What the heck is Femtotechnology?

I guarentee if you google it, you won't find much relevant information on the subject. Nanotechnology has entered the social meme-space, but femtotechnology or picotechnology are terms that are as alien as Nanotechnology was to the public thirty years ago.

The reason I bring the topic up is that there was this article over at "Next Big Future," (A website I highly recommend for any forward thinkers who like a bit more meat of explanation in their futurology).

The aforementioned article was mindblowing to me, which is saying something since my mind is regularly reinforced with unobtainium for protection through density (And apparently subject to unobtainium bullets).

It prefaces itself with the idea that femtotechnology is not being argued as reasonably possible, but that they are exploring the qualia of if it were.

The problem I run into is that I am an unrepentant optimist about some things. In my world view, if it exists at all, it can be made or manipulated by mankind with the proper tools. The article hit a particular point at home because I'd been tossing out half-thought questions at my friend if it were possible to manipulate and build on the nuclear particles rather than working on just the nano scale.

Which is of course a demonstration of Karl Jung's theory of Synchronicity; eary coincidences aligning and coinciding. If but a small one.

So it seems impossible right now. Improbable, unlikely, fantastical and mindboggling (Mine was boggled, about twelve times). Yet, now that it has entered my own memespace, I am a firm believer that it will happen! And sooner than prognostication would allow.

With the advent of a self-improving (And efficiency producing, since we make things at less than perfect efficiencies) AI, I'd imagine creating Nucleoid matter to be a triviality... but then my imagination exceeds my reach by far.

Gamers and Go: A commentary on Artificial Intelligence and its advances

In an article from Wired, they discuss how protein synthesis has recently been turned into a game in order to leverage the human creative process and see if by gaming the normally boring protein folding number-crunching that human beings can come up with better and more innovative folds of the proteins.

In completely unrelated news, a new program running off of Huygens has beaten four professional Go players. Go has been the benchmark for artificial intelligence since Deep Blue beat Kasparov at Chess.

On the one hand, we have human players being leveraged to use their imagination in order to improve upon brute force algorithm production in competition with computer software designed to fold proteins.

On the other hand, we have Supercomputers being programmed to beat professionals at games.

If you marry the two, and include also the concept of inventive AI's (such as from this other article from Wired), we may be on the virge of creating a system that displays both ingenuity and curiousity in its gaming tactics.

In which case, will we really need the gamers to fold proteins, or will our efforts at producing AI's that game better eventually give rise to a class of machines which outperform even the most ingenuitive of geniuses?

I leave the thoughts to you.