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Wireless Networking

Smart Dust Is Coming. Are You Ready? (forbes.com) 101

Posted by EditorDavid from the internet-of-dust dept.
"Imagine a world where wireless devices are as small as a grain of salt," writes futurist Bernard Marr in Forbes, describing a technology being researched by companies like IBM, General Electric, and Cisco. "These miniaturized devices have sensors, cameras and communication mechanisms to transmit the data they collect back to a base in order to process.

"Today, you no longer have to imagine it: microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), often called motes, are real and they very well could be coming to a neighborhood near you. Whether this fact excites or strikes fear in you it's good to know what it's all about." Outfitted with miniature sensors, MEMS can detect everything from light to vibrations to temperature. With an incredible amount of power packed into its small size, MEMS combine sensing, an autonomous power supply, computing and wireless communication in a space that is typically only a few millimeters in volume. With such a small size, these devices can stay suspended in an environment just like a particle of dust. They can:

- Collect data including acceleration, stress, pressure, humidity, sound and more from sensors

- Process the data with what amounts to an onboard computer system

- Store the data in memory

- Wirelessly communicate the data to the cloud, a base or other MEMs

Since the components that make up these devices are 3D printed as one piece on a commercially available 3D printer, an incredible amount of complexity can be handled and some previous manufacturing barriers that restricted how small you can make things were overcome. The optical lenses that are created for these miniaturized sensors can achieve the finest quality images.

The potential of smart dust to collect information about any environment in incredible detail could impact plenty of things in a variety of industries from safety to compliance to productivity. It's like multiplying the internet of things technology millions or billions of times over.
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Smart Dust Is Coming. Are You Ready? More

Smart Dust Is Coming. Are You Ready?

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  • Replicators (Score:5, Funny)

    by redback ( 15527 ) on Sunday August 30, 2020 @08:42PM (#60457024)

    Do you want replicators? because thats how you get replicators.

    • Get MacGuyver, quick!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Tuidjy ( 321055 )

        MacGuyver was non-violent, so he will probably stop with smart dust.

        Six months later, someone unhappy with the state of the world, (and frankly, who isn't today) will get grey goo right.

        • And all it takes to make this stuff, is a commercially available 3D printer? To print a power supply, cpu, camera, and other sensors with cloud connectivity, the size of a grain of salt? I'll take that with a grain of salt.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

        Don't you mean Jack O'Neill from SG-1?

        But on a more serious note - "smart dust" is the dream thing for spies.

        Smart Dust is also a dream for every company that want to track you in detail in order to "improve" your "ad experience".

        I'm just waiting for all our everyday items that we have in our buildings to incorporate smart dust. Wallpapers, bed posts, toilet seats, TP holders...

    • Dude, just let me have some smart dust!

      I need something strong to digest the mishmash of stupid in the summary.

      • It only seems like smart dust. You'll wake up in the morning feeling stupider.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

          You mean that smart dust really is Soma [wikipedia.org].

        • Oh, Darling, smart dust won't even make you smart tonight, who told you that? You didn't buy any eggs from him, did you?

          They only call it smart dust because the nanites run a trained algorithm.

      • You'll need something stronger if you try to digest the mishmash of stupid in the article.

    • The only thing this kind of crap may replicate successfully is garbage.

    • Yes I know you were being ironic but - any human built system would still have to obey the laws of physics so couldn't replicate quickly out of control without a high energy "food" source (ie not just anything that happens to be lying around) and it would have to be going some to out do bacteria which have a billion year head start and have colonised the entire planetary surface and a signifricant depth downwards.

    • This is smart dust, not the minefield on the wormhole

    • Do you want replicators? because thats how you get replicators.

      Terrible plot device, as was the Deus Ex Machina, Q.

  • outlaw its use (Score:5, Insightful)

    by iggymanz ( 596061 ) on Sunday August 30, 2020 @08:43PM (#60457026)

    neither government nor large corporations can be trusted with such devices, outlaw them.

    • Well, MEMS oscillators suck, so I won't fight that battle, but I'm not giving up cheap motion and pressure sensors just because some idiot is on dust and thinks he's smart.

      • monitoring yourself and your property is fine. Government or google dusting a town and recording everything is not.

        • probably too late, but if china gets these things it it game over for their population. The only thing they need to add is a AI and the whole country will be an authoritarian dystopia where any expression of discontent or disagreement will be subject to the necessary reconditioning / reeducation or termination of the trouble work unit. They are much closer to the society ruled by science that many here have advocated. Take a good look at the provinces in 40 day lock downs with strip searches and people b

          • Re: outlaw its use -- china. (Score:5, Insightful)

            by Archangel_Azazel ( 707030 ) on Monday August 31, 2020 @11:22AM (#60459086) Homepage Journal

            "This is what 'the singularity' and secular atheism really look like. This is where rejection of religion leads."
            So it's an atheist idea that masks are a form of control? Nope.
            An atheist idea that some deserve to be poor and die sick? Nope.
            An atheist idea that it's okay to burn the planet to a cinder because my invisible friend(s) will be here any minute to fix it? Nope.
            An atheist idea that others deserve to die simply for not being atheist? Nope.

            Those are all common religious beliefs though, and they're literally killing people everyday. Then they jump up and down a lot screaming about atheists trying to destroy the world whole they destroy the world.

            But yeah, totes the fault of folks who don't believe they're invisible friend can help their sports team win.

            • Wrong, plenty of atheist regimes have done just that, genocide, oppression of classes, racism, polluting, persecution of religions. China is poster child for all that, as are some other communist regimes like n. korea.

          • "This is what 'the singularity' and secular atheism really look like. This is where rejection of religion leads"

            Your post was more or less valid until you jumped the rails at this point.
            The problem is people's need to control others and greed, and lets face it, we are still killer apes.

            Believing in an invisible magic sky creature and quivering before it has lead to carnage and suffering on a scale that is impossible to accurately measure.

            Your 'solution' of going back to believing in a book o

    • Do not outlaw them. The only to watch the government, who will use these, is for the people to watch right back.

    • Yeah, cause evil people care so much about laws ... --.--

      There are only two types of entities that pose a danger:
      Criminal humans that ignore the laws.
      Criminal corporations, big enough to write the laws to make it legal for them.

      The real problem is not the smart dust. It, in the hands of a good and trustworthy person, in not the problem. Just as with any other dangerous thing, from plutonium to guns. (Though I do not know a good use for the latter.)

      The real problem is lack of empathy due to social distancing

    • neither government nor large corporations can be trusted with such devices, outlaw them.

      And that will prevent bad guys from deploying them how? We also tried outlawing recreational drugs.

  • - welcome our new grey goo overlords.

  • Not 3D printed (Score:5, Informative)

    by niftydude ( 1745144 ) on Sunday August 30, 2020 @09:10PM (#60457100)

    Since the components that make up these devices are 3D printed as one piece on a commercially available 3D printer, an incredible amount of complexity can be handled and some previous manufacturing barriers that restricted how small you can make things were overcome.

    This statement is very far from being factually accurate.

    MEMS are not 3D printed, they are manufactured using photolithography and thin film foundry processes.

    Ditto for the microcontrollers, wireless radios, and everything else usefull except the case.

    This article is completely contentless, basically "Woo - there could be this thing called smart dust in the future - woo - woo"

    • Re:Not 3D printed (Score:4, Informative)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Sunday August 30, 2020 @09:59PM (#60457218) Homepage Journal

      Yeah, thanks for that. MEMS is not new, for one thing. And even if you could make mechanical links as small as modern transistors they'd be too fragile to do meaningful work. MEMS has been around for ages in cheap devices like the accelerometers used in drones, it's fairly commonplace now. It's also used in DLP projectors. It's not magic; although it is fairly amazing what can be accomplished, smart dust is not on the list.

      • Yeah the smallest any useful "smart dust particle" could be built right now would be about a 1cm cube, and it would have a battery life of less than a day, even if it were coated with solar cells. From the summary I'd expect that the article is nonsense.

      • Uum, small correction: Our entire body is MEMS devices "too small and fragile to do useful work".

        Just look at this: https://youtu.be/7Hk9jct2ozY [youtu.be]

        For many things, smaller even means stronger! A bug does not die from falling from a height equivalent to a 20 story building. Glass does not break, but bend, if you make it thin enough.

        • That was FASCINATING! Thank you!

        • Our entire body is MEMS devices "too small and fragile to do useful work".

          Our bodies are self-repairing.

          For many things, smaller even means stronger! A bug does not die from falling from a height equivalent to a 20 story building.

          That doesn't mean stronger.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The main issue is that something that small can't harvest or store enough energy to make useful RF transmissions unless it's using something like NFC or RFID, i.e. powered by the transceiver from a few centimetres away max.

  • The optical lenses that are created for these miniaturized sensors can achieve the finest quality images. I guarantee ehh nobody gonna have fine quality images like this.

  • It isn't hard to understand how tiny MEMS could be fabricated, but how would they be powered? Wireless communications won't last long with a battery the size of a grain of salt. Would they scavenge power somehow? Be glorified RFID chips?

    • The same way as a Tesla tower. Or "wireless" chargers*. Or a radio that is powered by what reaches its antenna.
      Which of course makes EMP attacks incredibly easy.

      _ _ _
      * Which themselves very much have a wire, and need closeless to not be incredibly inefficient, so much that a wire to the phone would.actually mean more flexibility, making the whole idea utterly retarded, ... but we live in retarded-by-design times, so ...

  • Oh boy, oh boy, Tiny spying devices! Oh, how fun that will be.

    I wonder when the tech bubble will burst. I might throw a party.

    Just wait until we make them self-replicating. Gray Goo, anyone?

  • Once again, Michael Crichton predicted the future.

  • Fsck It... IPv8 it is. (Score:5, Funny)

    by aaarrrgggh ( 9205 ) on Sunday August 30, 2020 @09:22PM (#60457138)

    Just when I am starting to get IPv6, now every grain of dust needs an ip address...

  • Drugs are bad, mmm-kay...

  • Localizers (Score:3)

    by samwichse ( 1056268 ) on Sunday August 30, 2020 @09:59PM (#60457220)

    Life imitates art. Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky.

    • And don't forget the little cameras Paul Naismith made in Vinge's "The Peace War" (also part of the book "Across Realtime").
  • Sure the environmental and surveillance ar large issues are one thing, but what when they are breathed in or swallowed?

  • This immediately made me think of DOROTHY in "Twister". Way easier to deploy than a truckload of tennis-ball sized sensors. Also you could drop them on-site using drones. Being a storm chaser must be quite a bit safer these days.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday August 30, 2020 @10:18PM (#60457266)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • 2018 (Score:5, Informative)

    by Vanyle ( 5553318 ) on Sunday August 30, 2020 @10:36PM (#60457306)
    This article is 2 years old, why is it getting posted now?

  • Cut its power, or prevent power, and it's useless.
    A nice EMP will kill any of them in any place.

    And at their size-limited complexity, they will have no chance against a MITM. If only to block them.

    So the fearmongering is limited. I'm sorry.

    • They have experimented with powering them with ambient radio waves. Or from a network transmitter. Also you could use heat or light as sources of power.

  • your father's nanotechnology (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Goldsmith ( 561202 ) on Monday August 31, 2020 @01:20AM (#60457510)

    This idea is impractical, unrealistic, and not at all what we're working on in cutting edge nanotechnology. These conversations of how to build tiny robots are best left in the 1990s where they belong.

    You are made of tiny, self-replicating, self-repairing robots called cells. For several years now, the best of us in nanotechnology have realized that seeking to make mechanical versions of cells is... inefficient. Our task now is to find ways to engineer and work with biology such that it can be seamlessly integrated with digital infrastructure. It's not easy, but it's going well.

    • What's wrong with working both ends of a problem? Mightn't the best way to understand biology be to try and replicate it artificially?

      Besides, my father was a biologist, so I think you have it backwards.

      • It's not your father's biology either! Probably no field of science is changing as fast as biology right now. It's like being in computer science in the 1980s.

        In many ways, we're riding just behind the wave of that revolution in biology. The tools used and research approach is a combination of what could broadly be described as MEMS, CMOS, cell biology, and protein engineering. This is a very significant break from the past, where you would never use biochemical or biological engineering as part of an elec

        • I have to admit I am extremely intrigued by your posts regarding nanotech and biology merging. Are there any online info resources about this cutting edge stuff to read about? I'm not surprised to find that it's more effective to use cellular machinery that has been time-tested over hundreds of millions of years to perform work for us rather than trying to reinvent some newer, much crappier wheel.

    • Well...
      MEMS are good practical science also. Nanotech is also good. I mean, just because we have nano-machines doesn't mean we won't want to build cars and tractors, right? MEMS are not new - they are being used in scenarios such hormone/drug monitoring and regulating, using NFC systems embedded to stomach lining, for instance.

      The one thing I totally agree with is that none of this is particularly 'new', and it falls outside of the scope of 'news for geeks'.

  • Ah, yes. Futurists.
    I remember those.

  • The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer [wikipedia.org] by Neil Stephenson

    The Diamond Age depicts a near-future world revolutionised by advances in nanotechnology, much as Eric Drexler envisioned it in his 1986 nonfiction book Engines of Creation. Molecular nanotechnology is omnipresent in the novel's world, generally in the form of Matter Compilers and the products that come out of them. The book explicitly recognizes the achievements of several existing nanotechnology researchers: Feynman, Drexler, and Ral

  • I am ready... (Score:3)

    by LordHighExecutioner ( 4245243 ) on Monday August 31, 2020 @02:28AM (#60457616)
    ...and my Roomba is fully charged, waiting for it.

  • What a totally useless article (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Wowzers, someone at Forbes must be smoking wacky tobacky to have conflated microelectronics, MEMS and 3D printing into some fanciful Smart Dust device.

    MEMS devices have been around for many years. DMDs (Digital Mirror Devices) are an example of commercialized MEMS technology that's been produced, out in the field, and not actually spying on you.

  • would be trivial to just vacuum that shit up or use a microwave transmitter and burn the fuckers out with a hitec "sweep".

    it was fun to see them in stephenson' the diamond age and vernor vinge's a deepness in the sky but this is absurd, far future shit that's hundreds of years in the future if ever.

  • Anti-privacy (like the rest of us) is dust in the wind.

    On a similar note, how's that needed human behavior improvement coming along lul?

  • computing and wireless communication in a space that is typically only a few millimeters in volume

    Since when is millimeter a unit of volume? And while we're on the subject of size:

    these devices can stay suspended in an environment just like a particle of dust.

    It's pretty questionable how something a few millimeters in diameter will stay suspended like dust. Things that large tend to be heavy enough to settle to the ground fairly quickly, especially if they're gonna have batteries and electronics in it.

    • Seems pretty clear to me they meant cubic millimeters.

      But a few mm^3 is significantly larger than a grain of sand. Toss a handful of sand in the air and see how well it stays suspended. LOL.

      I feel like someone read Vernor Vinge and said "Hey, I can get grand money/VC for saying that's possible."

    • They won't have batteries, at that scale they'll be able to harvest stray radio waves for energy. Maybe a tiny tiny capacitor instead of a battery, but we're still talking about "devices" so small that their energy requirements are insanely small. They could just as likely turn ambient sound into electricity.

      All this stuff is coming, maybe not as fast as people think, but it's definitely coming.

      • So instead of the extra weight of a battery,they'll have the extra weight of the electronics that make the battery unnecessary. Not sure that invalidates the point.

        • Maybe, but when you're working at this small a scale the circuitry is probably going to be negligible compared to a battery. Even a 'battery' such as it would be on that scale would weigh almost nothing because the amount of power required is very small. And again, harvesting ambient light and sound could likely power nano devices without much trouble.

          • Uh...the context of the discussion is the ridiculous idea that these several mm sized items are going to stay afloat like dust. The weight of a battery or power generating mechanism might seem negligible on the scale we usually work on, but when you're talking about these items floating through the air for an extended duration, I'm pretty certain it's nowhere near negligible.

            • Uh...the context of the discussion is the ridiculous idea that these several mm sized items are going to stay afloat like dust.

              Real nanomachines will be fractions of a millimeter, if that. Nothing millimeter-sized can be called "nano" scale.

  • This gives me a sense of dread, as it foreshadows the dystopia created by the "slow glass" tech that debuted in the short story, Light Of Other Days. In subsequent stories in that universe, slow glass, which delays light passing through it, was ground into fine particles and distributed over the Earth, so that surveillance was ubiquitous. All one had to do to see what occurred was to retrieve some slow glass particles and wait for the light to emerge. With Smart Dust you wouldn't even have to go to that muc
  • n/t

  • We can pollute our environment much more efficiently this way. You know how glitter gets everywhere ...?

  • But would these MEMS, when inhaled, produce flu-like symptoms that would be mild in the majority of the population but could produce real problems for the very old of those with compromised immune systems? Asking for a friend...

  • Pretty much foretold in numerous scifi books, but most notably to in the book "The Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson.

    "The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is a science fiction novel by American writer Neal Stephenson. It is to some extent a Bildungsroman or coming-of-age story, focused on a young girl named Nell, set in a future world in which nanotechnology affects all aspects of life."

    And when they say "all", they mean ALL, whether you like it or not.

  • Are the answer. I want one, so I can go through the house, as if I were using a vacuum clearner, and zap every damn corner of the house.

    With luck, it'll kill biological bugs, too.

  • Neal Stephenson wrote about this his book :The Diamond Age" long before this guy played "futurist".
    Plagarist? Intellectual theft?

  • These promotional ads, with no real content, on /.
    are getting to be such a massive pain.

  • Oh Lord, 5G covid fanatics are going to eat this up!

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