 The third technology is the eye and the grin technology, and that's information technology. And of course anybody who's got a computer is familiar with the underpinnings of this, but what's amazing is how quickly this is becoming part of what it means to be human. For example, for almost 20 years now there have been devices called cochlear implants. And these are basically computers that fit into your ear and go directly into your nervous system. This is for people who are profoundly deaf. I mean they've got nothing in their ear that works, so you can amplify all you want and it won't help them. What a cochlear implant does is pick up the signal, turn it into a digital image, and pipe it directly into your brain. And there are now more than 30,000 Americans with these things and it completely changes their lives. And in 2004 the FDA approved similar technology for ocular implants. And these are tiny cameras that go directly into your retina and allow the profoundly blind to see. I mean what's amazing about all this information technology is that, I mean I don't know if there's anybody old enough to remember when a music player required three or four great big boxes covered with walnut, remember? And then of course a music player became something that you carried, like a walkman. And now it's a piece of jewelry, like the nano or the shuffle. That's because of Moore's Law these capabilities just get cheaper and cheaper and smaller and smaller. I mean it's just a matter of time before these become earrings. Well what's interesting about this is that there's no end of other technologies that are right on the heels of this. For example, in Afghanistan right now American troops carry universal translators. They're little basically laptops that have got 5,000 words that can translate in both directions in about 16 languages over about 5,000 words. So if you can say where's the bad guy and it will output, it'll talk to whoever you're talking about in their language and then they reply it'll understand just fine and then explain it to you in English. Well if this fit them it's not cheap and it's not small yet but because of Moore's Law you know you can easily imagine the point at which that too becomes an earring once you have a universal translator. The question becomes suppose what happens when this gets offered in the next five or ten years as an implant inside your skull? Suppose you could buy an implant that would make you fluent in Chinese. Would you go for it? When I ask this question you know there's this long pause and almost every time half the population raises their hand. You know they're willing to have an implant. And the same thing goes with memory chips. You know if you could buy a few gigabytes of you know who couldn't stand to use a couple of extra gigabytes of memory and of course one of the things that DARPA is interested in is allowing you to see what the robots can see from far away. So you can easily imagine a circumstance in which a researcher could look at the rings of Jupiter through a robot as if she were there. And that's pretty amazing. And this again this is not, I know it sounds like science fiction. One of the problems I have with this stuff is that it's convincing people that you know of what actually exists much less what's in the pipeline. But I mean Larry Page and Sergey Brin the co-founders of Google back in 2004 were telling Newsweek you know where can you go with this quote certainly if you had all the world's information directly attached to your brain or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain you'd be better off end quote. In 2005 they said quote why not improve the brain. Perhaps in the future we can attach a little version of Google that you just plug into your brain end quote. Now you know back then people thought they must be kidding. Oh no they're not. Alright that takes us into the fourth technology which is nanotech. And this is the least developed of the four. What nanotechnology is about is directly controlling matter and energy. It involves taking molecules and atoms and putting them wherever you want them in a fashion such that you can create from scratch anything you want. Anything you want. Diamonds. Molecularly accurate t-boat stakes. Spaceships you know whatever you want one atom at a time. Now this is one of the most transformative all four of these technologies of these grin technologies tend to you know are not discreet. The information technology feeds into the biology which feeds into the nanotechnology but it's all happening on a curve. And nanotechnology according to the congressional study is expected to be a one trillion dollar a year business by 2015 which for comparison's sake is about the size of the GNP of Canada. And what's interesting about nanotechnology is that the more urgent are issues the more promised this holds. A classic example is energy. There is a company for example called Nanosolar Inc. Which has got, which is now producing commercial quantities of great big sheets of plastic on which are printed nanoscale circuits that take sunlight and turn it into electricity. And when it's at a full scale it's supposed to be at the same price as coal or nuclear. So you know you're talking about big flexible sheets of plastic that can produce electricity that you can put anywhere you want. On your roof, on your car, on your lawn you know out in the desert in Arizona whatever you want. I mean think about how many companies have been upended by technology in the last 10 or 20 years. Think about you know the record industry or the newspaper industry Well think of what happens to the future of the electricity businesses when you no longer have to own a nuclear reactor to have electricity. Suppose it becomes distributed and bottom up the way technology has upended all these other things. It fundamentally changes a lot of the equations. And a little bit farther down the road like 10 or 15 years one of the promises of nanotechnology is to create nanobots as they're called. These are robots that are smaller than a human blood cell and you could put millions of them in your bloodstream and the first generation would be watchdogs. They'd be going through your bloodstream looking for a cell that was just becoming cancerous. Years before you had any symptoms. The second generation would be hunter killer bots which would go in and not only recognize a cancerous cell but it'd be able to attack it. Or anything else you wanted like fat cells again. I don't know why I keep on talking about fat cells. My personal obsessions I suppose. But anyway think of how that changes medicine. I mean it just kicks robotics. Robotics in this case just kicks genetics into a new orbit.