"In his 1963 scifi story "The Invincible," the Polish writer Stanisław Lem imagined an artificial species of free-floating nanobots which roamed the atmosphere of a far-off planet. Like tiny bugs, the microscopic beings were powerless alone, but together they could form cooperative swarms to gather energy, reproduce, and ultimately defend their territory from predators with deadly force. Unlike the story's human protagonists, the "black cloud" of bots was incapable of reasoning beyond the simple logic of animal instincts."
"Lem probably never imagined his evolutionary parable of living dust was just a few decades from becoming a reality - or that it would become the inspiration for the development of a real-life military technology known as "smart dust." Starting out as a theoretical research proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) - the Cold War-era military tech bureau behind everything from GPS navigation to the modern internet - smart dust is now being developed for use in a wide variety of industries,"
Stanisław Lem described swarming, free-floating nanobots that operated like animal colonies: powerless individually but collectively capable of energy gathering, reproduction, and lethal defense. The nanobots lacked higher reasoning and acted on instinct, while human interaction with them culminated in a decision to allow their survival. The fictional concept later informed real-world research into "smart dust," initially proposed to DARPA. Smart dust refers to tiny sensor motes that relay data to a central device. The term is somewhat misleading, since the devices are engineered sensors. Decades of theoretical and simulated work have steadily advanced microengineering and miniaturization in this field.
Read at Futurism
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