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Asked by beth5000 to Claire, Kate, Matt, Rob, Sam on 24 Jun 2013.
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Sam Geen answered on 24 Jun 2013:
I’m not a medicine expert, but robotic surgery is already a thing – the first operation using a robot happened in 1985 (the year I was born yes OK I am old). Tiny robots could help dentists, and even smaller robots in the future could even move around in our blood and help cure disease from inside our body. After that, who knows? Maybe we’ll merge with machines more, or even move our consciousness to robots (if that’s even possible).
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Claire Lee answered on 24 Jun 2013:
And some cool ideas for the future are nanobots that you can inject into your blood, and they will go to the site of damage and repair it, instead of needing surgery! It’s a very interesting field, and if you’re interested you should definitely pursue it!
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Robert Woolfson answered on 25 Jun 2013:
So, nanobots. I work in the field of nanoscience and we spent quite a lot of time studying nanobots when I first started. They are a very nice idea, but they are a long, long, long way away from products for three reasons:
1) Power. How do you power a nanobot? They’re tiny, so you can’t really stick a battery on them. A lot of research goes into this, but there’s not a lot of progress at the moment.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19651-smallest-electric-engine-could-power-nanomachines.html
2) Waste. If you have a nanobot doing something in your body, it’s going to produce some kind of waste. Whether that’s heat, chemical waste or some other type, we need to get rid of it. Otherwise, we can burn organs or cause all kinds of damage.
3) Control. You need the nanobots to have the miniature equivalent of mobile phones. But, as with everything else, you can’t simply shrink down current technology. How to control things at the nano level is fiendishly complex, and is another area of very active research.
For a bit more information (slightly technical):
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