Nanotechnology: Social Acceptance, Cultural Impact and Privacy

Many people believe that nanotechnology will be an important technological breakthrough in the next few decades because it can fabricate materials that lie in the range of 1 to 100 nm in dimension. New materials and frameworks synthesised at the nanoscale showed a wide range of novel characteristics and benefits. The rapid development of nanotechnology on a worldwide scale has driven debates on related ethical issues to become more localised and globalised. In this chapter, we discussed the social acceptance and challenges of nanotechnology in brief. Environmental concerns like health and ethics have been discussed with transparency. The nanowaste from the fabrication of nanomaterials reaches water bodies through soil and affects living organisms. Several applications of nanotechnology, like bioengineering, defence, agriculture, medicine, electronics, and sensing, have been studied briefly. In the last two decades, various countries like America, China, Japan, Britain, India, Russia, and Europe have used nanotechnology, 25%, 20%, 15%, 10%, 10%, 10%, and 10%, respectively, for their development. The emergence of tiny materials, smart chips, smart electronic gadgets, and sensing devices has been encouraged by the advancement of integrated circuits at the sub-micron and nanometer levels. It is essential to inform all organizations associated with nanotechnology about the advantages, drawbacks, and hazards of this field in order to empower our future generations to make decisions for an environmentally friendly and profitable advancement of nanotechnology. Many important development-related domains, including confidentiality, safety, ecological sustainability, agricultural and food production, etc., have been influenced by the moral and societal ramifications of nanotechnology.