In many respects, nanotechnology has been over-sold by its supporters, and over-criticised by its opponents. In this talk, I will try to give a realistic assessment of its prospects and potential problems. The two dominant areas of large-scale application for nanotechnology are likely to be in ICT (information and communications technologies) and in medicine. In the ICT area, both "top down" and bottom up" approaches are possible. Most of the current wealth-creating opportunities in ICT lie in "top down" technologies, which involve progressively shrinking the size of conventional information processing, storage devices and display technologies into the nano range. But in the longer term, the "bottom up" approach, which involves assembling radically new structures and devices from individual atoms and molecules, may provide greater returns, for example in the field of quantum computing. In medicine, nanotechnology has barely arrived, but it promises to revolutionise patient monitoring, diagnostics and especially drug delivery, with "nano-packaged" pharmaceuticals being developed which will attach selectively to target surfaces.
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