ecnecn t1_j69dq6f wrote on January 28, 2023 at 6:14 PM

Reply to comment by SoylentRox in Myth debunked: Myths about nanorobots by kalavala93

This tool by SalesForce called ProGen is a LLM that can create new enyzmes from prompts: https://github.com/salesforce/progen

It never learned all the billions of possibilites of tertiary structures or all amino combos, it just interpolates after it learned a few millions from databases. The created / proposed "artifical enzymes" function like their biological counterparts while having derivative structure (molecular configuration) that dont appear in nature but do the same job. This is extremely impressive and I am sure AI will solve greater Nanotech problems by interpolation and pattern recombinations as well.

It may sound super simplistic but you dont need Nanorobots at all with this tool you could create Repair-Enzymes (Membranerepairase ;P etc.) and deliver them with Microrobots or Attached to Nanoparticles that can be controlled by magnetic fields (such tech already exists in cancer research, you bind drugs to iron particles or the drug / iron combo to a nanostructure and control their movement through the body with electromagnetic fields)

SoylentRox t1_j69ls82 wrote on January 28, 2023 at 7:08 PM

I was referring to molecular assemblers - a machine that runs in a vacuum chamber at a controlled temperature. It receives through plumbing hundreds of 'feedstock gases' that are pure gases of specific type. It can make many (thousands+) of nanoscale parts, and then combine those parts into assemblies, and combine those assemblies etc.

Everything is made of the same limited library of parts, but they can be combined many different ways.

This makes possible things like cuboidal metal "cells" that are robotic, do not operate in water, and can in turn interact with each other to form larger machines, making possible something like the 'T-1000' from terminator 2. (it probably couldn't reconfigure itself as quick as the machine in the movie, but that doesn't matter since it wouldn't miss when shooting)

custom proteins are for medicine, and won't work at all the same way.