Responsible Nanotechnology

China's Prolific Nano Researchers

Over at Metamodern, Eric Drexler just posted a rather impressive table of the top nanotech researchers of 2005, in terms of numbers of papers published.

The top four nanotech publishers are Chinese. China also grabbed slots 6-9, 11-13, and 15.

Slots 5, 10, 14, 16, and 17 are filled by researchers from Italy, England, Germany, Taiwan, and Germany, in that order.

Slots 18-23 are tied between Japan, the U.S., China (twice), and the Netherlands (twice).

Drexler comments that this table "has a degree of relevance" to an essay of his, “Asia and the elements of innovation”"

Of course, the number of papers published may always be correlated with the quality of the work. And nanotechnology is a broad collection of barely-connected fields, with no indication of which fields these authors are publishing in. But still... it surprised me to see the US so far down on a tech-related list.

(I'd include the table in this post, but Typepad seems not to allow linking to external images. My only way to show the image would be to copy the image to Typepad, which would be a copyright violation - an actual crime - instead of mere linking, which may be rude depending on how it's done, but as far as I know isn't illegal yet. Anyway, click on the link above to see the table.)

Chris Phoenix

Concise Summary of Molecular Manufacturing

Eric Drexler over on Metamodern has posted a summary of "The Physical Basis of Atomically Precise Manufacturing."

Most of what he says isn't new - it comes straight from his 1992 reference/analysis work Nanosystems. Small things work faster and have higher power density. Detailed and conservative analysis shows that molecular-scale objects can be built by molecular-scale objects. (Biology is an existence proof of this last point - but the kind of machines Drexler analyzed have fundamental performance advantages over biology.)

Drexler makes an interesting point about the difference between design for easy analysis and design for easy construction, and he provides links to earlier posts of his on things like alternative materials for machine-type nanoscale manufacturing systems.

He also discusses the amount of time required for fabrication, pointing out that this is proportional to operation speed, and thus can be expected to be faster (per machine mass) in smaller machines. Perhaps in a future post he'll go into more detail on nanofactory architecture and molecular fabrication vs. component assembly. (My nanofactory paper explores these issues for a particular desing of fabricator, but it's a lengthy read and the convergent-assembly design is now probably outdated - the Burch/Drexler planar assembly design seems better in almost every way.)

Though he didn't include this observation, scaling laws also describe the huge difference between handling molecules with big machines and handling them with small machines. Not only do the small machines work faster in proportion to their size, but their volume changes drastically. People's intuition correctly tells them that a desktop machine could never build a copy out of molecules - it would take billions of billions of years. But what their intuition won't tell them is that, if you shrink the machine by a factor of a million, it should be able to build a duplicate out of molecules in a few minutes.

Even if you're familiar with molecular manufacturing, it's worth reviewing all the cool and useful things that happen at the nanoscale - which means it's worth reading Drexler's article.

Chris Phoenix

Molecular Manufacturing On Fox News

It's official: molecular manufacturing could be the second industrial revolution.

Physics professor Michio Kaku was interviewed on Fox News, talking about the virus-built battery that MIT's Angela Belcher has achieved. Prof. Kaku had a lot to say about molecular manufacturing in the interview:

"The holy grail of manufacture is to create a molecular factory, that is using viruses and molecules to cut, splice, and dice other molecules to create computers, laptops, transistors, and batteries for your car."

Although I expect future molecular manufacturing systems will use a more direct method than engineered viruses, the idea of "cut, splice and dice other molecules" to create products is certainly what molecular manufacturing is about.

"A virus cuts and splices other molecules together. .... At the key juncture, then you manufacture billions of these things .... This could set off a second industrial revolution. Imagine molecular factories creating Pentium chips. Molecular factories creating batteries."

So, he's talking about have massively parallel operations, being done by billions of molecular machines (viruses, in this case). So what's the big picture?

"It could create a second industrial revolution. The first industrial revolution was based on mass production of large machines. The second industrial revolution could be molecular manufacture. "

Yep, he said it: Molecular manufacture.

"We're talking about a new way of manufacturing almost everything. Instead of having robots that are gigantic and clumsy, you now have molecular robots, because what does a virus do? A virus cuts and splices and dices other molecules. So why not use that molecular ability to create a whole plethora of things for the computer age and the electric age? And so this could remove many bottlenecks in our manufacturing industry."

There's something almost Feynman-esque in his turns of phrase. Not only do we get molecular manufacturing of advanced products, but he expects it to have a large impact on the manufacturing industry as a whole.

At the end of the interview, the interviewer asks, "Just to be clear, you're a believer, right?" Kaku answers without hesitation: "In molecular manufacture. That could be the future - a second industrial revolution."

When CRN was founded in late 2002, one of our major goals was for people to accept that molecular manufacturing is coming. It seemed a long way off. And, in high tech, six and a half years is a long time. A lot of time in which there still hasn't been much discussion of the broader implications of molecular manufacturing. But I think we can say that that goal has now been pretty much achieved.

It's now time for CRN to focus even harder on those broader implications. One of the things that Prof. Kaku did not cover is the idea of factories building factories, so that for the first time in history, manufacturing capacity will not be scarce. He talked about electrical and electronic products, but not about mechanical products - including weapons. He did not discuss the economic, social, medical, and political impacts of molecular manufacturing. Of course, he couldn't, in a four-minute interview. But that's where the discussion needs to go next.

(Hat tip to Tristan Hambling.)

Chris Phoenix

Funny Nano Song

Here's a funny song (and puppet show) about how great nanotechnology is. The song was apparently written for a contest, and is currently in top place (click on the "Top Rated" tab). Other videos on the site are more serious (but probably not as cautionary as CRN is).

Chris Phoenix

The Dangers Of Prometheus

Josh Hall likes Prometheus; I'm not so sure.

A few days ago, I posted a comment on changes happening at Foresight, including Josh Hall becoming president. I questioned whether Foresight would continue to take a rosy view of nanotechnology. A partial answer has arrived in the form of a Nanodot post from Josh.

Josh asserts that, in forecasting the effects of a technology, it is easy to see the downsides and hard to see the upsides. Fire, for example, is known to be dangerous in that it can burn people; even Homo habilis knew that. But Homo habilis could not conceive of the positive side: the Apollo moon landings, and the global transportation network powered by combustion. A caveman might have rejected fire on the basis of known dangers, without being able to make a well-informed choice.

I think this is a one-sided view. One of the biggest concerns of the present time is anthropogenic global warming. Guess what put all the carbon dioxide into the atmosphere? Our control of fire. It remains to be seen whether the progress of economics (coal burning and unsustainable agriculture) will push the global climate past a disastrous tipping point before the progress of technology can pull it back. But if our hypothetical cave dwellers understood that one possible consequence of fire was that most of the planet would turn into desert for 100,000 years, as James Lovelock expects... perhaps they would make a rational choice to reject it.

My point is that it's not only the positive consequences of a technology that are hard to forecast and hard to understand. Even technologies as well-established, beneficial, and canonical as fire can have consequences that we are still struggling to deal with or even comprehend. And some of the potential consequences are disastrous almost beyond imagining.

Of course, nothing is all good or all bad. In the next few decades, molecular manufacturing will probably (depending on how it is deployed) give humans the ability to undertake planet-scale engineering. This will make it relatively feasible to moderate the planet's climate and chemistry. It will also make it quite easy to destroy the planet's climate - and I'm not talking about gray goo, but about deliberate applications of high-throughput high-performance manufacturing.

To us today, writing and reading these words on a computer in a comfortable climate-controlled environment, it seems inconceivable that we might want to reject the gift of fire. To our descendents fifty generations from now, whether they are scratching out a living in the few remaining habitable square miles near the Arctic Circle (Lovelock's prediction), or struggling to cope with the nano-built flying land mines that have already killed 99% of the population, the answer may not be so obvious.

I am not arguing for stopping technology. I don't think we can, and I don't think we should try. But let's not pretend that technology is going to make things better. It will give us new problems and opportunities, even as it solves some old problems. The best we can do is to try to guide technology in directions that are less destructive than they might be, and keep looking for new options to solve problems that (to paraphrase Einstein) can't be solved by the systems that created them.

Chris Phoenix

Chris Interviewed On Gray Goo

The SETI Institute has a radio program called "Are We Alone?" and this week's broadcast covers slimy things - from slime mold, to gray goo.

Click on "You've Been Slimed" on their home page to hear the interview [mp3]. My segment starts 28:00 in and runs to 36:08.

In the introduction, before they start interviewing me, they assert that gray goo is a risk of molecular manufacturing, since molecular manufacturing will, they assert, require self-replicating robots. I wish they hadn't done that, but I suppose they wanted to make gray goo sound scary enough to be worth talking about.

I think I did a pretty good job of explaining that molecular manufacturing will involve large (human-scale) factories full of inert tools - no self-replicating robots at all. I gave a bit of history of the gray goo concept: why it was originally a concern of Drexler's, and how and why his thinking changed about the way molecular manufacturing would be implemented.

I expect I'll be doing a lot more public speaking in the future. Any advice on how to present myself or my ideas will be much appreciated.

Chris Phoenix

Josh Hall as Foresight Institute President

The Foresight Institute held an event in Palo Alto earlier today, at which Josh Hall spoke in his new capacity as president of Foresight. He has been involved in molecular manufacturing for two decades; his accomplishments include founding the sci.nanotech newsgroup.

I expect Josh to bring a more technical and future-oriented focus back to Foresight, which for the past several years has (from my point of view) mainly been active in promoting stories about how good near-term nanoscale technologies can be. Nanoscale technologies are incremental steps away from familar technologies, and raise familiar issues; they are far less perilous than molecular manufacturing, which is why CRN has largely left them to other organizations.

It sounds like Foresight will be focusing on artificial intelligence as well as molecular manufacturing; Josh is an accomplished AI researcher. (And AI was a focus of Foresight back when it was founded; although it focused on molecular manufacturing, its mission was to address a variety of advanced technologies.) CRN won't have much to say about AI.

But I'll be watching closely to see how Foresight handles molecular manufacturing. Will Josh be able to redirect Foresight away from its current focus on "Advancing Beneficial Nanotechnology" to address the negative implications as well? I asked him today about Foresight's earlier slogan, "Good for people, good for the planet," and he did not like it. So maybe Foresight will be moving toward a more balanced view of the perils as well as the promise of molecular manufacturing. If they don't, CRN will just have to do our best to balance the picture.

Chris Phoenix

Destructive Nano Video

Well, that's a nice welcome-back-to-work for you.

Two days into my new/old job, and I hear from Mike that there's a nano video going viral. It's hosted, no surprise, by none other than Wired, which also published Bill Joy's anti-nano article in 2000. Nanotechnologists take note: Wired wants to destroy your funding.

I wish I thought that videos like this would raise public awareness of the implications of molecular manufacturing. But I don't. This video is not just about destructive nano - it is a destructive video about nano.

So what's wrong with the video? Like all good lies, it contains grains of truth. Here are a few of the half-truths:

• "Because it takes so many of these microscopic machines to do large-scale work, self-replicating nanobots will be pretty common in laboratories."

It is true that it takes many small machines to do large-scale work. The lie is that these machines will be free-floating and self-replicating, rather than being fastened in place like the conveyor belts and drill presses in a factory.

• "Rather than replicating using the rarest materials, program the nanobot to use the commonest."

It is true that molecular manufacturing will provide lots of design flexibility. The lie is that machines can simply be programmed to change their fundamental construction: it's like saying "program the tree to grow on gasoline." More accurate would be "Design a whole new nanobot from scratch, because nothing like it will exist."

• The overall message of the movie is that molecular manufacturing is powerful enough to be extremely scary.

It is true that molecular manufacturing will be immensely powerful and easy to misuse. The lie is that grey goo is the biggest danger. Deliberate institutional misuse of the products will generate more perilous and more urgent threats, which will be more difficult to prepare for.

At least I can hope that, nine years after Bill Joy's article scared nano researchers into claiming that molecular manufacturing was impossible, the researchers will react a little more calmly and reasonably this time. CRN has been explaining the realities of grey goo for years, and I co-authored a paper, "Safe Exponential Manufacturing," with Eric Drexler in 2004 on the topic.

While this video may scare the uninformed, perhaps the actual discussion of molecular manufacturing will emerge stronger and more sensible than before. I welcome your suggestions and actions toward this goal.

(Edit: I originally said Joy's article was in 2001)

Chris Phoenix

Adapt or Collapse

Apocalyptic thinking is frequently found in certain future scenarios, especially when those scenarios are created by people concerned with military conflict, climate change, artificial intelligence, disease outbreaks, or other scary possibilities. CRN has ourselves participated in the making of such scenarios involving nano-weaponry, and our co-founders wrote a chapter for a book on global catastrophic risk.

So, for anyone who's read this blog for a while, or who has kept up with general trends in futurist thinking, the projected "end of civilization" is not an unfamiliar theme.

A recent article in the New Scientist suggests that "the demise of civilization may be inevitable."

It appears that once a society develops beyond a certain level of complexity it becomes increasingly fragile. Eventually, it reaches a point at which even a relatively minor disturbance can bring everything crashing down.

Some say we have already reached this point, and that it is time to start thinking about how we might manage collapse. Others insist it is not yet too late, and that we can -- we must -- act now to keep disaster at bay.

The upshot is that a certain level of complexity is unsustainable, and that we have reached or are near that point in numerous areas, including energy production, environmental management, finance and credit, etc. Assuming you accept the premise of the article, our choice -- that is, the collective choice of our modern industrialized society -- is to either adapt or collapse.

Adaptation will mean huge changes in the way we function. This is not a new idea, of course. Since "The Population Bomb" (1968) and "The Limits to Growth" (1972), we've been hearing increasingly dire warnings about being on the wrong path and what we must do to correct it. But today, in the face of massive evidence that global warming will dramatically change our world no matter what we do, adapting in order to survive seems more urgent than ever.

Is total collapse actually possible? Well, obviously, ours would not be the first civilization ever to perish or to crumble under the weight of its own unchecked enlargement. So certainly it's possible.

As pointed out in the New Scientist article:

The stakes are high. Historically, collapse always led to a fall in population. "Today's population levels depend on fossil fuels and industrial agriculture," says [Utah State University's Joseph] Tainter. "Take those away and there would be a reduction in the Earth's population that is too gruesome to think about."

If industrialised civilisation does fall, the urban masses -- half the world's population -- will be most vulnerable. Much of our hard-won knowledge could be lost, too.

On the other hand, we now know a great deal more about the mechanics and dynamics of collapse than have any people before us. We know much more about sustainability and resilience. It is also possible then, if not likely, that we can avoid collapse by making just enough of the right kinds of changes just in the nick of time.

But if our civilization is to change as much as some people say is necessary, how will that affect current institutions, such as the corporation, the nation-state, or even democracy itself?

George Dvorsky, who writes the excellent Sentient Developments blog and who serves on the Board of Directors of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET), has some serious thoughts on the subject in a piece titled "Future Risks and the Challenge to Democracy."

It is becoming increasingly clear that 21st Century politics will be focused around managing the impacts of disruptive technologies, addressing the threats posed by apocalyptic weapons and environmental degradation, and attending to global-scale catastrophes and crises as they occur. [his emphasis]

This restructuring is already underway. We live in the post 9/11 world—a world in which we have legitimate cause to be fearful of superterrorism and hyperterrorism. We will also have to reap what we sowed in regards to our environmental neglect. Consequently, our political leaders and institutions will be increasingly called-upon to address the compounding problems of unchecked WMD proliferation, terrorism, civil unrest, pandemics, the environmental impacts of climate change (like super-storms, flooding, etc.), fleets of refugees, devastating food shortages, and so on. It will become very necessary for the world’s militaries to anticipate these crises and adapt so that they can meet these demands.

More challenging, however, will be avoiding outright human extinction . . .

Catastrophic and existential risks will put democratic institutions in danger given an unprecedented need for social control, surveillance and compliance. Liberal democracies will likely regress to de facto authoritarianism under the intense strain; tools that will allow democratic governments to do so include invoking emergency measures, eliminating dissent and protest, censorship, suspending elections and constitutions, and trampling on civil liberties (illegal arrests, surveillance, limiting mobility, etc).

Looking further ahead, extreme threats may even rekindle the totalitarian urge; this option will appeal to those leaders looking to exert absolute control over their citizens. What’s particularly frightening is that future technologies will allow for a more intensive and invasive totalitarianism than was ever thought possible in the 20th Century – including ubiquitous surveillance (and the monitoring of so-called ‘thought crimes’), absolute control over information, and the redesign of humanity itself, namely using genetics and cybernetics to create a more traceable and controllable citizenry. Consequently, as a political mode that utterly undermines humanistic values and the preservation of the autonomous individual, totalitarianism represents an existential risk unto itself.

George has eloquently restated some of the concerns that CRN has written about for years, many of them made possible or exacerbated by advanced nanotechnology. I urge you to read his whole article.

Clearly, then, the question to ask is not only whether our civilization can survive the challenges of this century, but if it can, what kind of civilization will it be?

That is what we must actively plan for and work toward if we hope to live in a better tomorrow.

Mike Treder

Latest Issue of H+ Magazine

Is the future cancelled?

That's the provocative question headlining the latest issue of h+ magazine, available now at your virtual newsstand. If you'll turn to page 55, you'll find an article by yours truly, titled "Nanotechnology, for Better or for Worse."

Here is a description of what you can expect in future issues:

h+ covers technological, scientific, and cultural trends that are changing — and will change — human beings in fundamental ways. We will be following developments in areas like NBIC (nano-bio-info-cog), longevity, performance enhancement and self-modification, Virtual Reality, "The Singularity," and other areas that both promise and threaten to radically alter our lives and our view of the world and ourselves.

More than that, h+ aims to reflect this newest edge culture by featuring creative expressions of humanity on a razor's edge where daily life and science fiction seem to be merging.

Good reading!

Mike Treder