Word: scale
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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What would such a machine be good for? Construction projects, on the tiniest scale, using molecules and even individual atoms as building blocks. And that in turn means you can make literally anything at all, from scratch--for the altering and rearrangement of molecules is ultimately what chemistry and biology come down to, and manufacturing is simply the process of taking huge collections of molecules and forming them into useful objects...
From the viewpoint of bioengineering, a silicon chip is a large and rather complex shard of glass. Inserting a silicon chip into the human brain involves a certain irreducible inelegance of scale. It's scarcely more elegant, relatively, than inserting a steam engine into the same tissue. It may be technically possible, but why should we even want to attempt such a thing...
...most profound changes afforded by the digital world is the ability to be asynchronous, in the smallest and largest time scales. In the smallest sense, this allows us to use efficiently our channels of communications; for example, interleaving people's conversations--packetizing them--so that many people share the same channel without being aware that they are. In the larger sense, we can expand, contract and shift our personal time in new ways, leaving and receiving messages at mutual convenience. On a yet larger scale, social behavior will also become more asynchronous, with all of us moving in much less...
...buying Time Warner, is buying its own cable monopolies. And many are worried that AOL will forget its roots. Will the temptation to build its broadband network to protect itself against unallied content and new innovation be too great? Will AOL, like every other large-scale network that has controlled content and conduit, pick a closed rather than an open architecture? Will AOL become what it eats...
Sustaining a neutral platform for innovation will be the challenge of the next quarter-century. The danger is the view--common among politicians--that this neutrality takes care of itself. But we have never seen the owners of a large-scale network voluntarily choose to keep it open and free; we should not expect such altruism now. The Internet has taught us the value of such a network. But the government should not be shy to make sure we don't forget...