Responsible Nanotechnology

Roadmap Comments

Below are comments from nanotechnology experts on the recent release of the Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems, a new roadmap for development of atomically precise manufacturing:

Jim Von Ehr, CEO, Zyvex Labs
"For the first time, progress across all key nanoscale disciplines has been brought together into R&D pathways leading to atomically-precise manufacturing, with revolutionary applications to medicine, smart materials, and energy. We look forward to hearing from technologists in industry, academia, and government on their thoughts about this roadmap, and their suggestions for improvement in the next version."

Steve Jurvetson, Draper Fisher Jurvetson
"Since the concept of building molecule-by-molecule was introduced, investors and business professionals have wondered how we could possibly get from the nanotechnology of coatings and simple materials to the atomically-precise manufacturing that will have a revolutionary impact on business and our society. This Roadmap is a good step towards detailing on how we will get there."

J. Fraser Stoddart, Northwestern University
"We'll only reach the goal of atomically-precise manufacturing through extensive multidisciplinary collaborative research. This Roadmap will help researchers identify the pathways and talent sets needed to make the fundamental breakthroughs that will lead, on the one hand, to new medical treatments and bring us ever closer, on the other hand, to using nanomachines for complete control inside reticular structures, as well as at both molecular and supramolecular levels."

Thomas Theis, Director, Physical Sciences, IBM Research
"The Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems nicely compliments the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors. The ITRS focuses on the ongoing challenges to further miniaturization of the transistor for applications in information technology. The TRPN focuses on the research challenges to realizing a future of ubiquitous atomic precision manufacturing and many applications of nanofabrication technology well outside the traditional domain of information technology."

Alex Kawczak, VP, Nanostructured Materials and BioProducts, Battelle
"Battelle is very pleased to be a partner on this critical pioneering nanotechnology project. The advancement of nanotechnology is a highly collaborative endeavor that requires complex cooperation across disciplines. The roadmap provides the foundation needed for this cooperation as research moves towards atomically precise manufacturing to meet the needs of industrial and government markets."

KW Lim, Executive Director, Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE), Singapore
"This is the first attempt to identify the challenges in creating productive nanosystems. It provides an important reference for the research community. IMRE and Singaporean research will benefit."

Malcolm O'Neill, retired CTO, Lockheed
"Foresight, Zyvex and the others have done a masterful job. This document provides a recipe for future progress in energy, medicine and other equally important fields of endeavor. It is amazing to understand how many scientific and commercial breakthroughs will be enabled by Atomically Precise Manufacturing. APM should be a major focus of the global scientific and engineering communities. Put this roadmap in place immediately!"

Our congratulations once again to all involved in this historic effort.

Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics blog

Humanoid Robotics

Simroid is a dental patient robot developed as a training tool for aspiring dentists. She can follow spoken instructions, closely monitor a dentist's performance during mock treatments, and react in a human-like way to pain. She was built by Kokoro Company Ltd.

I'm not sure whether to say "Wow!" or "Ewww!"

I wonder if she has saliva? (And notice that I automatically wrote 'she' instead of 'it'.)

Mike Treder

Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics blog

Security AND Privacy

Security versus privacy...

Which is more important? How much privacy are you willing to give up for security? Can we even afford privacy in this age of insecurity? Security versus privacy: It's the battle of the century, or at least its first decade.

That's Bruce Schneier, author of Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World, writing in a commentary for Wired. He continues:

We've been told we have to trade off security and privacy so often -- in debates on security versus privacy, writing contests, polls, reasoned essays and political rhetoric -- that most of us don't even question the fundamental dichotomy.

But it's a false one. . .

If you set up the false dichotomy, of course people will choose security over privacy -- especially if you scare them first. But it's still a false dichotomy. There is no security without privacy. And liberty requires both security and privacy. The famous quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin reads: "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." It's also true that those who would give up privacy for security are likely to end up with neither.

We agree.

(Hat tip to Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing)

Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics blog

Battlefield Earth

It may sound like science fiction, but it’s only a matter of time before the world’s militaries learn to wield the planet itself as a weapon.

That's the heading for a new essay published online at ForeignPolicy.com by CRN's Director of Impacts Analysis, Jamais Cascio. He writes:

Geoengineering involves humans making intentional, large-scale modifications to the Earth’s geophysical systems in order to change the environment. These can include sequestering atmospheric carbon dioxide in the oceans, changing the reflectivity of the Earth’s surface, and pumping particles into the stratosphere to block a fraction of incoming sunlight. Many of these proposals mimic natural events, so we know that—in principle—they can work, although there is insufficient understanding of their potential side effects. Unsurprisingly, geoengineering is highly controversial, and even proponents view it as a “Hail Mary” pass, to be considered only after all other options have failed.

But geoengineering presents more than just an environmental question. It also presents a geopolitical dilemma. With processes of this magnitude and degree of uncertainty, countries would inevitably argue over control, costs, and liability for mistakes. More troubling, however, is the possibility that states may decide to use geoengineering efforts and technologies as weapons. Two factors make this a danger we dismiss at our peril: the unequal impact of climate changes, and the ability of small states and even nonstate actors to attempt geoengineering. . .

The offensive use of geoengineering could take a variety of forms. Overproductive algae blooms can actually sterilize large stretches of ocean over time, effectively destroying fisheries and local ecosystems. Sulfur dioxide carries health risks when it cycles out of the stratosphere. One proposal would pull cooler water from the deep oceans to the surface in an explicit attempt to shift the trajectories of hurricanes. Some actors might even deploy counter-geoengineering projects to slow or alter the effects of other efforts. . .

Read the whole article HERE.

Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics blog

Emerging Economies and U.S. Hegemony

A feature story on the CBS Sunday Morning program yesterday dealt with the shifting world economy and particularly with the rise of economic power in Asia.

I was struck by the juxtaposition of these two graphics:

They show GDP as a percentage of total world output. Note the dramatic reversal in just five years. How much more will it change in the next five or the next ten years?

Yesterday's New York Times Magazine includes a related article by Parag Khanna titled "Waving Goodbye to Hegemony." Khanna writes:

From Thailand to Indonesia to Korea, no country -- friend of America's or not -- wants political tension to upset economic growth. To the Western eye, it is a bizarre phenomenon: small Asian nation-states should be balancing against the rising China, but increasingly they rally toward it out of Asian cultural pride and an understanding of the historical-cultural reality of Chinese dominance.

And in the former Soviet Central Asian countries -- the so-called Stans -- China is the new heavyweight player, its manifest destiny pushing its Han pioneers westward while pulling defunct microstates like Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, as well as oil-rich Kazakhstan, into its orbit. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization gathers these Central Asian strongmen together with China and Russia and may eventually become the "NATO of the East."

The upshot of this changing balance is a swift reduction of U.S. strength as a global hegemon. Khanna adds:

At best, America's unipolar moment lasted through the 1990s, but that was also a decade adrift. The post-cold-war "peace dividend" was never converted into a global liberal order under American leadership.

So now, rather than bestriding the globe, we are competing -- and losing -- in a geopolitical marketplace alongside the world's other superpowers: the European Union and China. This is geopolitics in the 21st century: the new Big Three. Not Russia, an increasingly depopulated expanse run by Gazprom.gov; not an incoherent Islam embroiled in internal wars; and not India, lagging decades behind China in both development and strategic appetite. The Big Three make the rules -- their own rules -- without any one of them dominating. And the others are left to choose their suitors in this post-American world.

The more we appreciate the differences among the American, European and Chinese worldviews, the more we will see the planetary stakes of the new global game. Previous eras of balance of power have been among European powers sharing a common culture. The cold war, too, was not truly an "East-West" struggle; it remained essentially a contest over Europe. What we have today, for the first time in history, is a global, multicivilizational, multipolar battle.

According to this analysis, it seems that the next international order after U.S. unipolar power has already begun. You'll recall that we wrote about this a few months ago, and wondered:

How long will the current order last? If you accept my argument that we're living today in the fourth different period of the last 100 years, it should be obvious that this is not a permanent state.

What comes next? How can we anticipate it? How might we shape it? And how will the development of powerful new technologies, such as molecular manufacturing, fit into that big picture?

The two previous periods of international order in the 20th century lasted for 30 years and then 40 years (see graphic below). Now it appears that the current order may have met its demise after less than 20 years.

CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE

Assuming we've entered a new phase, as Khanna suggests, then how long will this one last? Can the Era of Global Multipolarity maintain stability for more than a decade or two?

We're reminded again of Jamais Cascio's trenchant 2006 analysis of a "Post-Hegemonic Future" for the United States, in which he wrote:

Eventually, the US, too, will become just another country. This is not a partisan position, but a historical observation. And as fundamental changes to the international power structure rarely happen without major disruptions, it's wise to think through what might lead us to a world where the US is no longer king of the hill.

Jamais proposed a four-box set of scenarios to analyze a future where the US loses its position of dominance from either absolute decline or relative decline, and where future global competition comes from either traditional nation-states or from non-state actors.

One point Jamais didn't mention -- which I said at the time was not only conceivable but probable -- was the potential for emergence of some form of global governance that effectively replaces the nation-state as the key entity in geopolitics.

Does the recent rise of emerging economies and the evident decline of U.S. unipolar power make that global governance scenario less likely or more likely?

(Hat tip to The Washington Note)

Mike Treder

Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics blog

Immortality

Not Necessarily Relevant Quote of the Week:

Write a wise saying and your name will live forever.

— Anonymous

What Did We Learn?

Our latest monthly column for the popular Nanotechnology Now web portal has been posted. This month's entry is by CRN's Director of Impacts Analysis, Jamais Cascio.

His article is titled "What Did We Learn?" Here is how it begins:

As enjoyable as it can be to construct future histories and stories of what the coming years might hold, the goal of a scenario planning process is to help people make better decisions by giving them a sense of the implications of different choices.

Throughout 2007, the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology worked on assembling a set of scenarios depicting a variety of near-term futures in which molecular manufacturing — a nanoscale technology allowing atomically-precise, exponential production of physical objects — becomes a reality. The eight different scenarios we completed offer a range of viewpoints about how such an advent of molecular manufacturing might occur. As we've noted elsewhere, we chose a near-term setting not because we thought it would be the most likely, but because we thought it would be both the most disruptive to the status quo and the most amenable to a foresight process (i.e., not already subject to too many other changes to make useful scenarios impossible). Nonetheless, we believe that these near-term scenarios provide lessons applicable to longer-range possibilities as well.

While the individual scenarios trigger their own particular conclusions, several insights arise from looking at the set of scenarios as a whole...

READ THE REST

We hope you'll enjoy reading all our columns, offer feedback, and tell others about them too.

Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics weblog blog

For What It's Worth

There's a new, chewable nanotechnology that lets you take photos with your eyes, cures cancer and eliminates body odor. But the early adopters are realizing they got extra "features" they didn't count on. And no one told them once they spread through the bloodstream, it's harder to uninstall than your average computer virus.

Infest Wisely is a feature length movie in seven episodes, each with different directors but all written by novelist Jim Munroe. "It was free to make, so it's free to watch," says Munroe, who has also released his novels under a Creative Commons license for free download.

This looks pretty much like a retread of Greg Bear's Blood Music, at least at first glance. I haven't watched it (and don't plan to), but it does say something, I think, about the spread of advanced nanotechnology interest into the mainstream that such a movie is out there.

Of course, we have to offer the standard caveat that nanobots are not needed for molecular manufacturing, and that such entities likely will be much harder to build than nanofactories and probably will have much less disruptive impact.

Mike Treder

Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics blog

Impressive Scientific Progress

Two additional developments in the news today fit into our category of 'enabling nanotech':

World's Best Microscope Can Produce Images Less Than Diameter of Single Hydrogen Atom

TEAM 0.5, the world's most powerful transmission electron microscope — capable of producing images with half‑angstrom resolution (half a ten-billionth of a meter), less than the diameter of a single hydrogen atom — has been installed at the Department of Energy's National Center for Electron Microscopy (NCEM) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. . .

In preliminary tests at the FEI Company, before the TEAM 0.5 was shipped, NCEM's Christian Kisielowski tested the microscope's ability to resolve individual atoms and precisely locate their positions in three dimensions. He made a series of images of two gold crystals connected by a "nanobridge" only a few dozen atoms wide. From each exposure to the next, individual gold atoms could be seen changing positions.

To achieve this extraordinary resolution, TEAM 0.5 embodies technical advances that have only recently become possible, including ultra-stable electronics, improved aberration correctors, and an extremely bright electron source. . .

Correcting spherical aberration makes it possible to use the TEAM 0.5 not only for broad-beam, "wide-angle" images but also for scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM), in which the tightly focused electron beam is moved across the sample as a probe, capable of performing spectroscopy on one atom at a time — an ideal way to precisely locate impurities in an otherwise homogeneous sample, such as individual dopant atoms in a semiconductor material. . .

It's not just high resolution that makes TEAM 0.5 the world's best microscope, says Ulrich Dahmen, director of the NCEM. When all the electrons in the beam focus at the same plane, image contrast and signal-to-noise ratio improve tremendously.

"It's because the signal-to-noise ratio is so good that you can adjust focus atom by atom, with enough sensitivity to obtain information about the three-dimensional atomic structure of a single nanoparticle." Dahmen adds, "This brings us within reach of meeting the great challenge posed by the famous physicist Richard Feynman in 1959: the ability to analyze any chemical substance simply by looking to see where the atoms are."

Scientists Make 'Perfect' Nanowires

Scientists have created silicon nanowires that are perfect—at least atomically. Down at the single-atom level, the identical wires have no bumps, bends, or other imperfections. They are perfectly crystalline, even more so than bulk silicon. The full array of nanowires is also highly parallel, and each wire is an excellent metallic conductor.

This research may be an important step forward for nanotechnology. Nanowires play a key role in developing nanoelectronics applications, and silicon nanowires are particularly important because of the central function that silicon plays in the semiconductor industry and current technologies. Some scientists believe that silicon nanowires will overtake carbon nanotubes in popularity, and they are being eyed for a variety of electronics applications and even quantum computing.

Therefore, the ability to create straight, identical, parallel, and atomically smooth nanowires could lead to new developments in nanoelectronics. . .

Neither of these advances directly portends a realization of molecular manufacturing, of course. But both could represent significant steps toward enabling the full range of MM's needed technical capabilities.

(Double hat tip to KurzweilAI.net)

Mike Treder

Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics blog

Radical Technologies, Rapid Change, Real World

I'm a confirmed speaker for the 2008 World Future Society conference -- "Seeing the Future Through New Eyes" -- to be held July 26-28 in Washington, DC. In fact, I was specifically invited by the organizers to speak, since they said my talk last year generated so much positive response.

My presentation this year will be on the topic of "Radical Technologies, Rapid Change, and the Real World."

Here is the abstract I submitted:

What happens when science fiction becomes science fact? When rapid change meets the real world? In the coming collision between radically powerful new technologies and the messy world of military conflicts, culture wars, and globalization, who will win and who will lose? In this talk, Mike Treder, executive director of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, will present the findings of a Global Task Force on Implications and Policy, a group that recently produced eight future scenarios of rapid technological change.

Picture the Washington D.C. of 1808 being suddenly introduced to any of today’s highly developed technologies -- in medicine, aerospace, communications, you name it -- and imagine the tumult that would result. Now consider that our world may face the equivalent of two centuries worth of industrial and technological revolutions, all packed into just the next few years. Are today’s institutions prepared for that level of change? Are you?

Who should attend?

Anyone with an interest in the future of the world over the next two decades, particularly those concerned with managing change. Educators, policy makers, and business leaders may find it especially enlightening.

What will they learn?

They will learn the results of a unique project bringing together thought leaders from around the world to craft plausible scenarios of rapid change over the next 20 years. They’ll discover several different depictions, some pessimistic and some optimistic, but all believable, all thought-provoking, and all potentially action-inducing.

How can this new knowledge be applied?

All attendees will receive a CD-ROM containing the eight future scenarios developed by CRN’s Global Task Force on Implications and Policy. Studying, comparing, and contrasting the scenarios can assist both organizations and individuals to evaluate their present approach to change and make adjustments for the revolutionary disruptions that could be triggered by the coming collision between radical technology and the real world.

The program schedule has not been completed, so I don't yet know the day and time for my talk. But I hope to see you in Washington this summer!

Mike Treder

Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics blog