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Nanotechnology’s spring - Works in Progress

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Nanotechnology sometimes sounds as much like science fiction as artificial intelligence once did. But the problems holding it back seem solvable, and some of the answers may lie inside our own bodies. The usual way of thinking about the Great Stagnation is as a faltering of preexisting trends. From 1920 to 1970, US total factor productivity grew at a rate of two percent per year – since then growth has fallen by more than half. From 1800 to the late 1970s, American energy consumption per capita grew at around the same rate, a phenomenon J. Storrs Hall calls the Henry Adams curve. Since 1978, per capita energy use has actually declined. If these trends had not faltered in the 1970s, we might expect energy consumption to be three times as high as it is today, and living standards to be about twice as high as today’s. Yet what if our ambitions should go beyond restoring pre-Stagnation trends? Storrs Hall devotes a portion of his book Where Is My Flying Car? to one technology so potent tha

The usual way of thinking about the Great Stagnation is as a faltering of preexisting trends. From 1920 to 1970, US total factor productivity grew at a rate of two percent per year – since then growth has fallen by more than half. From 1800 to the late 1970s, American energy consumption per capita grew at around the same rate, a phenomenon J. Storrs Hall calls the Henry Adams curve. Since 1978, per capita energy use has actually declined. If these trends had not faltered in the 1970s, we might expect energy consumption to be three times as high as it is today, and living standards to be about

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