Re:Nano-cluelessness strikes again. (Score 1)

Cart before the horse: They do need to be individually mobile and able to sync up their actions with one another to produce meaningful behavior, yes. But there are already microscopic systems that work together in aggregate despite individually being incapable of conceiving of the tasks to which the gestalt gets put. You're talking to one, and unless you happen to be a particularly insightful chatterbot, you are one. No one cell can comprehend or meaningfully model an organism, but the rules that govern their macroscale behavior don't require them to. The processes that led to such coordinated emergent behavior are understandable, and some of it is very well-understood. We don't need to make a bunch of wholly-independent nanites; interoperability is the point. Basic problem: "We can't build devices of convenient sizes and with unlimited funds" Nanotechnology is a new engineering discipline, but it's already an industry. Nobody has unlimited funds to work with, and you haven't shown me that unlimited funds are necessary here. As far as size goes, I saw an article a while back about a fully-functional guitar visible (and playable) with an electron microscope. That's a toy, or at best proof-of-concept, but the field has been making quite a bit of progress since then (I believe it was in 2002 or so). The problems I see are ones of our current infrastructure and knowledge not being up to the task yet--nothing insurmountable or fundamental.