the Nano and Quantum Technologies Laboratory
What is NanoteQ About?

​Future Shock and the Tech Frontier

 

Emerging Future Technologies or Frontier Technologies are names given to a set of rapidly developing tech-concepts that center around: altered cyber-realities and the Web, AI, Human-machine fusion, and quantum information devices. Such technologies are referred to as “emergent” in the sense that the combination of their technological advances leads to a complex and unexpected set of outcomes. 

 

The Frontier is a constant and rapid appearance of unexpected technologies, the quick adoption of those technologies into society and the world-wide reach of their impacts. Consider the example of how the increase in the iPhone’s power + the growth in web speed and ubiquity + ChatGPT and on demand AI all combined. Each of these are breakthrough technological advances, but when fused together, they altered social structure and interaction, as well as the nature of informational validity, in ways that were unpredicted.

 

This synthesis of novel technologies, unexpected outcomes, and broad human impacts, means the creative spaces in which we work and innovate today have been dramatically altered. 

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Compare our vision of the future: in the 1961 (left) in which we saw 2061 technology as uniting humanity, bringing community and families together. In 2025 as we approach 2061, that future looks very different (right) as we retreat into ourselves and live online. The outcomes of Future-Tech are values dependent and can be highly unpredictable over the time scales of these images. However, that unpredictability is speeding up, as is tech adoption in our societies.

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​​The If/Then World

 

If our communities are to be relevant in this frontier world, if we are to generate the leaders of future economies, the citizens of future societies, and lead in the marketplaces of future ideas, then we must be prepared to embrace a deeper engagement with this frontier. Our educators, our researchers, our industries, and our government, must cease upon the opportunities of frontier tech. while remaining cognizant of its challenges to human welfare. ​This means we seek an engagement built upon: novel scientific paradigms, radically altered spaces of innovation, and emergent mores for technological development, with a deeply humanist center to technological impacts.

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This is NanoteQ

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The regional need for such engagement is why NanoteQ was built. The NanoteQ Laboratory at 95 W 32nd street (adjacent to the WFU campus) is a shared instrumentation facility open to WFU/WFUBMC faculty as well as researchers from surrounding companies and schools. It provides a collection of specialized tools for the development and testing a wide variety of nano and quantum technologies. Many of these tools are unique in the southeast, providing a gateway to capability for our region. 

 

The laboratory also hosts a resident scientific community. The research ecosystem within the lab combines vision and capability to embrace the untrodden path. Going beyond standard reductionist approaches to tech development, and adopting a more integrative pedagogy for discovery, NanoteQ teams are cross-cutting and edgy. They invite radical multidisciplinarity to realize creative technological opportunities that didn’t exist beyond the interfaces of silo-ed thought. They challenge the fundamental dynamic of creativity.

 

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