There is a very predictable type of news story that one sees every so often. The crux of the story is that, by breaking one important constraint, one achieves the impossible.
π₯ sometimes to do such a thing is indeed a great accomplishment. other times, the only accomplishment is the degree of subterfuge needed to make it appear meaningful.
Most recently, in the news, we find: These tiny, medical robots could one day travel through your body . With the one important detail being that these are no more robots than a firecracker is a robot.
The puffery continues throughout. When the article says they are capable of traveling "many times faster than a cheetah in relative terms", that is still less than 1/1000th of the speed of blood flow.
π‘ ultimately, the maximum speed is impressive-sounding. This is because humans are bad at thinking in scale. If a δΊΊ could become 100 times smaller, accomplishments like "jumping higher than you are tall" would become easy.
The propulsion is "compressed air" powered. There is no pretense that these are capable of perpetual motion, or of gathering energy from the environment, or of navigating in any fashion. It is a pressurized cavity that can be opened by ultrasound, and nothing more.
π₯ so, when people point to this as "a worrying sign towards the pending development of nanobots", it isn't.
π or, more modestly, it is no more a sign than a child's picture of monsters is a worrying sign towards a pending alien invasion
β¨ trust not in those who worship mirrors
π‘ as many of you should have already noted, the failure of this news story to actually be about nanobots is not evidence that nanobots are impossible
βοΈ well, actually, to the straw-man Bayesian (he who sees a black horse and views it as evidence that all sheep are white), this is evidence