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Caspian comments on For FAI: Is "Molecular Nanotechnology" putting our best foot forward? - Less Wrong
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I'd like to address just the claim here that you could provide instructions to a nanosystem with a speaker. If we assume that the frequency range of the speaker lines up with human hearing, and that our nanosystem is in water, then the smallest possible wavelength we can get from our speaker is on the order of 7cm.
lamda=v / f= 1500 m/s / 20 kHz
How can you provide instructions to a nanosystem with a signal whose linear dimension is on the order of cm? How can you precisely control something when your manipulator is orders or magnitude larger than the thing you're manipulating?
You can get microphones much smaller than 7 cm, and they can detect frequencies way lower than 20 kHz. There's no rule saying you need a large detector to pick up a signal with a large wavelength.
I believe the original comment isn't about the receiver, but about the emitter -- that if you use audible-range sound or even ultrasound, the spatial resolution of the signal will be impossibly large compared to a nanobot. Each nanobot will be able to get the signal, but you won't be able to only communicate with nanobots in a specific part of the body.
This might not be a fatal objection, since you could imagine some sort of protocol with unique addresses or whatnot, but it's an objection.
This isn't about bots, it's about a little tiny factory building your second-stage materials.