Responsible Nanotechnology

Robust Manufacturing Technology

Paul S commented on my last post: "...if regulation is necessary it will have to be applied before any robust [molecular manufacturing] technology is released to the public."

I agree with this - depending on just what is meant by "robust."

What makes a technology robust? Or, what would make a molecular manufacturing technology difficult to un-release to the public?

Consider first that molecular manufacturing development, along with other technologies, will not be standing still. A ten-year-old nanofactory would be more out of date than a ten-year-old computer. So if a branch of technology is left to stagnate for ten years, then it will effectively be un-released. It will still be able to do what it used to, but relative to the powers of modern technology, its products would be relatively unimportant. And if regulation is needed, ten years of progress in military and law enforcement technologies (including data mining) might make it difficult to use ten-year-old technologies without being spotted.

On the other hand, this analysis assumes that the governmental version of molecular manufacturing would continue developing rapidly. This is not necessarily a safe assumption. Without lots of minds working on it with the stimulus of economic competition, a technology could easily stagnate. So ten-year-old civilian tech vs. ten years of governmental progress might be a pretty even match. Just look at the U. S. space program.

The second question is whether a particular incarnation of technology is usable and useful. For commercial applications, this means it has to be reliable, predictable, and not too innovative. As a home appliance, it has to be thoroughly simple to use, safe and perceived as safe, and make finished products. For hobbyists, it has to be fairly inexpensive to work on. It's far from obvious that an embryonic molecular manufacturing technology would be adopted by any of these groups in a way that led to its rapid further development.

So if early molecular manufacturing was released to the public, it's not at all certain that this would lead to Pandora's box being opened a decade in the future. This is good news, because in a sense, early molecular manufacturing has already been released.

Chris Phoenix

Draconian Measures For Molecular Manufacturing?

A few days ago, I wrote a post implying that liberty in the U.S. may be at risk due to an ongoing state of near-war. I quoted Aldous Huxley: "Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of the central government."

A commenter named Baughn asked: "I wonder, however. Considering the rather draconian measures you believe would be required to control nanotechnology, do you think this is a bad thing?"

First, let me clarify (for any new readers) that "nanotechnology" here is used to mean molecular manufacturing - its original meaning - not all the newer stuff that has been grafted onto the word, such as nanoparticles. No one is suggesting that nanoparticles might need draconian control measures - though some kinds of nanoparticles might need a bit more control than they're currently getting.

So, molecular manufacturing: tiny nanotech machines, made out of precisely designed molecules, that can rapidly build more machines of equivalent precision and complexity. A manufacturing revolution: general-purpose manufacturing, using non-scarce equipment, of inexpensive and highly advanced products. And the manufacturing systems could be small, easily concealed, easily duplicated - very difficult to control, if an unrestricted system was ever in civilian hands.

Pretty revolutionary - which means disruptive - which means potentially destructive. So, does it require draconian control measures?

There is some argument that it should simply be allowed to be developed with minimal controls, in the expectation that the good will outweigh the bad, and problems will be outweighed by solutions. In my more optimistic moments, I have a lot of sympathy for this viewpoint. Computers have developed pretty much that way, and we - and our infrastructure and society - have so far managed to survive computer viruses, spam, and data-mining. On the other hand, if a computer virus could kill a person instead of just erasing their data, we might be a lot less sanguine.

If molecular manufacturing has to be controlled, how much of society needs to be controlled to accomplish that? The good news is that not much broad-based control may be required. In other words, it may be sufficient to keep control of a few key technological capabilities, to make it difficult or impossible for a private effort to develop molecular manufacturing until technology has advanced to the point that molecular manufacturing is no longer a big deal.

There may, of course, be paths to molecular manufacturing that, once conceptualized, turn out to be fairly simple recipes, accessible with technologies that are already widespread. That would be problematic. But without sophisticated tools and lots of R&D money, such recipes couldn't be developed and tested.

I'm not yet ready to say that broad-based control of society to avoid technological evils is definitely unnecessary and will always continue to be unnecessary. But I do think (at this moment, at least) that in terms of potential harm to humans from private development of high tech, there are other technologies that loom a lot larger. And I think this will continue to be the case until the first advanced molecular manufacturing system is not only developed, but released to the public in unrestricted form.

If it turns out to be necessary to restrict molecular manufacturing, then either limits on its development or technological limits on its implementation may well be sufficient. I don't see the need to restructure or oppress society to keep us safe from this technology.

My ideal future would have most of the limits be technological, and applied to limit the use of publicly available manufacturing systems. Technological limits would have to be carefully designed, because almost anything can be cracked given enough effort. But molecular manufacturing has enough potential for good that I'd like to see it available in some form that's appropriately restricted but still broadly useful.

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

Student Nano Interview

A student recently emailed me some questions about nanotechnology. I decided to write a lengthy answer and make a blog post of it as well.

Even though this is quite long, it is more abbreviated than I wish it was. For more information, check out our published papers. You may also want to read this overview of nanotechnology and molecular manufacturing.

> 1)Please state your background and expertise in the field of nanotechnology.

I started learning about nanotechnology when I took a class from Eric Drexler at Stanford in 1988, and I have continued to study it for 21 years. My software engineering experience has helped me to understand the implications of large engineered systems, built of small reliable components, and capable of implementing the operations that created them.

I have published numerous papers on the science and implications of molecular manufacturing (see http://crnano.org/papers.htm) and have spoken on four continents, keynoting and organizing two conferences.

> 2)What is the science behind nanotechnology (in general)?

Building things at the atomic scale has many advantages. For example, there are some very cool physics tricks such as near-frictionless surfaces and a variety of effects (such as luminescence) from confined electrons. Smaller things work faster and with higher power. Atoms are perfect copies of each other, and molecular structures are inherently "digital," which can translate into extremely high reliability.

Not every branch of nanotechnology uses every advantage that's available at the nanoscale. As our ability to build more complicated nanostructures develops, nanotechnology will get even more exciting.

A major predictable advance is the increasing use of nanomachines (not just nanostructures) and eventually the use of nanomachines for fabricating other nanomachines. That will lead to a series of manufacturing breakthroughs that I expect to be rapid and revolutionary.

Molecular manufacturing is the end goal of nanomachine fabrication. Highly reliable manufacturing at the nanoscale, using flexible nanoscale tools, will allow tools to build more tools, as many as desired, and then use the tools for general-purpose product manufacture. In the end, the cost of highly advanced products may be determined mainly by the cost of raw materials and/or the R&D required to make the blueprints.

> 3)What are the inhibiting factors slowing down the research and development
> of products using nanotechnology?

Most of today's nanotech is done by indirect methods: for example, mix some chemicals together, let them react on their own, and you get nanoparticles or DNA structures. Each development requires a lot of research and experimentation. And it's hard to see what we're doing. With better microscopes and more general-purpose fabrication methods, nanotech research will be able to advance much more quickly.

Politics has hurt the development of advanced nanotechnology, including molecular manufacturing. A few decades ago, people thought that molecular manufacturing would lead directly to the creation of dangerous self-contained self-replicating robots, too small and too numerous to stop, that could do untold damage simply by eating stuff we care about. That worry was obsoleted in 1992, when Drexler published a technology development pathway that skipped the small self-contained robots entirely. But in 2000, Bill Joy invoked the worry in an article in Wired magazine, just as the National Nanotechnology Initiative was getting funded. Suddenly, researchers in other branches of nanotech saw billions of dollars of funding at risk, and it became fashionable to assert that molecular manufacturing was impossible.

There are also concerns about the health risks of some nanoparticles, which have probably slowed the development and productization of some kinds of nanotechnology.

> 4)How do you think advances in nanotechnology will affect the future of...

In the short term, nanotech will improve one product at a time, causing only incremental effects in all the areas you list below. Eventually, when a suite of general-purpose manufacturing and sensing tools are developed, things will change a lot faster. Product design will speed up, each designer will be able to build a wider range of products with less effort, and in the end, it will be possible to make as many copies as desired of a product with fully automated manufacturing.

>      A) War-

There's a large class of weapons that gets more effective as they cram more complexity and power into a smaller volume. Basically, this applies to anything that flies through the air. Nanotechnology, and especially molecular manufacturing, promises products with far higher complexity and power density.

When nanoscale manufacturing becomes able to make whole products, weapons may become more numerous and cheaper to build. Combined with rapidly improving computers and software, automated weapons systems may become overwhelmingly important on the battlefield - regardless of whether the battlefield overlaps with civilian populations. Think of something like a mechanical housefly, but networked, and exploding on command. That's only one of a vast range of possible weapons.

As manufacturing and testing become faster, weapons may be developed and deployed so quickly that any arms race will become unstable: one side will develop a weapon the other side can't defend against, deploy it, and take out the other side before they can do the same.

>      B) Medicine-

The human body is amazingly complex at many levels. I expect medicine to advance incrementally but rapidly as better computers, sensors, chemicals, and machinery are developed.

I used to think that molecular manufacturing would revolutionize medicine. I'm starting to moderate that opinion, because I'm seeing how medicine today is limited by factors other than the tools available. Molecular manufacturing will certainly accelerate medical research, but so will a lot of other things like computer data-mining and DNA sequencing.

>      C) Entertainment-

I think that computers (which already use a form of nanotech, but require lots of other technologies as well) will be a major factor in entertainment advances for the next several decades.

Physical sports will be helped by material science advances. I enjoy several extreme sports, some of which couldn't exist without synthetic fibers. Nanomaterials will probably play an increasing role in sports of all kinds.

In the future, when molecular manufacturing can build motors and energy storage devices with immensely high power density, I expect personal aviation to finally (so to speak) take off.

Eventually, increased ability to design new medical technologies will merge medicine and entertainment. Anything further I said on this topic would go straight into science fiction.

>      D) Everyday Life-

Westernized countries already have enough technology that our lives are determined more by our choices than by our technological limitations. The major exception to this is aging. Currently, everyone has to plan to get old and feeble and dependent. If and when medicine (presumably with the help of nanotech) advances to the point that the processes of aging can be largely stopped and/or reversed, there will be major social shifts.

A new and powerful means of manufacturing could have major impacts on environmental issues. I believe that planet-scale engineering will become possible. Instead of having an impact on the environment accidentally and on a timescale of decades, it will be possible to have a planet-scale impact in a matter of months. We will have to choose what impact we want to have. We will be able to fix most of today's problems. We will also be able to create new problems.

>      E) Other (any other information you would like to add)-

I should say something about timelines. Computer chips using nanotech (by the National Nanotechnology Initiative's definition, which I actually don't find very useful) are already here. Medical diagnostics are being developed and will soon be very important; treatments may take a bit longer (maybe 10 years plus or minus five before we see major impacts).

Nanomaterials are already being used, and their use will increase, but we mostly won't notice.

Molecular manufacturing is kind of a wild card, since its development depends largely on perception and politics, and its use may depend largely on national-level policy and politics. It would surprise me a lot if someone, somewhere, had not developed it by 2020. But whether it will be available, or will be a closely guarded military technology, is anyone's guess.

> 5)How can nanotechnology be seen as a problem in the future?

Any technology can create problems by its indirect effects on society.

The main direct problem that nanotechnology could create in the short term is if some nanoparticle is widely used and then turns out to be a health or environmental hazard. Keep in mind that nanoparticles are as different from each other as rocks and soap bubbles - some nanoparticles will be perfectly safe, and some are known to be unhealthy (this is, of course, also true of a wide range of industrial chemicals - if the danger is known, it's not usually a serious problem). The potential for trouble arises if a nanoparticle is used before it's studied. This has happened several times already, without any major health consequences that I've heard of.

In the longer term, once molecular manufacturing is developed and nanotech becomes a general-purpose technology, there will be all sorts of potential problems. I already mentioned an unstable arms race, which could lead to war and/or domination. There will also be major impacts on society. Look how much difference electricity and automobiles and plastics and computers made in the previous century. Molecular manufacturing has the potential for comparable impacts, both good and bad.

> 6)Is nanotechnology ethical?

Ethics is about how humans use the technology, not the technology itself. Nanotechnology will present us with many choices, many chances to improve the world, and many opportunities to do unethical things.

> 7)How will nanotechnology be enforced?

Nanotech is too broad for any one set of policies to be meaningful. Many of its implications will have to be dealt with separately.

Once nanotech leads to general-purpose manufacturing, things will get even more complicated. A single manufacturing device may be able to make products with military, medical, commercial, environmental, and societal implications. It will be very difficult to regulate such a device sensibly. Frankly, I don't know the answer.

Chris Phoenix

Bio Risk Update

As I learn more about the bio risk I've been studying, I'm settling in for a long-term effort. There's one experiment nearing completion that initially looked extremely risky, but I've come to think it's probably within the bounds of acceptable risk. It seems that already-existing organisms are enough like the organism being created, so that there will (probably) be parasites waiting for it if it's accidentally released.

However, I remain unconvinced that the broader class of experiments is safe, in the sense of unlikely to create harm. And if harm does happen, I remain unconvinced that the worst-case plausible scenario is at all acceptable.

So I'll keep learning about the various issues involved - ecology, population dynamics, molecular biology, invasive species, bacteriology - and I'll keep talking with the relevant researchers about what I learn. Meanwhile, I'll be re-directing some of my focus back to CRN.

Chris Phoenix

What I've Been Up To: Risk Analysis

Sorry I haven't been posting here more regularly. The biotech issue I've been working on has really claimed all my attention. I've been learning a lot about bacteria...

So far, conversations have mostly gone like this: I say to an expert, "What ____ is doing seems potentially very dangerous, because ___ could happen, or at least no one has shown me a reason it can't, and I've talked to several experts already."

I get one of three replies:
1) "I don't think that's worth worrying about, and I'm not inclined to look further."
2) "I don't think it will happen, because of _____." Then I look up _____ and find that it's factually incorrect.
3) "It seems like this is worth looking into further. You should talk to more experts."

Is it just me, or should I be getting more worried as I get more and more responses of type 2 and 3?

So far, I haven't managed to get any experts in the field to say "Yes, this is really worrisome, and I'll use my reputation to try to get the researchers to back off." Of course, this is a very hard thing for any scientist to say. There's a chasm to be crossed between "This might be a problem" and "This might be a problem I should act on, even if it means criticizing eminent fellow scientists." And the magnitude of the potential problem does not seem to make it easier to cross that chasm.

This has some similarities with molecular manufacturing, and some differences. One major difference is that molecular manufacturing is still in the future, while the potentially dangerous bio research is going on today.

A major similarity is that there appears to be a potential for self-replicating systems to be immensely powerful - more powerful than most specialists' intuitions - but that potential is only visible to generalists and systems thinkers. The experts don't easily see it, don't want to see it, and usually either dismiss it or treat it as someone else's theoretical problem.

For the past week or so, I've been in communication with the researcher who's actually doing the work I (and several other experts in various related fields) think is dangerous. As long as he's talking, I'm avoiding taking action that could start a grassroots movement against his work. Such a movement could be very powerful in the short run - and would probably create a lot more heat than light, causing future research along the same lines to be obscured and harder to regulate.

If any of you have experience with a case where a scientist was successfully convinced that their research was riskier than they thought - risky enough to substantially modify their plan and delay their work - then please let me know how that was accomplished. If no one has heard of such a thing happening... then what does that say about how the scientific community handles newly discovered risk?

(Yes, I know about Asilomar. That was one event, decades ago. How common are such things?)

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

Fast Takeoff: Introduction

When and why will molecular manufacturing revolutionize the world? From a technical point of view, the answer has a few subtle but easily understandable aspects. Understanding those points will let us project from current and near-future technology developments, to understand how far we are from a molecular manufacturing breakthrough.

Over the next few weeks, I'll be writing a series of posts exploring the various aspects of fast takeoff. I'll be covering design spaces, product design, factories-building-factories, product performance, the economics of competing technologies, and whatever else seems necessary to understanding the difference between a cool technology and a revolutionary one.

By the time I'm done, CRN's new website design should be live, and I'll convert these posts into new content. (Yay!)

Here's a teaser: A very basic and primitive computer-controlled molecular manufacturing system might have a million atoms (or molecular building blocks). If 99% of those atoms can be placed by the system, then 10,000 atoms must be placed "by hand." That's a very large molecule, or a very large number of scanning probe operations. Probably, a system like this would not be revolutionary - too hard to build, to design, or both. But a system that could handle 99.99% of its atoms would only need 100-atom "inputs" per copy. That is quite feasible by today's standards. So a difference of less than 1% can make the difference between a laboratory demo and a revolutionary manufacturing system.

Chris Phoenix

Confronting the Dangers of Technology

Someone commented on my recent post, The Dangers of Prometheus: "The existence of knowledge doesn't mandate its scope of use. Problems such as global warming come from irresponsible employment of technology, not technology itself."

Sure, there's no mandate that technology has to make things either better or worse. But it's safe to say that irresponsible use is guaranteed. The question is whether we can find and implement enough responsible uses to tip the balance.

The more powerful a technology is, the more important it is to balance or avert - not just the sum total of positive and negative - but each and every of the negatives that's unacceptably catastrophic.

Molecular manufacturing is one of the most powerful technologies I can imagine. It can lead to many outcomes that are unacceptably catastrophic. CRN exists to get people working on how to avoid the catastrophic outcomes of molecular manufacturing.

Of course, molecular manufacturing will also have beneficial outcomes. I'm happy to talk about them as well. Many of those beneficial outcomes will happen by themselves, and others will be promoted by a variety of organizations. But there's no guarantee, and indeed it will often not be the case, that the positives and the negatives neatly match up by themselves. Without deliberate and careful work on avoiding the negatives, molecular manufacturing is easily powerful enough to create unthinkable disaster.

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