Transformational impact on science, technology and/or society
The general grand challenge that MICREAgents addresses is to integrate ICT with dynamic ICT-Construction. So far, only living systems are able to seamlessly integrate ICT and production, and they are neither fully interfaced to, nor fully programmable by, us. We contend that this can eventually be achieved using biological information encoding principles at the molecular level, when combined as in MICREAgents, with electronically programmable autonomous local manipulation systems. MICREAgents will take a major step in this direction and inspire a flurry of international research activity that will lead directly to achieving this grand challenge. This role of piloting major disruptive paradigm shifts is an important one for FET, and is both a scientific and a technical challenge.