circuits started out as devices with just two transistors
on a die, and progressed to building blocks for larger systems.
Finally, in the mid 1970s, practical microprocessors, entire computers
on a single chip, appeared. These initial devices were crude, which
led many observers to dismiss them as toys. Indeed, none of the major
computer manufacturers of the time played a significant role in the
development of what is now the universal way of making computers.
It was the chip makers who pioneered microprocessors and developed
them to their current state. Why? Because they were familiar with
the inexorable consequences of device scaling, and they knew how far,
in time, it would carry the microprocessor.
CPU PERFORMANCE
===============
How far have we come?
I have a little program, called the Autodesk Benchmark, that I run on
various computers to get a feel for how fast they'll run engineering
software like AutoCAD.
Here's an anthology of results, spanning the history of Autodesk, from
1982 through the present.
Run time
(seconds) Computer
========= ========
3466.00 Commodore 128
1598.00 Macintosh Plus
1582.13 Marinchip TI 9900 2 Mhz
66.36 IBM PC/AT 6Mhz+80287
6.29 Sun 3/260, 25 Mhz 68020
4.00 Sun386i/25 Mhz model 250
3.00 Compaq 386/387 25Mhz
2.96 Sun 4/260, Sparc RISC
2.20 Data General MC88000
0.66 DEC Pmax, MIPS processor
0.60 Intel 860, 33 Mhz
0.40 Dec 3MAX, MIPS 3000
0.31 IBM RS/6000
In 1982, personal computers were becoming seen as useful tools for
serious work, but they were still very, very slow for computationally
intensive tasks. A typical low cost PC such as a Commodore took close
to an hour to run the program. (Putting this in perspective, to do
the same job by hand with a pocket calculator would probably take a
whole day.)
More expensive and powerful PCs emerged and slowly reduced this time,
making more and more complicated tasks practical. Then, in 1984, the
80286 appeared. The impact of this machine on Autodesk can't be
underestimated. Calculations that took half an hour on the PCs that
existed when we started the company could be done in a minute on the
PC/AT. It's no coincidence that Autodesk's sales took off through the
roof right about that time.
But it didn't stop there. Three years later, workstations and PCs
based on the next generation of chips had cut this time by another
factor of ten--from a minute to about five seconds.
And now the newest, shiniest crop of machines just arriving have
handed us another factor of twenty--down to less than a third of a
second.
In eight years, we've seen a task that originally took an hour
reduced, by the simple consequences of device scaling--making things
smaller--to less than a third of a second.
This kind of technological progress is hard to comprehend, even if
you've lived through it. If automotive technology had advanced an
equivalent degree, your car that went 55 MPH in 1982 would today go
615,000 miles an hour, with the same gas mileage and price. You could
drive to the Moon in around 25 minutes, if you beat the rush hour and
had a good radar detector.
So the inevitable question is...just how long can this go on?
There are reasons to believe the end of progress in electronics
through pure application of device scaling may be within sight,
although not imminent. When the limits of device scaling are
encountered, the linear extrapolation that has driven our industry
since the 1950s will come to an end and we'll enter another era.
Before getting into that, I'd like to talk about some different
perspectives on the kind of exponential growth we've been seeing.
OH WOW
======
| .
| .
| .
| .
| .
| .
| .
| .
| ..
| ..
|...
L_______________________
The first is what I call the "Oh Wow" view of things. You look at the
curve and draw the obvious conclusion--it's going to go on climbing to
the sky forever.
Now I don't mean to disparage this view; most people err on the side
of conservatism--they don't realise just how far a trend can go once
it's set into motion. But nothing grows forever.
In evaluating any growth trend, whether CPU performance at constant
price, world population, or Marin County real estate prices, you have
to ask, "what are the fundamental limits to this growth."
OH WELL
=======
| .....
| ..
| .
| .
| ..
| ..
|...
L_________________
This kind of analysis leads to a different perspective I refer to as
the "Oh Well" view. Rather than continued exponential growth, the
trend continues until it begins to encounter limits that constrain it,
then it tapers off after achieving maturity.
This view is very popular among mainstream business analysts since,
especially if you cook up some suitably bogus constraints, you can
always justify cutting research and development, reject innovative
market expansion and distribution ideas, and relegate the business to
a mindless caretaker status once it has reached "maturity".
For example, once you've sold a video tape recorder to every TV
station, how many more could you possibly sell?
OH SHIT
=======
| ...
| .. ..
| . .
| . .
| .. ..
| .. ..
|... ...
L_________________________
Again, we're not seeing the whole picture. Taking a still longer view
gives us what I call the "Oh Shit" perspective.
Nothing in this world is static and nothing, regardless of maturity,
lives forever. When a technology, or market, or species ceases to
grow and develop, it's the strongest possible indication that it's
become a dead end--its hand is played out--that decline and
replacement are only a matter of time.
To understand why, we have to take an even longer perspective.
OH YEAH
=======
| **
| ** **
| * *
| * *
| * *
| * *
| * *
| * *
| ++ * *
| ++ ++ * *
| + * *
| + * + *
| ... + * + *
| .. +. * + *
| . + . * + *
| . + . * + *
| .. + *. + *
| .. ++ ** .. ++ **
|... ++ ** ... ++ **
L__________________________________________________________
For this is what's really happening. Progress is made in a series of
waves. Each starts with a giddy period of exponential growth. That's
when it's fun, when everybody's jumping in, working 24 hours a day,
losing money hand over fist, and having a wonderful time.
As the curve really begins to soar, it starts having an impact on the
established, mature technologies that went before. This is a
general-purpose graph; it's my worldview on a single slide. You can
read it as transistors replacing vacuum tubes and then being
supplanted by integrated circuits, or of mainframes, minicomputers,
and personal computers, of turnkey mainframe CAD companies,
workstation based CAD, and mass market desktop CAD software, or for
that matter of species diversification and extinction in an ecosystem.
It doesn't matter. It's all evolution in action.
TECHNOLOGICAL TRANSITIONS
=========================
I call the points where a rapidly developing technology takes off and
starts to displace its predecessor "technological transitions." These
are perilous times, but they are the times when great industries are
founded. Rarely do leaders of the last technology play a significant
role in the next; they've usually become encumbered with a
bureaucratic superstructure focused on managing a mature market but
incapable of acting on the small scale with the rapid pace that's
needed to develop its successor--the new market that's inexorably
displacing them.
Having grown out of their period of rapid growth, they've forgotten
it's possible. They value caution over the very assumption of risk
that built their industries in the first place, and through caution,
they place at risk everything they have.
Technological transitions are great times to make gobs and gobs of
money. Autodesk got on board a relatively minor technological
transition in 1982--the second subwave of personal computers, which
was a ripple of the microprocessor surge, itself part of the
semiconductor tide, contained within the automation industrial
revolution. Even so, we managed to turn a hundred thousand dollars
into more than a billion in less than eight years.
Just imagine what you could do with a real industrial revolution.
FIVE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTIONS
===========================
Everybody has their own list of industrial revolutions, and here's
mine.
Tools 2,000,000 B.C.
Metallurgy 3600 B.C.
Steam power 1764
Mass production 1908
Automation 1946
A couple of million years ago we figured out that bashing things with
rocks you'd worked into special shapes was better that bonking them
with any old random rock you picked up. Suddenly you had tools,
craftsmanship, carpentry, weapons, wealth beyond imagining, and global
proliferation of a previously obscure critter. This was an
information revolution: using knowledge to transform existing
materials into useful forms.
All of this was based on natural materials, picked up from the Earth
or taken from plants and animals. Then, about 5600 years ago, on a
sunny Thursday morning, somebody figured out how to extract copper
from yucky looking rocks. Now people had access to new materials --
technology was no longer limited by what was lying around; it could
make new substances and build with them. This led to bronze, iron,
alloys, alchemy, chemistry, and steel. This was a material
revolution; enabling new technologies by creating substances not found
in nature.
All of industry until the 18th century was powered by the energy of
human or animal muscles, or natural energy sources like falling water
and the wind. This limited both the scope and scale of what could be
done. The advent of practical steam power swept away these
limitations, spawning trains, steamboats, satanic mills, and
capitalism. This was an energy revolution.
As the scale of industry grew, economies of scale could be realised by
standardisation and interchangeability of parts. These trends
ultimately led to an entire industrial system focused around mass
production of largely identical objects. This is harder to date. I
use 1908, the date of the first automobile assembly line, as the
milestone of mass production. Mass production was essentially an
information revolution: it embodied a uniform set of specifications in
huge numbers of objects, thereby reducing their cost so many more
people could afford them than ever before.
I consider automation to be the most recent industrial revolution.
Until the advent of mechanical, electrical, and electronic computers
in the twentieth century, any computation or information processing
required the attention of a human being and necessarily proceeded at
the pace a human could work. The computer revolution, which I date
here from Eniac in 1946, has been an information revolution that has
transformed not only the mechanics of industry, how we make things,
but also the structure of our organisations and societies.
Ironically, mass production, an essential precursor of automation, is
becoming less important as the introduction of intelligence throughout
the manufacturing process allows more flexible forms of production.
METRE SCALE
===========
Before I get into the details of what's about to happen, I want to
make sure we understand the territory. We're about to discuss things
that range in size by a factor of a billion to one, so it's useful to
go over the distance scale so we don't confuse millions and billions
the way the politicians do.
Let's start with the measure of all things, a human being. Humans are
on the order of metres in size, actually closer to two metres, but we
can ignore ones and twos when talking about factors of 1000, as we're
about to do.
Most of the history of technology has been built to this scale, and
tended to look something like this.
[GEARS--PRINTING PRESS]
If an object has to be assembled by people, in many cases powered by
people, and operated by people, it doesn't make any sense to make it
smaller than people can reasonably use, notwithstanding the design of
modern car stereos.
The size of mechanical parts is governed by the materials that compose
them and the scale of the machines used to fabricate them. Both
imposed severe limitations on miniaturisation throughout most of
history, limitations that were surmounted only with great difficulty
and expense when absolutely necessary, as in the design of watches.
Wherever technology leads us, effective design at this scale will
remain important as long as humans use the products. This is the
domain of user interface and ergonomics.
METRES TO MILLIMETRES
=====================
If we shrink down by a factor of a thousand, we arrive at the
millimetre scale, where an ant is pretty big stuff. (The thing on the
right of the slide is supposed to be an ant, OK?) This is about the
limit of what the human eye can effectively see unaided, or the human
body can manipulate without mechanical assistance, so it's a
convenient milestone on the road to Lilliput.
(TUBE)
Here's an example of millimetre scale technology. This, for those of
you too young to remember or old enough to have had enough bad
experiences and deliberately forgotten, is a vacuum tube.
If you examine this device closely, you'll see that its fundamental
geometry: the spacing of its grid wires, the distance from the cathode
to the plate, are all on the order of millimetres. With the
development of electronics, device scaling immediately became
important: the smaller you made a tube, the faster it ran and the less
power it used. Unfortunately, the fact that tubes had to be assembled
from separate metal parts limited how much you could shrink them.
This particular tube is a 6SN7. That's the type used in the flip-flop
circuit of the Eniac, the world's first electronic digital computer of
1946. Each tube, along with a handful of other parts, stored one bit
of computer memory--RAM. The Eniac contained 18,000 tubes like this,
occupied 3000 cubic feet of space, and required 140 kilowatts of
electricity. It had about the computing power of a pocket calculator.
It was a miracle of millimetre technology.
Tubes like this aren't even made in the United States any more; this
one came from the Soviet Union and cost $13. Interestingly, that's
almost exactly the current price of an 80 nanosecond 1 megabit dynamic
RAM, with a million times the storage capacity and 125 times the
speed.
MILLIMETRES TO MICROMETRES
==========================
Which brings us to the next factor of 1000 in size, to the micrometre
range that's the heart of microchip technology. All of these RAMs and
ROMs and microprocessors have feature sizes on the order of
micrometres. The entire march of processor technology I showed in the
timing slide is essentially the story of learning to shrink our
circuits from the order of tens of micrometres to single micrometres,
and the frontier of electronics in the next several years will be
shrinking further, down to fractions of a micrometre.
And then what?
Well, that's a very interesting question.
MICROTEETH
==========
Here's a piece of silicon that's been machined into slabs a third of a
micrometre wide. This is about the best we can do right now with
conventional processing technology, and to give an indication of just
how tiny that is, each of those slabs is smaller than the wavelength
of deep violet light.
Needless to say, this image is from an electron microscope, not an
optical one.
All the way down to micrometres, we've been able to design circuits
essentially the way we did in the days of vacuum tubes. Yes, the
devices and fabrication technologies changed, but the rules of the
game like Ohm's law remained the same.
Somewhere between half a micrometre and a tenth of a micrometre, these
comfortable assumptions begin to break down. The weird world of
quantum mechanics, where the wave nature of the electron becomes
apparent, begins to become manifest at this scale and straightforward
shrinking doesn't seem likely to work.
This suggests we're already uncomfortably near the top of the curve
for conventional electronics.
MICROMETRES TO NANOMETRES
=========================
But how far are we from the theoretical bottom?
Just about another factor of a thousand, it turns out.
If we shrink from a micrometre to a thousandth of that, a nanometre,
we've reached the scale where atoms become tangible objects. A one
nanometre cube of diamond has 176 atoms in it.
Designing at this scale is working in a world where physics,
chemistry, electrical engineering, and mechanical engineering become
unified into an integrated field.
This field will be called molecular engineering, and I believe it will
be at the heart of the next two industrial revolutions.
PLENTY OF ROOM
==============
The principles of physics, as far as I can see, do not speak
against the possibility of maneuvering things atom by atom.
...it is interesting that it would be, in principle, possible
(I think) for a physicist to synthesize any chemical
substance that the chemist writes down. Give the orders, and
the physicist synthesizes it. How? Put the atoms where the
chemist says, and so you make the substance.
--Richard Feynman, 1959
Over thirty years ago Richard Feynman pointed out that physicists knew
no limits to prevent us from doing engineering at the level of atoms.
His words are as true today as the day he spoke them.
Until recently, though, while the lack of physical limits was accepted
as commonplace, molecular engineering was thought of as impractical,
unnecessary, or requiring breakthroughs in knowledge and technique
that placed it somewhere in the distant future.
Many visionaries intimately familiar with the development of silicon
technology still forecast it would take between 20 and 50 years before
molecular engineering became a reality. This is well beyond the
planning horizon of most companies.
But recently, everything has begun to change.
WRITING WITH ATOMS
==================
In 1981, Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer of the IBM Zurich Research
Laboratory invented the Scanning Tunneling Microscope. This device,
easily one of the most elegant and unanticipated inventions of the
century, allowed imaging of individual atoms, and won Binnig and
Rohrer the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1986.
In 1985, Binnig and Christoph Gerber of IBM Zurich, along with Calvin
Quate of Stanford, invented the atomic force microscope. This allowed
imaging nonconductive matter such as living cells to molecular
(although not currently atomic) resolution.
Since then, every year has seen new inventions in the rapidly growing
field of scanning probe microscopes. They're now imaging bits on
magnetic surfaces, measuring temperature at microscopic sites, and
monitoring the progress of chemical reactions.
Recently, IBM San Jose used a scanning tunneling microscope to, in
Feynman's words, put the atom right where the chemist says.
Here's a picture of xenon atoms on a nickel crystal, lined up in a row
by pushing them into place with an STM tip. Remember, those bumps are
individual atoms, and they've been moved precisely into position, in a
row, one half nanometre from each other.
IBM
===
You can not only put atoms right where the chemist wants them, you can
put them right where the marketing department says to, as well.
Here, from the same paper, is a sequence of pictures showing a bunch
of randomly positioned xenon atoms being aligned to spell out the name
of the sponsor.
Again, each dot in this picture is a single atom, and the letters are
5 nanometres tall.
X
=
Here's an illustration from a paper published a few weeks before the
IBM result. The bottom picture shows an X drawn with an atomic force
microscope on material adsorbed onto a zeolite crystal surface. The X
is 8 nanometres tall, and it remained intact for the 45 minutes it was
monitored after being drawn there.
This experiment was done with a desktop instrument no bigger or more
complicated than a compact disc player.
MOLECULAR ENGINEERING
=====================
Molecular Engineering (Nanotechnology)
...thorough control of the structure of matter at the
molecular level. It entails the ability to build molecular
systems with atom-by-atom precision, yielding a variety of
nanomachines. These capabilities are sometimes referred to
as molecular manufacturing.
--K. Eric Drexler, 1989
So what we're talking about is making the next big jump to building
systems a thousand times smaller than the ones we're making today; to
go all the way to the bottom and start working with individual atoms.
This is called molecular engineering, or nanotechnology. Eric Drexler
defines this as control of the structure of matter at the molecular
level, however achieved.
Technology has never had this kind of precise control; all of our
technologies today are bulk technologies. We take a big chunk of
stuff and hack away at it until we're left with the object we want, or
we assemble parts from components without regard to structure at the
molecular level. Precise atomic level fabrication has previously been
done only by living biological organisms. We are entering an era when
some of the barriers between engineered and living systems will begin
to fall.
NEURON
======
In fact, we're already building components on the scale of biological
systems. The picture on the left shows a neuron net from a human
brain with an integrated circuit component inset at the same scale.
The picture on the right is a synapse--the interconnection of the
wiring in the human brain, with a one micrometre scale. Remember that
this is just about the feature size of the wires in our integrated
circuits.
The huge difference in capability between engineered and biological
systems is not just the materials from which they're made, it's that
the fine structure of the integrated circuit stops with what you can
see: there's nothing down below. Since we're forced to fabricate our
circuits from bulk material, from the top down, they must be
essentially two-dimensional. Biology builds its structures from the
bottom up, at the molecular level, and in three dimensions.
Engineers are beginning to learn how to do this.
MANY CHALLENGES
===============
...But Many Paths to Follow
Biochemistry: Custom protein design
Chemistry: Molecular recognition
Physics: Scanning probe microscopy
Computing: Molecular modeling
Engineering: Molecular electronics
Engineering: Quantum electronic devices
Engineering: Nanocomposites
The challenges in scaling another factor of 1000 shouldn't be
minimised. Developing millimetre scale electronics and micrometre
scale integrated circuits wasn't easy, either, but after we overcame
the initial obstacles, both progressed much faster and further than
anybody initially expected.
The remarkable thing about molecular engineering is that it looks like
there are many different ways to get there and, at the moment, rapid
progress is being made along every path--all at the same time.
In 1988, a group at duPont led by William deGrado designed a new
protein, called Alpha-4 from scratch, and manufactured it in their
laboratory. This protein, which never existed in nature, is more
stable than natural proteins its size. Researchers around the world
are now looking at proteins as molecular structures they can design
and build, just as an IC designer lays out a chip.
Chemists are making progress in designing and synthesising molecules
that bind to other molecules at specific sites, facilitating the kind
of self-assembly that occurs in biology. The 1987 Nobel Prize in
chemistry was awarded for just such work.
I've already alluded to the feats accomplished so far with scanning
probe microscopes. We now have a tool that lets us see and move
individual atoms. STMs have also been used to pin molecules to a
substrate and break molecular bonds. John Foster of IBM and Eric
Drexler have suggested in a recent paper in Nature that attaching
custom molecules to the tip of a scanning microscope may allow
assembling objects with up to 10,000 molecular pieces, with atomic
precision.
The ability to model and simulate complex molecular systems has been
growing rapidly in recent years, driven both by advances in raw
computing power, but also by the development of better simulation
techniques that now permit modeling of proteins composed of thousands
of atoms.
Physicists and electrical engineers are making rapid progress in
fabricating electron devices that work at the molecular level. In the
past two years, Texas Instruments and Bell Labs have reported
molecular-scale quantum transistors and have fabricated quantum wires
with X-ray lithography. These quantum wires are on the order of 30
nanometres wide.
Materials scientists and mechanical engineers are fabricating new
materials called "nanocomposites," made up of individual particles
ranging from 100 to 1000 atoms. These appear to have electrical and
mechanical properties unlike any other engineering materials and may
prove useful in the near future.
STEPS: MOLECULAR ELECTRONICS
============================
* Speed: 1000 Ghz (100--1000 times present)
* Power: (100--1000 times less power)
* Compatible with photonics
Even technologies with enormous potential can lie dormant unless there
are significant payoffs along the way to reward those that pioneer
them. That's one of the reasons integrated circuits developed so
rapidly; each advance found an immediate market willing to apply it
and enrich the innovator that created it.
Does molecular engineering have this kind of payoff? I think it does.
Remembering that we may be less than 10 years away from hitting the
wall as far as scaling our existing electronics, a great deal of
research is presently going on in the area of molecular and quantum
electronics. The payoff is easy to calculate; you can build devices
1000 times faster, more energy efficient, and cheaper than those we're
currently using--at least 100 times better than exotic materials being
considered to replace silicon when it reaches its limits.
BACTERIORHODOPSIN OPTICAL MEMORY
================================
* Purple membrane from Halobacterium Halobium
* Bistable red/green switch
* In protein coat at 77K, 10^7--10^8 cycles
* 10,000 molecules/bit
* Switching time, 500 femtoseconds
* Monolayer fabricated by self-assembly
* Speed currently limited by laser addressing
As an example of current work, consider the molecular optical memory
research underway by Prof. Robert Birge and his group at Syracuse
University. Using the purple membrane from the bacterium
Halobacterium Halobium, they've made a working optical bistable
switch, fabricated in a monolayer by self-assembly, that reliably
stores data with 10,000 molecules per bit. The molecule switches in
500 femtoseconds--that's 1/2000 of a nanosecond, and the actual speed
of the memory is currently limited by how fast you can steer a laser
beam to the correct spot on the memory.
BACTERIORHODOPSIN AD
====================
Lest you think this is some far out distant future research topic,
here's an ad from a couple weeks ago by a company in West Germany
offering bacteriorhodopsin for sale, listing under applications,
"Optical data processing, optical switches, holography, information
processing, nonlinear optics, and light sensors."
SIXTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
===========================
MOLECULAR ENGINEERING
* Fine-grain control over the structure of matter
* Materials inaccessible through bulk processing
* 100 times smaller (at least)
* 10,000 times cheaper (at least)
* 1000 times faster (at least)
* Fabrication of quantum devices
And so, we can begin to see the outlines of the sixth industrial
revolution: moving from micrometre scale devices to nanometre scale
devices. Current progress suggests the revolution may happen within
this decade, perhaps starting within five years.
Neither the events nor their consequences will be subtle. Suddenly,
we'll acquire new capabilities comparable to those of electronics or
computers.
What can we make with it? Well, anything we can design and model
that's built of atoms. Think about that. And that includes the
essential component of the industrial revolution that will follow,
perhaps in the same year.
SEVENTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
=============================
REPLICATING MACHINES
* Molecular engineering a prerequisite
* Required to mass-produce at the atomic scale
* Existence proof
For once we've mastered the essential technology of life, assembling
objects at the molecular level with molecular machines, there's no
reason we can't rapidly exploit the central trick of life as well:
getting the job done with machines that make copies of themselves.
Mass production has reshaped our industries, lives, economies, and
societies, but it's been a limited form of mass production: one where
the process of production was explicitly designed and rigidly oriented
to making a given object.
Once we can build molecular machines, we can design machines that make
copies of themselves. By doing so we achieve the second level of mass
production: being able to make anything we can design at a cost
fundamentally constrained only by the materials and information it
contains.
If this seems absurd, just imagine how an engineer at the start of the
twentieth century would have reacted to a description of
photolithography, the technology we now use to make integrated
circuits and printed circuit boards. "You're telling me you can
manufacture objects in the millions just by making photographs of
them? Give me a break!"
In fact, if we want to make objects on the metre scale with molecular
engineering, we're going to have to design replicating machines. The
vacuum tube I showed you has about 10^23 atoms in it, and if you try
to build something that large atom by atom, it's going to take pretty
long. If you add an atom every second, it'll take 10^23 seconds which
is a real problem because that's a million times longer than the
current age of the universe. But, if you can get your molecular
machines to crank out copies of themselves, you can set up a chain
reaction that can generate numbers on that scale quite rapidly.
That's how biology manufactures bacteria, butterflies, and buffaloes,
and it works very well.
This is flexible manufacturing taken to the logical limit. An
invention made on Monday could, by the following Friday, be in mass
production, with billions of copies fabricated. It's the ultimate
triumph of information over machinery, of software over hardware, of
intellect over capital.
The consequences of this are truly hard to grasp. Just as the
development of computers made many problems that have vexed mankind
for centuries essentially trivial, we're looking here at the first
fundamental change in the means of production in the last two million
years. Our economic and societal structures have evolved around
assumptions that will no longer be valid once technology reaches this
milestone. And it may happen in the next ten years.
But the real question I haven't answered yet is this. "Is it actually
possible to make these little tiny machines out of atoms and then get
them to replicate themselves, or this all just a pile of hooey, as
ridiculous as, say, putting 16 million transistors on a piece of
silicon the size of your fingernail?"
PHAGE T4 FOLDED
===============
Let's look at how we might design such a machine. Here's a little
gadget that looks like a lunar lander, but considerably smaller. It
stands about 225 nanometres high. This device is designed to operate
within a living system, to seek out cells of a particular type, land
on them by extending its landing legs, then inject them with material
stored in the tank at the top.
You could design something like this, for example, to locate cancerous
cells in a human body and kill them.
PHAGE T4 LANDED
===============
Here's our little machine attached to a cell, with its injector poked
through the cell membrane and emptying the tank into the cell's
interior.
For a sense of scale, this entire gadget, standing on its tippy-toes
would be less than a quarter the size of the smallest feature of a
current microprocessor integrated circuit.
Could something like this be built?
Could it possibly work?
PHAGE T4 SEM
============
Yes. Here's a scanning electron microscope picture of the actual
device. It wasn't designed on a CAD system; it evolved in nature.
It's called bacteriophage T4. It's a virus that preys on E. Coli, a
common bacterium that lives in the human intestine.
So molecular devices exist, work, and even succeed in replicating
themselves in a proper environment.
PHAGE F2 SEM
============
Here's an electron micrograph of some E. coli cells infected with
another virus, phage f2. The crystalline lattice in the corner of the
cell is an array of self-assembled copies of the virus, manufactured
within the cell.
You might also ask, "Can we store information at the molecular level?"
DNA SEM
=======
The answer to this is also yes, and each of us is living proof.
Here's a picture of a molecular-level file copy operation in progress.
This is a 140,000 times blow-up of a strand of messenger RNA being
transcribed into the proteins it encodes by a bunch of ribosomes--
they're the little beads on the string of RNA. The bumpy strings
coming out the sides are the protein chains being assembled by the
ribosomes. Each ribosome is a little molecular machine about 20
nanometres across that manufactures proteins to order by reading a
tape called messenger RNA and assembling the protein it describes
according to the genetic code.
There are quadrillions of them busy at work in each of your bodies at
this very moment, and they're about as accurate in copying the
molecular data in your DNA as a typical hard disc drive.
Since these biological molecular machines obviously exist, and clearly
work, and since biology follows the same laws of physics and chemistry
we apply as engineers, there's no question our molecular machines will
work. All we have to do is figure out how to design and build them.
And with the rapid progress on all fronts toward molecular
fabrication, design may become the most important part of the puzzle.
THE ARGUMENT FOR DESIGN
=======================
The consequences of any industrial revolution extend far beyond the
domain of scientists and technologists. Indeed, they are difficult to
even imagine. For example, try to envision the present world without
any electronic devices. You can't. Nobody can. It would be a very
different world from ours.
Similarly, the world that will develop after the next two industrial
revolutions is difficult to imagine starting from today, but there is
every reason to believe the consequences of molecular engineering will
be even more profound in every way that those that followed the
development of electronics or computers.
One thing, however, is clear. Unlike all of the industrial
revolutions that preceded it, molecular engineering requires, as an
essential component, the ability to design, model, and simulate
molecular structures using computers.
Computer aided design has been largely an adjunct to engineering so
far. It has promised productivity gains, cost savings, and other
benefits but except at the leading edge, as in VLSI design, has rarely
been an indispensable component of the design process.
But with molecules, if you can't model it, you can't build it.
Computer aided molecular design is one of the key enabling
technologies of these imminent industrial revolutions, and stands to
benefit both by helping to bring them about, and to profit from the
fruits of their success.
A computer aided design company that comprehends, throughout the
organisation, what is about to happen and takes the small, cautious,
prudent steps today to position itself to ride this next wave stands
an excellent chance of emerging as one of the dominant industries on
the planet as molecular engineering supplants our present
technological base to the degree that integrated circuits have
replaced vacuum tubes and electricity has displaced steam engines.
"Leverage" is commonly used these days in a financial sense to mean
risk/reward amplification through the assumption of debt. But there
are many kinds of leverage. Technological leverage, the power born of
knowledge, is supreme among all forms. We used it to build Autodesk
into the company it is today, fending off competitors with far more
money and people by simply knowing where technology had to go and
hitching a ride.
Autodesk is, at this moment, the preeminent global force in computer
aided design. Around the world, technology is poised at the threshold
of access to capabilities scarcely imagined a decade ago, and computer
aided design is an essential component of this next chapter in the
human adventure. The technological leverage of this next industrial
revolution is ours, if we want it.
The lever pivots on the micrometre technology of the microprocessor.
At one end, we reach to grasp it with our metre scale human hands, at
the other, it manipulates atoms to designs born of the human
imagination. With this lever, and the knowledge, courage, and vision
to operate it wisely, we can truly move the world.