Word: massed
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...crop of overseers has a distinctly local flavor. Hobbs hails from Concord, Mass., while Saris grew up in West Roxbury and attended Boston public schools...
Most parents and guests hoping for good seats were up and waiting in lines that stretched down Mass. Ave. and around street corners...
ELECTRONICS The advantages of smaller computers--more speed, more memory--are well known. But building matchbox-size supercomputers is too delicate a job for conventional mass manufacturing. Nanobots could do it easily, laying down circuits (made of nanotubes) molecule by molecule without a single mistake...
NIGHTMARE SCENARIO Self-replication is the best way to build a few trillion nanobots in a hurry: each one makes two more, and each of those makes two and so on. But if they don't stop, the entire planet could rapidly be reduced to a teeming mass of robots. Nanotechnologists plan to program their tiny creations to stop reproducing after a certain point. But it takes only one rogue self-replicator to cause a disaster. If you thought computer viruses were a problem...
Human population and our technological advances are increasing exponentially and, if the predictions of many scientists are borne out, so will our problems--widespread famine, massive shortages of clean water, unstoppable viruses, flooding, global warming (or cooling), a vanishing natural environment and mass extinction. Meanwhile, technology promises to solve these problems--feed the world, eliminate industrial waste, clean up the environment, predict climates and earthquakes, reduce human suffering and extend human life. In the short run, low tech will not replace high, if only because we need increasingly sophisticated technologies to solve the very problems technology created...