Nanotechnology is expected to have a variety of economic, social, environmental, and national security impacts. In 2000 the National Science Foundation began working with the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) to address nanotechnology’s possible impacts and to propose ways of minimizing any undesirable consequences.

For example, nanotechnology breakthroughs may result in the loss of some jobs. Just as the development of the automobile destroyed the markets for the many products associated with horse-based transportation and led to the loss of many jobs, transformative products based on nanotechnology will inevitably lead to a similar result in some contemporary industries. Examples of at-risk occupations are jobs manufacturing conventional televisions. Nanotechnology-based field-emission or liquid-crystal display (LCD), flat-panel TVs will likely make those jobs obsolete. These new types of televisions also promise to radically improve picture quality. In field-emission TVs, for example, each pixel (picture element) is composed of a sharp tip that emits electrons at very high currents across a small potential gap into a phosphor for red, green, or blue. The pixels are brighter, and unlike LCDs that lose clarity in sunlight, field-emission TVs retain clarity in bright sunlight. Field-emission TVs use much less energy than conventional TVs. They can be made very thin—less than a millimeter—although actual commercial devices will probably have a bit more heft for structural stability and ruggedness.

Other potential job losses could be those of supermarket cashiers if nanotechnology-based, flexible, thin-film computers housed in plastic product wrappings enable all-at-once checkout. Supermarket customers could simply wheel their carts through a detection gateway, similar in shape to the magnetic security systems found at the exits of stores today. As with any transformative technology, however, nanotechnology can also be expected to create many new jobs.

Nanomaterials could also have adverse environmental impacts. Because nanomaterials are invisible to the human eye, extra caution must be taken to avoid releasing these particles into the environment. Some preliminary studies point to possible carcinogenic (cancer-causing) properties of carbon nanotubes. Although these studies need to be confirmed, many scientists consider it prudent now to take measures to prevent any potential hazard that these nanostructures may pose. However, the vast majority of nanotechnology-based products will contain nanomaterials bound together with other materials or components, rather than free-floating nano-sized objects, and will therefore not pose such a risk.

At the same time, nanotechnology breakthroughs are expected to have many environmental benefits such as reducing the emission of air pollutants and cleaning up oil spills. The large surface areas of nanomaterials give them a significant capacity to absorb various chemicals. Already, researchers at Pacific Northwestern National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, part of the U.S. Department of Energy, have used a porous silica matrix with a specially functionalized surface to remove lead and mercury from water supplies.

The possibility of building new materials and devices that operate at the same scale as the basic functions of nature explains why so much attention is being devoted to the world below 100 nm. But 100 nm is not some arbitrary dividing line. This is the length at which special properties have been observed in materials—properties that are profoundly different at the nanoscale.