What corporate world will transcend to and what marketers will do in the nanotech age of open source digital products and digitalized matter? Does your business strategy look far enough ahead, when your billion dollar worth physical products inventory become a free computer code?

I would lie if I said that I know enough about nanotechnology, but from little I know, dangerous questions arise in my dangerous mind.

How nanotechnology and artificial intelligence development will effect the world of advertising and the business world as such?

To connect with my stream of thoughts, I suggest you to take 6 mins of your time and watch an interview with Ray Kurzweil who tells about his vision of the Singuarlity — a point around 2045 when artificial intelligence will blossom to such degree that technology will infuse itself with biology. Either you are skeptic or supporter, it will not matter when this picture becomes a matter of fact. Ray‘s theories have many supporters, as well as critics, but the fact that numerous Kurzweil’s theories and predictions he made few decades ago, now are the reality that seems obvious to us.

“We have shown the feasibility of manipulating matter at the molecular level, which is what biology does. One of the ways to create nanotechnology is to start with biological mechanisms and modify them to extend the biological paradigm – to go beyond proteins. That vision of molecular nanotechnology assembly – of using massively parallel, fully programmable processes to grow objects with remarkable properties – is about twenty years away”, says Ray Kurzweil in one of his interviews. “The key issue is that information technology and information processes progress at an exponential pace. Biological evolution itself was an information process – the backbone is the genetic code, which is a digital code.”

If indeed we decode the “DNA” of matter, creating ”things” out of the air (almost literally – all you need is a digital code that a friend sends to you via email or post on his blog) will become as easy as printing the fax page sent to you in a digital format today.

Matter fabrication where the output of computation finds itself in a digital world, so any of products below become not more than a digital code, various combinations of 1 and 0 can effect all world processes to such to such degree that we can not even imagine now.

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No more Amazon, no more eBay, no more needs for sweet savings? No more wholesalers and distributors since no more retain chains… as we know it?

Boy, what is your girl going to Tweet about if not about her new bra?   Well, may be about the one she just have fabricated from an open source code?

Of course significant majority of the world population has no idea what might be coming, but the captains of multibillion dollars corporation who are responsible for the future of companies they are leading, have no right not to care. Corporate executive might ignore the development of nano science, but ignorance will not help to quickly turnaround the company that one day can became invalid in a blink of an eye, and “nobody seen it coming”.

If you are a young advertising professional, don’t you wonder what you might be advertising in the last decade before your retirement? May be all there will be is digital goods?

And if you are running a hype ad agency, don’t you think that all traditional media performance matrix might become irrelevant as expression “print media” becomes an archaism, so all your focus has to shift to mastering digital marketing techniques?

And if this truly digital world indeed will become the reality of the future, it opens unlimited opportunities to step beyond the commerce. We might become observers or participants of the new scene where innovation will jump out of each of 10 billions computers (of course at that point there will be no need in computers as we know them today).

The video below supports the concept of the world as a “global invention lab” which breaks organizational boundaries and helps creative minds to invent solutions to both local and global problems.

Now imagine what shift would arise in a social media (if it doesn’t go down the drill till then). I cannot wait for the time when I can transform IdeaMamaClub.com and furnish it by cloud hosted tools for innovation beyond imagination… (Hey, may be in my 60th I will look younger then now with new nano tools for immortal suffering ). I do believe matter “decoding” might happen within this lifetime… I guess that would take IdeaMama from Web 3.0 to Web 4.0, Web 5.0, or what have you.

Do I believe in the prevailing goodness of developments in nanotech and artificial intelligence? I never said so, but ethical / moral side of technology evolution is a separate conversation all together, and I will come back to it in one of my articles.

“There is no secret and there is no defense; there is no possibility of control except through the aroused understanding and insistence of the peoples of the world. … In this lies our only security and our only hope—we believe that an informed citizenry will act for life and not death.” Albert Einstein about atomic energy.

Here are excerpts from Nanoveau, a new column by John Robert Marlow, the author of the novel Nano: Digital Matter—Understanding Nanotechnology.

The coming Age of Nanotechnology might best be described as the Age of Digital Matter, for it will be a time in which it becomes possible to manipulate the physical world in much the same way that a computer now manipulates the digital ones and zeroes on its hard drive.

There are 116 known elements, or types of atoms. The world and everything in it is made up of atoms of one or some combination of those elements. The arrangement and combination of these atoms determines what a thing will be. Consider the element of carbon: arrange a gaggle of carbon atoms one way, and you have a worthless lump of graphite; arrange them a bit differently, and you have a diamond. Combined with oxygen atoms, they become a gas floating through the atmosphere. When arranged in yet another manner, and combined with several additional elements—those same atoms form a human being.

And just as the digital ones and zeroes of a computer’s binary code can be arranged to form mathematical formula, a symphony, an invitation to a hate rally or pornography—any object on earth can be torn apart into its basic atoms, which can then be used to build something else.

In the same way that the hate rally invitation can be deleted and overwritten with, say, Beethoven’s Ninth, it will be possible to disassemble a car, a building, or a person—and use their atoms to build something else. It will also be possible (and more common) to gather the necessary atoms from a junkyard, a dump, or the environment itself—and then use those atoms to make something useful.

Nanotech is, at its heart, a technology which will allow us to work directly with the basic building blocks of matter—to manipulate individual atoms at will. Because human hands are millions of times too large to do this, we must construct incredibly small machines, or nanodevices, to do the work for us. Such devices are now being developed.

Just a few of the many good things this technology will make possible: pollution reversal (because pollutants can be reduced to their component atoms and recycled); elimination of disease and genetic defects (because the body’s cells and DNA can be altered); eradication of poverty (because production costs of nearly all products—including food—will drop to near-zero); microscopic computers faster than today’s best supercomputers (because of radical miniaturization); inexpensive space travel (low production costs for lighter and stronger materials), and; the indefinite extension of human lifespan (because cells which grow old or damaged can be completely restored).

“… Production costs of nearly all products—including food—will drop to near-zero!” So, do you think this development would effect your business? You better believe it!

CONCLUSION:

Are we moving from programming bits to programming atoms and as a result of it – matter? None of us can know for sure. But those who invest millions or billions of dollars in creation of hard assets with intent to commercialize them in few decades just can not afford not to care. Entrepreneurs, managers, venture capitalists…. Can you?

I don’t suggest anybody to believe that this picture is our definite future, but I encourage us to assume that it is quite possible and ask “what if” when making plans – if the prediction to be true, the long-term strategic plans that we are making now can be used in a digitally designed restroom, pardon my French.

I encourage us, who invent the products, build companies, strategize and design processes simply expand our consciousness and ask right questions… and hold our horses when skeptical “no way” response arises in the mind. The reality of tomorrow might surprise all of us.

It all might be just a theory, but might be one that is included in a history book a few decades from now. One never knows… unless he does…

“[Nanotechnology is] a development which I think cannot be avoided.”
—Richard Feynman, Nobel Laureate, Physics

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by Olga Kostrova, CEO of IdeaMama Group | IdeaMama Ad Network | IdeaMamaClub.com |

Connect with me on LinkedIn & Facebook | Follow me: twitter.com/IdeaMama | Skype me: IdeaMama |

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