Responsible Nanotechnology

Nanotechnology for Students

Student Pugwash USA (SPUSA) is "an educational, nonprofit organization that strives to add a dimension to scientific study that goes beyond formulas and figures. Activities encourage young people to probe the reasons for scientific advancement and the implications of technology on citizens' everyday lives."

Recently, SPUSA started a blog called MindFull. They asked me to be a guest contributor and write an article on "Nanotechnology — What is it, really, and how important will it be for our futures?"

Yesterday, my entry was published. It begins:

Over the last few years, I’ve been heavily involved in making the case that nanotechnology will be profoundly transformative, that disruptive change is coming sooner than most people realize, and that we need to be working right now on policies for responsible stewardship of this emerging technology.

But to actually have an impact on these issues, it’s necessary to define the terms of the debate. Four questions can be addressed:

1. What is nanotechnology?
2. How soon will the Nanotechnology Revolution arrive?
3. How disruptive will it be?
4. How should we respond?

READ MORE...

Mike Treder

Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics weblog blog

Take Five

Need a 5-minute introduction to the concepts behind molecular manufacturing? Earlier this year, we posted just such a summary on our website and called it, appropriately, "Five-Minute Molecular Manufacturing."

Here's how it starts:

Molecular manufacturing refers to a revolutionary near-future manufacturing technology. Whereas today's manufacturing uses large and imprecise machines, molecular manufacturing will use molecular machines to build engineered molecular products. The performance, value, and scope of this technology will be revolutionary and disruptive.

The root idea of molecular manufacturing is that molecule-scale fabricators can output their own mass of product in a few minutes. Built from precisely positioned and strongly bonded molecules, the products will be precise and strong. Computer control will enable a wide range of products, including more manufacturing systems. Doubling the number of fabricators every hour would scale a single fabricator into a kilogram-scale personal nanofactory (PN) in a few days. The fully automated PN would contain arrays of fabricators and equipment to join their output into large-scale, integrated, heterogeneous, complete products. . .

READ THE REST

Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics weblog blog

Favorite Future Fora

These are a few of the blogs and news sites I visit regularly to keep up with accelerating trends in scientific and technical progress, and with efforts to intelligently respond to those trends:

Adventures in Ethics and Science
amor mundi
Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things
Contrary Brin
FuturePundit
FutureWire
KurzweilAI
Lawrence Lessig
Nanodot: Nanotechnology News and Discussion
Nanotechnology Law
Nanotechnology Now
Open the Future
Our Technological Future
Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends
SciDev.Net
Science Blog | Think. It's not illegal yet.
The Speculist
WorldChanging

Can you suggest others we should follow?

Mike Treder

Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics weblog blog

Open Source Science

During the 17th century, the ideas of Francis Bacon and René Descartes gave birth to an objective approach to discovery and verification of accurate knowledge about the world we live in. Today we call it the scientific method.

One of the hallmarks of this method is open sharing of information. When a researcher makes a significant finding, s/he publishes it quickly so others can verify and learn from it. This has the benefit of rapid increases in the number of people who can know things, as well as in the amount of things those people can know. In fact, since the total amount of available information is effectively infinite, information sharing is not zero-sum, obviously, or even positive-sum: it is unlimited-sum.

CRN recognized the importance of information sharing and its interesting application to molecular manufacturing in our foundational paper on Three Systems of Action. Now we're pleased to learn that others are thinking along the same lines:

In a perfect world, scientists share problems and work together on solutions for the good of society. In the real world, however, that's usually not the case. The main obstacles: competition for publication and intellectual property protection.

Is there a model for encouraging large-scale scientific problem solving? Yes, and it comes from an unexpected and unrelated corner of the universe: open source software development.

That's the view of Karim R. Lakhani, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School with an extensive research background in open source software communities and their innovation and product development strategies. His latest research analyzes how open source norms of transparency, permeable access, and collaboration might work with scientists.

This is from an interview with Karim Lakhani published in the Harvard Business School journal under the title of "Open Source Science: A New Model for Innovation." Lakhani write more about this on his blog, where he says:

Many people say that open source is only applicable to software. But in my research I saw practices that could be translated to other industries.

(Hat tip: Giulio Prisco)

Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics weblog blog

Very Large and Very Small

Not Necessarily Relevant Quote of the Week:

To understand the very large we must understand the very small.

— Democritus (470-380 BCE)

Tag: quotes

Science and Islam

From SciDevNet:

Islamic countries spend little on research and development — less than 0.4 per cent of their gross national product compared to the global average of 2.36 per cent.

Lack of funding is partially to blame, but a bigger problem is a lack of governmental strategies to foster science and prioritise research projects, argues Herwig Schopper in this Nature article.

Muslim nations need drastic changes in their approach to science and technology if they are to compete with the rest of the world.

Political leaders must recognise the importance of research in contributing to the welfare of Muslim societies. Investment in research infrastructure is essential, as is better job security for scientists.

The Islamic world also needs to integrate itself with the international scientific community by participating in regional cooperative projects and establishing global scientific collaborations.

Herwig Schopper is former director-general of CERN and president of the SESAME council. His article in Nature is part of a remarkable "Islam and Science" special feature, which also includes:

• Islamist political parties are taking over from secular ones across the Muslim world. What does this mean for science at home and scientific cooperation with the West? Ehsan Masood investigates.
• Building a knowledge-based society in today's Arab world depends on overcoming primarily political obstacles to progress. Nader Fergany analyses the reforms required for an Arab renaissance.

Athar Osama is a senior executive at ANGLE Technology Group in the United States and specializes in technology-based economic development. In a related Op-Ed for SciDevNet, he writes:

For decades, Muslim countries have struggled to understand the value of scientific and technological research. But a recent study by the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) on the status of scientific research in its 57 member states sheds some light on the nature of the 'science deficit' in these countries.

Although the results show that many Muslim countries have a poor scientific output, they also indicate a growing realisation among such countries that they must catch up with the rest of the world or lag behind economically, socially and politically.

If Muslim countries are to become innovative and knowledge-based societies of the 21st century, they will need to develop coherent and relevant science and technology policies and create an environment supportive of research.

UPDATE: Islamic nations have agreed to set up a network to explore the relationship between Islam and science.

Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics weblog blog

Don't Do Anything Stupid

We're not quite there yet, but the Transparent Society is drawing nearer.

Political commentator Ariana Huffington says:

Now that video and cell phone cameras are ubiquitous, if you are going to say or do anything stupid (or Taser someone in the library), it will end up on YouTube.

The Participatory Panopticon is spreading widely, inexorably, and spontaneously. Maybe that's a good thing.

Mike Treder

Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics weblog blog

Hard-Nosed Predictions

It seems appropriate to follow up Mike's post about prediction with a post on actual predictions.

These predictions are not the work of futurists. They are predictions made by 700 IEEE Fellows -- about half of them academic researchers, the rest working in industry -- asked to forecast trends within their area of expertise over the next 50 years.

They are not overly optimistic. For example, while 67% said that fuel cell would likely be widely used in mobile devices, only 19% said that they would likely be used as a source of household electricity globally, and only 29% said it was likely that photocells over 50% efficiency would be in commercial production.

So, let's see what these hard-nosed, bubble-bursting experts had to say about more advanced technologies:

• Almost half said that it was likely that implantable brain-machine interfaces would be widely adopted.

• Over half said that most individuals in developed countries would have documented personal genetic profiles -- and within only 20 years.

• 64% said that a universal language translator would be commercially available, and almost 70% thought that this would happen in 20 years or less.

• Nanoelectromechanical systems will likely go commercial (58%), probably in less than 20 years.

And of special interest to CRN:

Only 26% thought that molecular self-assembly would likely be commonly used to build integrated circuits; nevertheless, 50% thought that five-nanometer processors would likely become commercially viable. So, one wonders, how will they be built?

Well, 56% of experts thought it was likely that it will be "commercially viable to manufacture nanostructured materials to exact specifications without machining." And of those, over 75% thought that this would happen within 20 years or less.

Meanwhile, almost 2/3 of experts expected "robust design tools for fabrication at the nanoscale" to become available.

They weren't asked directly about molecular manufacturing, but enabling technologies are certainly looking plausible. If you can do NEMS, five-nanometer commercial lithography, robust design, and built-to-order nanostructured materials, then it's not a very big step from there to NEMS-building-NEMS.

The paradigm is shifting. The nanoscale is rapidly moving from the domain of scientists to the domain of engineers -- and the engineers know it, and are looking forward to it.

Molecular manufacturing is going to be more about engineering than about science. Even if it's developed first along lines that are different from the ones we are analyzing, equivalent capabilities are certainly coming -- and, as we've been saying all along, they are coming very quickly.

Chris Phoenix

(Hat tip to Foresight/Nanodot for the story.)

Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics weblog blog

Predicting the Future

How far into the future can anyone actually see?

Most of us reject things like the prophecies of Nostradamus, or the psychic predictions of Jean Dixon. However, you're probably not reading this blog unless you're interested in understanding the future, like we are.

So, which predictions can we trust? (Our friend David Brin has recommended the establishment of a predictions registry. We like that idea.)

One good rule of thumb is that the further out the future is predicted, the less you should trust the prediction -- which becomes more true each year in this age of accelerating change.

The Long Now Foundation was established in "01996" to "creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years." Sounds good, if awfully ambitious.

Similarly, the Foundation for the Future has good intentions for helping humanity make our way successfully through the next millennium.

Considering how much more change is expected in the next one thousand years than in the previous thousand, can we really expect to be better at forecasting the year 3000 than someone in 1006 would have been at seeing our time?

But never mind a thousand years. How about just predicting the biggest breakthroughs of the next 50 years? As part of their 50th anniversary celebration, NewScientist asked 70 of the "world's most brilliant scientists" for their ideas.

In coming decades will we: Discover that we are not alone in the universe? Unravel the physiological basis for consciousness? Routinely have false memories implanted in our minds? Begin to evolve in new directions? And will physicists finally hit upon a universal theory of everything? In fact, if the revelations of the last 50 years are anything to go on -- the Internet and the human genome for example -- we probably have not even thought up the exciting advances that lay ahead of us.

That last sentence is the most important point. Even trying to look just 50 years ahead, it is very likely that the most significant change is something no one has even conceived of yet.

Where does this put CRN, and our projections for the development of molecular manufacturing as "likely by 2015, and almost certainly by 2020"?

We think we have solid grounds for making that estimate, although some people will disagree with us. We also note that mainstream rejections of rapid development toward productive nanosystems are gradually falling away and being replaced by cautious if still extraordinary claims for fourth generation nanotechnology.

CRN doesn't claim to predict the future, of course. In fact, we'll readily say that by the time personal nanofactories are actually produced, they may be quite different in appearance and function from today's expectations. Rather than trying to get all the specifics exactly right, our focus is on raising awareness of the probability that general-purpose precise exponential manufacturing will have astounding and potentially disruptive impacts on society and the environment, and on trying to stimulate effective and responsible preparation.

Mike Treder

Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics weblog blog

Building Futuristic Weapons

Nanodot says:

It had to happen somewhere: the first country to publicly state they are planning to use nanotechnology in weapons is -- Israel.

They quote two news articles. First, the Sydney Morning Herald:

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has given the green light for Israel to set up a special office to develop a nanotechnology arsenal.

Yediot Aharonot said that Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres had been told to choose 15 top thinkers to focus on developing futuristic weaponry. The 15 would be selected from within the security establishment, the world of hi-tech and academia.

And then, Spiegel Online:

"The war in Lebanon proved that we need smaller weaponry," said Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres. "It's illogical to send a plane worth $100 million against a suicidal terrorist. So we are building futuristic weapons."

Foresight's Christine Peterson says what we always say:

Misuse of nanotech-based weapons may be the biggest problem of the 21st century.

That's right.

Finally, a couple of commenters at Nanodot make great points. First, Tapani:

Creating even more deadly weapons, then those used today, is not development. It is stupidity, large scale, dangerous stupidity. Inabilty to figure out and maintain solutions, that would not require killing those who are somehow opposed to your political and ecomical goals.

I’m not suprised, but still I feel disappointed. Our species can never achieve its fullest potential, we are too busy destroying ourselves.

Second, John Joyce:

We use to aspire from 'swords to plowshares' now it it seems to be the other way round.

Amen.

Mike Treder

Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics weblog blog