Disruptive Nanotechnology

A California newspaper, Palo Alto Weekly, has a cover story today on nanotechnology.

Scientist Cheri Pereira stood in a lab at Palo Alto-based Nanosys and held up a glass beaker with a half-inch of gold-tinged liquid at the bottom. That half-inch contained around a billion nanowires, she said. . .

"Nano" is a prefix meaning one billionth. Nanotechnology is the science of working with substances around one to one hundred-billionths of a meter in size. It could help cure cancer, make better clean-energy batteries and create computers with nearly unlimited memory, researchers say. . .

Some predict the nano-revolution will dwarf the computer revolution in its scope.

It's a long article that covers current work in nanoscale technologies as well as the more futuristic possibilities of molecular manufacturing:

[Eric] Drexler's book, Engines of Creation, hailed the coming nano-era with visions of machines only a few molecules big, making products atom by atom.

Those machines are still on the horizon. Foresight released a road map to nanotechnology in January calling for more research and funding to develop them.

"Productive Nanosystems: A Technology Roadmap" states such machines could help build artificial organ systems or remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Drexler was one of the document's technical leaders.

I was interviewed extensively for the piece and quoted in it:

Mike Treder of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology warns against possible disasters. The tiny machines could cause economic breakdown or a vicious arms race, according to Treder, executive director of the online think-tank. . .

Molecular machines could cause economic changes on par with the last industrial revolution, he said. Such a machine would build new products atom by atom. It could spit out a pair of new blue jeans bit by bit the way today's computer printers push out documents, he said.

If these machines spread to households nationwide, it would seriously disrupt manufacturing and traditional commerce, he said. The little nano-factories could also reproduce themselves, leading to endless at-home production, he said. And they may be as little as a decade away from development, he said.

Molecular manufacturing could also trigger an arms race, he said. Today's smallest weapons are expensive to build and often made out of rare materials. But nano-factories could make weapons cheaply and precisely using abundant elements such as carbon, he said.

"It would be possible to make millions of tiny devices, let's say flying weapons, that are the size of a bug or at least a bird," he said.

Treder advocates developing international regulations through a body such as the United Nations or World Trade Organization -- and soon. Research is advancing quickly, he said.

Christine Peterson, acting president of the Foresight Nanotech Institute, also was interviewed:

Foresight's Peterson agrees with Treder's caution -- but not all his conclusions.

Using mini-machines to make products at home is unlikely to cause economic disruption, she said.

"I don't worry about capitalism collapsing... The designs would be often times intellectual property, which might conceivably be patented," she said.

Such patents would prevent endless at-home production, or at least maintain the pay structure currently in use, she said. And at-home production could save needless transportation costs and fossil fuels, she said.

But military applications need some sort of oversight, she agreed. Yet the current system of U.N. inspections and sanctions doesn't work, she said. . . Peterson, like Treder, said monitoring should start now, before weapons grow more complex.

You can read the whole article online here.

Mike Treder

Comments

[Tom Craver]

Disruption of Capitalism:

A projection: nanofactories, in themselves, may not mean the end of capitalism (though they'd almost certainly create a huge amount of change in existing systems). BUT!

Changes in our technologies and means of production have inspired socio-economic movements of the past, so we can expect nanofactories to have a similar effect. That is, beyond the direct effects and enabling, there'll be an inspirational impact on people's ideas.

People looking at the new and swiftly improving capabilities of nanofactories will likely project factories shutting down, employees let go, business drying up, rampant individualism, etc. To some extent they'll accept such changes as inevitable, but in other ways they'll seek to curb changes they don't like.

They'll draw on old ideas, but changed in light of the new possibilities.

Attempts at secular and religious communes will be made. Perhaps we'll also see some "technological" communes - groups that want to go to Mars, or build floating-free nations at sea, or simply groups of scientists and artists who think they can set up sufficient automated systems so that they may no longer need either external funding or to work very hard at providing for themselves.

Intellectuals will likely invent forms of "econo-communism" - schemes where everyone owns one share in a monopoly that produces and distributes energy and nano feedstock - generating profits and paying them out equally to all shareholders, creating a guaranteed basic income. Etc.

[Jan-Willem Bats]

I read that "research is moving quickly" on a regular basis here on the CRNano blog.

I'm starting to get curious... exactly what type of progress has been made in, say, the last year or two?

I want to hear the technical version. I want hear the stuff that doesn't in mainstream media news articles. I want to know what's going on in nanotech-labs presently.

So please enlighten me, Mike or Chris. :)

[Mike Treder, CRN]

Jan, take a look at these recent entries:

  Powerful Nanoscale Computer Created
  Tech Moving Ahead Fast
  Nano Building Techniques
  Impressive Scientific Progress
  Enabling Nanotech Update

They contain some of the most up-to-date advances that we're aware of.

[Jan-Willem Bats]

Thanks for the round-up.

What is Chris into these days?

Still researching ways of engineering the first nanofac, or a fundamental part thereof?

[Mike Treder, CRN]

Chris is on currently on sabbatical from CRN, as we announced a few months ago.

[Hal]

I'm skeptical that home nanofactories will turn out to be a superior manufacturing technology for most products. Instead, a system similar to what we have now, with products built in specialized, centralized factories and distributed to retailers and homes, will still have many advantages.

In general, a specialized manufacturing system is able to build products cheaper and with higher quality than a general purpose system. This will remain true with Drexlerian nanotech. It is part of why Drexler switched from an assembler-arm based system to a mill system between Engines and Nanosystems. Specialized nanofabs custom-designed for specific products will make things that are stronger, lighter and more functional, and do so more efficiently and with less waste.

While the hybrid nanofactory concept shown in the movie, with specialized areas that build blocks which get pick-and-placed to be stuck together, aims to provide some of the advantages of a full custom manufacturing process, it will inevitably fall short. Block joins will be weak points, and the product as a whole can never have the degree of functional integration that would be possible if the entire factory were customized around building the product.

Factories also will have advantages in terms of intellectual property; it will be much easier to protect design and functional ideas if products are manufactured in a relatively small number of centralized locations rather than in every home. Further, by designing products that require full customization to build, it will be much more difficult to pirate the designs and build them in more limited home nanofactories. In effect, home built products will be cheap knockoffs which may imitate the features of the high quality custom products but which will never match them entirely.

For many products as well, people want to be able to try them out before they buy. They want to feel fabrics and other materials; they want to check for fit and appearance. Retail and showroom shopping will still be an important part of the sales process.

Home nanofactories will also require an extensive infrastructure to supply raw materials, remove waste, and provide energy. I suppose there would eventually be a network of pipes going to every household through which would flow a variety of special molecules to provide the feedstock for the nanofactories. Clearly it will take substantial time and expense to build out this infrastructure, while providing raw materials to centralized units is conceptually no different from how factories work today. Yes, we can imagine intelligent self-drilling and -constructing pipe systems that build the infrastructure automatically underground, but this shades into magical thinking, where nanotech makes wishes come true. In practice it is likely to be a long and expensive process to fully integrate home manufacturing systems with the other infrastructure of a city.

I think one blind spot many people have in looking forward to a nanotech manufacturing era is that they are implicitly comparing the quality and variety of products potentially produced by home nanofactories with what is available today. Since things would be so much better with nanofacs, people assume that they would be very attractive and that any possible superiority from custom built products would be superfluous.

But this reasoning fails to appreciate the role of competition and social pressure in buying decisions. Everything available today is vastly superior to what our caveman ancestors had access to, but people still seek out high quality products. Even families in poverty often save their money and buy $100+ basketball shoes for their teenagers. There are dozens of MP3 players on the market, but people still pay a premium for an iPod. It may seem that a dress as light as silk from a home nanofactory would be attractive to any woman; but if the custom built dress is light as smoke, as air, and has other features the home nanofactory can't match, it is the one which will signal status and fashion. In fact designers will almost certainly aim to incorporate features that cannot be fully reproduced with home units, just in order to achieve this differentiation.

[Brian]

Besides the items listed by Mike, some of the most exciting and impactful nanoscale tech is thermoelectronics (heat to electricity) using nanowires and particles and nanostructures. Thermoelectrics have been around for awhile (beer coolers, car seat warmers) but nanoscale tech and nanomaterials are providing massive improvement. A better (but still crude) grind down of old material is providing a 40% boost in performance. (Alternative approach that is more like a fuel cell in design could prove to be a bigger winner)

Something that may still be 10 years out (sooner if MNT advances faster to help implement it) is that carbon nanotubes packed with gold and surrounded by lithium hydride. Radioactive particles that slam into the gold push out a shower of high-energy electrons. They pass through carbon nanotubes and pass into the lithium hydride from where they move into electrodes, allowing current to flow. So then once this is working until the nuclear waste (unburned fuel) is put into an advanced reactor that can fission it for energy, the material can be placed in energy generating storage (nuclear waste batteries).

Advanced thermoelectrics and radiation converters could be used to make nuclear generators two+ times more efficient just by converting energy better.

Alternative routes to nuclear fusion, advanced nuclear fission (high burn, nano-layer coated pellets)

All kinds of DNA technology is rapidly advancing. Whole genome DNA sequencing $60,000 now, could be $5000 by year end. DNA synthesis of 500,000 base pairs, could actually have millions of base pairs now just need people will to piece together and error check synthesized 100-10000 bp pieces.

The Zyvex atomically precise manufacturing project got $15 million in funding. Atomic layer epitaxy with selective hydrogen removal for atomically precise layers built up one layer at a time.

GE and others making progress with roll to roll production (R2R) of OLED electronics. If R2R could be achieved using a printing technology for electronics that could keep up with the roll presses (for say newspapers) and not have performance disadvantages, then the 50,000 wafer per month chip fab could be 1500 times faster (or more with wider printing) with 1000 meter per minute R2R printing. what kind of tech could keep up with that speed ? Advanced version of laser printing on metal (change the surface to any color etc...) Perhaps graphite electronics.

This goes to what Hal was saying. You could not deliver the amount of raw materials and energy to a home system that the industrial setup would have.

But short production run products and needs can be made at the home or at kinkos or at the Walmart.
The job split is similar to 30-200 page per minute home printers versus web presses set up in China or smaller web press shops in each city for newspapers.

So for more unlimited and even faster production - what is the device or product where demand is so unlimited that 1500 or 10,000 times faster than a fab production can be put to constructive use ? I think only some kind of mega-construction mega projects. Something for controlling the biosphere or making a Dyson shell of something etc...

[Tom Craver]

Hal -
But what does "cheaper" and "higher quality" mean in the context of molecular manufacturing? The amount and types of material and energy used will depend on the design. The home equipment could be the same as that used in centralized production facilities, at the nanoscale.

The main difference would be one of scale and time - factory fabbers would be bigger or more numerous, and run continuously so as to minimize factory size for a given quantity of product. But such economies of scale aren't relevant to a home setting - you want your product fabbed and in your hands as quickly as possible - but then you don't care that the fabber sits idle for an hour or a day, taking up a few square feet of space.

Larger objects might not be commonly home-fabbed, depending on how unwieldy the fabber is. If I need a 5m x 3m x 0.5m box to fab a new car, I'm not likely to keep that around. But if it looks more like a 5m x 3m drop cloth I can spread on my garage floor and then roll up when I'm done, I might keep that around. It'd still need quite a bit of mass to make a car, but if I'm going to recycle an old one at the same time, that's not too inconvenient.

The performance of home-fabbed products might be limited compared to the best possible products at some point in time, but it seems unlikely that all products will be "high performance".

Artificial constraints may be imposed on home fabbers, which may create markets for factory-made products - security, licensing, intellectual property control, zoning restrictions, etc. People may want hot new branded products - until they become yesterday's new commodity products.

In-store fabbing may be associated with services. E.g. I might take my car to get it repaired, and they'd fab the parts in the store. But really I'd be paying for the services, not the parts - which I could have fabbed at home.

If fabbers are too slow, stores or factories might fab products and put them on shelves, so you could quickly pick a product and take it home. But I don't think this will be the case, especially if the product can be fabbed from nanoblocks.

Depending on how much energy it takes to produce nanoblocks, those might be made in a centralized factory next to a power plant. Or they might be made at home, just made slowly so as to stay within the home's energy budget, and collected in a tank for later use. I tend to believe the former is more likely, beyond hobbyists and survivalists.

So long as the nanoblocks are made re-useable, it'll make sense to unfab products at home to fab new stuff, so the volume of nanoblocks brought home need not be huge.

Soft products like food will likely be difficult to fab, at least for things like meat and vegetables. People will probably prefer natural products until that gets perfected, and many even after that point.

[John B]

The question in my mind isn't if things will change, it's how quickly things will change.

I take it as a given that nanotechnology will radically alter the socioeconomic status quo. Traditionally highly-paid specially skilled metal workers (for instance) will be competing for a smaller number of jobs, and may eventually become a craft rather than an occupation, much the way many/most wind-power sailors are today. Large numbers of other jobs will also be altered - the trucking industry for instance, or the homewares sales force, will likely see non-trivial changes.

Some few jobs will be fairly unaffected. Boutique farmers, for instance, may actually find their numbers increasing as more disposable income becomes availble for what previously were luxuries. But these IMO will be the exception, not the rule.

Given that we're seeing a lot of people finding job prospects curtailed by changes, and only a relatively few highly specialized niches expanding (as I understand it), I would predict a pretty massive social cost to the widespread adoption of nanofactories.

Were nanofactories limited to factory production only, many 1st world economies (with large service industry job bases) would be less affected but 3rd world economies (with larger manufacturing job bases) would probably be affected, and ramifications would still be likely to be disruptive.

The speed at which these changes occur is IMO the critical aspect driving the degree of disruption. If the adoption takes place in less than a generation (~35 years) I believe there would be some very painful social issues to address, and shorter periods exacerbate the degree of social disruption. Longer periods may possibly lead to nanotech being absorbed with lesser social disruption.

All IMO. YMMV, etc etc.

-John

[Brian]

Big economic growth comes from a bunch of people doing something (say farming, 25-90% of labor force of various countries economies in 1900) they get displaced and say 1-2% produce 10 times the farm products of the old larger labor force. Then you have 24-89% of the people who have to develop new products, services and grow the economy. Each society still has the same or more of everything overall. (More food and product) It is a matter of distribution and how much goes into whose pocket.

-as Merlin said in Excalibur= A Dream to some ... a nightmare to others.

In this case the nightmare needs to be a short and mild one. This is where society and government can ease the transition. Just like they are doing for the credit crisis and where other regions and industries had disruption. People need to be retrained and more entrepreneurship needs to be enabled and encouraged.

Can people find something new to make or do that people would want to pay for that they can do better than regular folks who are willing to pay for it ? Can someone just use the new tech to seek out and access and utilize new resources (ie. if I got access to a nanofactory then I am making space ships, space habitats and building things on asteroids, staking claims and expanding frontiers and building a lot of energy generation and collection. Growing the human economy.)

Widescale automation in manufacturing has to be absorbed by developing economies all the time.

As noted the US economy is service and information based.

Food would probably have a different transformation. Possible stem cell based meat factories. Cattle and other animals seem energy and resource inefficient and thus suitable for displacement. Vertical farming and super green houses. More bio-engineered production.

[Tom Craver]

These discussions are interesting - but I keep thinking that if we formalized it, we'd better uncover interactions and side effects and take them into account much better.

E.g. set an initial condition, such as "In late 2008, a nanofactory is announced, limited to building with a single small "molecular block", able to build up a layer one millimeter thick (500,000 molecular layers) per day, possessed solely by MegaNano Corp. Products have strength about equal to steel, at half the weight, and can be arranged as an electrical insulator or conductor depending on the orientations of blocks."

The process would progress in phases. In the first phase, participants propose developments and out-comes of that technology, or even un-related developments they consider likely.

In the second phase, they would determine how far out in time the developments are likely to occur, entering them on a Gantt chart.

In the third phase, they would examine the chart for side effects and interactions, and modify the chart to reflect those.

Those phases would be repeated until the participants agree the early period is pretty settled, and the later period is getting too far out in time, such that un-anticipated events would be having too much impact.

For deep-future projects - e.g. starting with a diamondoid nanofactory developed in 2020 - more detail would have to be put into projecting the initial state of the world. So it'd be good to start with several "near term" projects to get a feel for the probability of developments and events.

[John B]

Sounds interesting.

Questions on your scenario, Tom -

What are the limitations on these 'blocks'? That is -
How do blocks link up?
How many blocks does it take to replicate the block-making capability?
What are the raw material, power & cooling requirements?
What are the initial shapes available to work with from "MegaNano Corp"?
What's the regulation environment - modern day? What nation(s)?

-John

[Tom Craver]

John -
It wasn't intended to be a serious scenario. Certainly it should be more detailed than I laid out, to be useful.

I chose to use the very near term date of 2008 purely because it allows participants to initially avoid the issue of how much will have changed 20 years hence.

I would guess the nanofactory would only be capable of self-copying about 95% of it's mass - very likely excluding the assembly tips.

It'd likely use an external motor for power, and a conventional external computer to address low-level instructions to trivial on-board mechanical logic. Likely the whole assembly surface would be raster-scanned over the work surface, with each assembly unit scanned over a small rectangular area with dimensions equal to the spacing of the individual assembly units.

Large areas of assembly units could all be given the same instructions in parallel. The more finely detailed a design is, the slower the nanofactory would work, as the controlling computer would have to address instructions more specifically. It'd be fastest at creating vast arrays of the same repeating pattern - i.e. things much like the nanofactory itself.

It would not be capable of producing it's own molecular blocks, which would likely be produced via conventional chemical processing. The blocks might be chemically activated (e.g. stripping off surface hydrogen atoms) just prior to rapidly moving them into position to bond to the workpiece.

Energy consumption might be less an issue than removing the heat released as the molecular blocks bond.

(If I knew more than this about how it'd work, we could start building it! It's just a scenario!)

[John B]

Heh. As you may have noticed, I tend to get a little excited about some of these topics from time to time. Sorry 'bout that.

I'd not necessarily agree that tool tips would be unreproducible. There has to be some mechanism to handle tool wear - not traditional tool wear, but the (WAG) 1% thermal disassociation of portions of the tool, leading it to be unusable. Using said mechanism to replace tools is only one step off from using that same mechanism (procedure, whatever) to create additional tool tips.

Admittedly this process may not be do-able in the initial nanofac's capability - and would be a big brake on exponential growth scenarios, requiring man-in-the-loop processes. However, I would also suggest that this would be one of the biggest sinks of R&D funding after "MegaNano" admitted the capability or the capability was otherwise leaked.

Assuming a 'mild steel' structural strength and atomic precision, the next limitation (IMO) to an exponential growth scenario comes with the mechanism(s) used to link blocks together. If those joints can't stand up to an atmosphere, the pressure vessel would be the next limiting factor.

I would be curious what other bits of such a system couldn't be made with milimeter-cube-maximal-volume parts. I don't think there'd be many.

Bandwidth for comms is going to be an extremely non-trivial issue for true atomic precision manufacture at the milimeter-square scale. I suspect that simple, mathematically describable solids will be almost trivial to produce, given a simple addressing scheme for the 'tool tips' (whatever they end up looking like! *grin*). More complex structures - like the Drexlerian electrostatic motor, or even PNP/NPN transistors - will likely be rather more difficult. As such, "It'd be fastest at creating vast arrays of the same repeating patter" is something I'd agree with, but would point out that early usage might be best to create gem-quality materials or the like rather than more complex materials - bootstrap financial backing to allow for greater fac production down the road.

Forget about 'random' materials like jade, at least initially. Also difficult would be materials with unstable states in their production - like many protiens or genetic material.

Interesting thought, using traditional solutions chemistry to handle block joining. I'd note that I'd have concerns about that, personally - you're going to have interesting random atoms and molecules floating around, possibly (probably?) leading to highly irregular bonds between cubes, and hence we're back to great capabilities in a milimeter cube but not in multi-cube environments.

One possible change here would be a surface structure along the lines, perhaps, of Lego(tm) or equivalent physical interactions. Then your block-to-block connections could be standardized based on the friction/mechanical fitting of the cubes, albeit at a 'waste' of some volume to handle the inter-block connections.

Cooling, as you note, is going to be an extremely important aspect of any such device, given the thermal noise issues.

Thanks for your thoughts... interesting!

-John