CRN's biggest concern is that molecular manufacturing will be a source of immense military power. A medium-sized or larger nation that was the sole possessor of the technology would be a superpower, with a strong likelihood of becoming the superpower if they were sufficiently ruthless. This implies geopolitical instability in the form of accelerating arms races and preemptive strikes. For several reasons, a nanofactory-based arms race looks less stable than the nuclear arms race was.
Related to the military concern is a tangle of security concerns. If molecular manufacturing proliferates, it will become relatively easy to build a wide range of high-tech automated weaponry. Accountability may decrease even as destructive power increases. The Internet, with its viruses, spam, spyware, and phishing, provides a partial preview of what we might expect. It could be very difficult to police such a society without substantial weakening of civil rights and even human rights.
Economic disruption is a likely consequence of widespread use of molecular manufacturing. On the one hand, we would have an abundance of production capacity able to build high-performance products at minimal expense. On the other hand, this could threaten a lot of today's jobs, from manufacturing to transportation to mineral extraction.
Environmental damage could result from widespread use of inexpensive products. Although products filling today's purposes could be made more efficient with molecular manufacturing, future applications such as supersonic and ballistic transport may demand far more energy than we use today.
Another major risk associated with molecular manufacturing comes from not using it for positive purposes. Artificial scarcities — legal restrictions — have been applied to lifesaving medicines. Similar restrictions on molecular manufacturing, whether in the form of military classification, unnecessary safety regulations, or explicit intellectual property regulation, could allow millions of people to die unnecessarily.
Finally, although this is hard to quantify, the potential may exist for development of smarter-than-human artificial intelligence. If molecular manufacturing can build extremely tiny, extremely powerful networked supercomputers, and if software development reaches the point where a sophisticated computer program is able to design and produce improved versions of itself, then the stage may be set for rapidly and recursively self-improving entities. Used as a tool by tyrants, or even on their own, these 'products' could prove highly dangerous.
Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics weblog blog
I'm not so sure there'll be economic dangers. After all, taking apart / destroying is easier than creating. Plus: we already have food&drug regulations (banning stuff that's carcinogenic). We know very little about this, but taking it apart will tell us more about the constituents. Therefore, I think it is much more obvious to say there will be very little, if any, environmental danger, because by then we will probably know everything about emergent properties.
Posted by: Rik | February 08, 2006 at 09:39 AM