Responsible Nanotechnology

Watching the Watchers

One of the biggest problems that will confront us in the years ahead is the increased ability for surveillance -- both covert and public -- that may be conducted by government agencies, corporate entities, and individuals, benign or otherwise. Molecular manufacturing technology will vastly and rapidly enhance that ability, and privacy will become a central issue in political and ethical debates.

It was refreshing today to read a new and potentially valuable perspective on this subject. Arnold Kling, in a piece on Tech Central Station called "The Constitution of Surveillance", offers an overview of the problem and suggests a solution. His article reflects exactly the kind of creative and rigorous thinking we believe is so important to prepare for the changes that emerging technologies will bring. Like CRN, he may not have all the answers, but at this point, the most important thing any of us can do is begin asking the right questions and proposing possible answers.

A question that comes up after reading his ideas is how they might apply outside the United States. The surveillance management structure he suggests may be useful in this country -- and could be used as a model for others -- but the same technologies it is designed to control also will make it easy for malevolent users to extend their reach across borders. A global solution may be called for.

Russian Kids Doing MNT?

A nanotech blog in Russia has announced a "competition of Russian youth projects on domestic MNT development".

The proposed contest is a project of Nanotech Information Services, Institute of Nanotechnology of International Conversion Fund, and Youth Science Society, all Russian organizations.

The press announcement says: "Future of Russia is not imaginable without high technologies, and without science, technology and business professionals. Molecular nanotechnology development will allow solution of many important national tasks. This direction of high-tech industry opens the way to intensive innovative progress, next technology level of other industries, increase of life quality."

Manufacturing Upheaval

A more cost-effective method of manufacturing microchips will gradually replace multi-billion-dollar foundries with table-top boxes, marking the end of the silicon era and the potential death of many factory-floor jobs. This was the message from Douglas Mulhall, author of Our Molecular Future (and member of CRN's Board of Advisors), at a recent IT conference in Canada.

"We now see hundreds of companies around the world manufacturing products by printing them three dimensionally. It looks like this technology will become as common as bubble-jet printing technology is now," said Mulhall.

Jay Myers, chief economist of the Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters, agreed that "nanotechnology is a huge disruptive technology that will replace the existing manufacturing process."

Read the full story here. And read more about the transformative and potentially disruptive economic effects of molecular manufacturing here.

Barriers are Coming Down

Seems like every day, there's a new discovery of something that brings molecular manufacturing closer: a new molecular motor, a new imaging technique, a new small size record for lithography...

For more than a decade, Chris Phoenix (CRN's Director of Research) has periodically been estimating the financial and technical difficulty of developing molecular manufacturing. He's recently detected a pattern: like the cost of computers, his estimate of development cost has been falling by half every 2-3 years. That means that if developing molecular manufacturing would cost $1 billion today, by 2020 it could cost less than $10 million.

If a crash development program were funded today, how long would it take to succeed? At a guess, the shortest time is five years: a year to get off the ground and do preliminary studies, a year to get research under way and find early problems, two years of all-nighters in the lab, and a final year to put the pieces together. Design software could be written in parallel, enabling the rapid development of products. This is a very aggressive schedule, but the Manhattan Project took only three years.

How much would it actually cost? At this point, there's no way to know for sure. Two years ago, Chris thought that it would take 10,000 researchers to do it in five years. Now he thinks perhaps as few as 1,000-2,000 could do it. Progress has been that rapid!

At this point, the main barrier is conceptual, not financial or scientific. Someone will develop it -- may already be working on it -- while most other people remain clueless and unprepared. This seems dangerous. CRN’s job is to raise awareness of the possibilities. Who do you think most needs to know about this? What can you do to inform them?

Wll Kerry/Bush Talk Nano?

Terrorism... Jobs... Taxes... Credibility...

These are likely to be the main issues debated by candidates Kerry and Bush, and their supporters or detractors, in the 2004 U.S. Presidential election. All are important topics, of course, but CRN believes that nanotechnology and its socially disruptive consequence, molecular manufacturing, also should be on the agenda.

Full-scale molecular manufacturing might be developed within the next two Presidential terms (by 2012). That could have implications for the economy and for national security far beyond any other issue of this campaign.

If Bush or Kerry challenged each other on U.S. preparation for molecular manufacturing, would you switch channels or would you pay attention? In this election year, does CRN have any hope of making nanotechnology a public issue, or should we wait until after the election?

Tell us what you think.

Come Together

When we set up CRN's main website in January 2003, we wrote:

We do not currently plan to maintain a membership. Membership has some benefits—we get to brag to politicians about how many members we have, and we get to charge you money, and you probably get some perks. But for now we don't want the hassle. If you really want to be a member, tell us why membership is good; if you convince us, we'll announce it on the mailing list.

Fifteen months later, in our March newsletter published yesterday, we wrote:

CRN has never been a membership organization. But recently we have been talking about whether and, if so, how to change that. Several options have come up, including paid membership, voluntary sponsorship or donations (though people can already donate), and a statement of Nanotech Responsibility that people or groups could sign in a show of support to CRN. Which of these options would you want to participate in?

What's happened is that we have had a number of requests over the last several weeks from people asking about joining CRN. So we are thinking that membership/participation is an idea whose time has come, but we're not sure yet what model will work best. Any thoughts?

Fear of Nanotech

We've written about this before, but it's worth bringing up again.

The idea that the nano establishment in the United States, namely the NNI and the NanoBusiness Alliance, is out of step won't seem to go away. Yesterday, the latest of many commentaries on the subject was published, this one from US News columnist Jim Pethokoukis. Here is a bit of it:

Last December, President Bush signed a bill -- the 21st-Century Nanotech Research and Development Act -- that will provide $3.7 billion to nanotechnology projects over four years. But the legislation seems to be getting more attention for what it does not fund than for what it does. In particular, it fails to fund a study examining the feasibility of "nanobots" -- molecule-size robotic devices that would position atoms and molecules to build complex substances and products from the bottom up in a process called molecular manufacturing.

At one point as the bill was working its way through Congress, it seemed that a feasibility study would be included, but in the end the government defined nanotech in a more conventional way -- such as creating nanosize particles (found now in stain-resistant pants, longer-lasting tennis balls, and deeper-penetrating skin creams) or using chip-making tools to make nanosize etchings on computer semiconductors. And Mihail Roco, director of the government's National Nanotechnology Initiative, has been publicly dismissive of molecular manufacturing and nanobots, as has the NanoBusiness Alliance, a trade group.

Pethokoukis passes along one theory:

Government and business fret that any talk of nanobots would conjure up the Magician's Apprentice scenario (in which tiny, replicating machines get out of control and cover the Earth). That could raise the odds that environmental groups would attack nanotechnology just as they have attacked genetically modified plants and foods.

Read the full column here.

Once again, CRN will state our contention that not talking seriously about the risks and not studying them is pure folly -- counterproductive, to say the least. We only hope that leadership in American business and government soon will see the value in taking a new direction...before it's too late.

Nano Product Design

Responding to the previous post about the "tidal wave of change" that a sea of new nanotech designers might bring, blog reader Brett Bellmore wrote:

Would your proposed regulatory regime REALLY let everyone be a designer? ... I can't imagine the uber-regulators letting people just design and make things, and then trade the designs. They'd want to at least review the plans, and unless they had AIs available by the millions, that would be quite a bottleneck.

Here is how CRN addressed that issue in our paper on "Safe Utilization of Advanced Nanotechnology":

Rapid innovation is a key benefit of nanotechnology. The rapid and flexible manufacturing process allows a design to be built and tested almost immediately. Because designers of nano-built products do not have to do any actual nanotechnology research, a high level of innovation can be accommodated without giving designers any access to dangerous kinds of products.

[A] design with billion-atom, sub-micron blocks—permitting specification of near-biological levels of complexity—would still pose no risk of illicit self-replication. The minimum building block size in a design could be restricted by the design system. A fully automated evaluation and approval process could also consider the energy and power contained in the design, its mechanical integrity, and the amount of computer power built in. The block-based design system provides a simple interface to the block-based convergent assembly system. A variety of design systems could be implemented using the same nanofactory hardware, and the designer would not have to become an expert on the process of construction to create buildable designs.

With a safe-design nanofactory, adults—and even children—could safely play with advanced robotics, inventing and constructing almost anything they could imagine. (Today, adults as well as children find it worthwhile to play with the Lego MindStorms™ system.) More powerful products would require an engineering certification. This could be given to any responsible adult, since even a malicious product engineer would be unable to bypass the factory's programming and cause it to make illicit fabricators. A product that included chemical or nanomechanical manipulation ability would have to be carefully controlled, even during the design phase, to prevent the designer from building something that could be used for illicit nanomanufacturing.

Risks and dangers associated with products could be assessed on a per-product basis. Many products, produced with simplified design kits, could be approved with only automated analysis of their design. Most others could be approved after a safety and efficacy assessment similar to today's approval processes. Only rarely would a new degree of nanotechnological functionality be required, so each case could be carefully assessed before the functionality was added to appropriately restricted design programs.

Product approval for worldwide availability could depend on any of several factors. First, unless designed with a child-safe design program, it could be evaluated for engineering safety. Second, if the design incorporated intellectual property, the owner of the property could specify licensing terms. Third, local jurisdictional restrictions could be imposed, tagging the file according to where it could and could not be manufactured. Finally, the design would be placed in the global catalog, available for anyone to use.

We'd be very interested in serious critiques and/or alternative proposals. Thanks!

A Tidal Wave of Change

Before a tidal wave strikes, another dramatic event—usually an earthquake or major landslide—must occur to trigger it. The first generation of products to come out of nanofactories—inexpensive but high quality clothing, furniture, electronics, household appliances, building supplies, medical devices, and more—may be like that: a powerful landslide of change, but only a portent of the gigantic wave that is to follow.

Most of these early products probably will be similar to what are current at the time nanofactories begin production. Because they are built by molecular manufacturing, with every atom precisely placed, they will be better in every way—stronger, lighter, cheaper—but they still will be based on existing models.

The world-changing shock wave will hit when we realize that we no longer need be restricted to existing models. Not when a supercomputer smaller than a grain of sand can be integrated into any product. And not when people everywhere—young, old, male, female, technical, nontechnical, practical, artistic, and whimsical—will have the opportunity to be designers.

Within months, conceivably, even the most up-to-date appliances, machines, communication media, and other electronics will be outmoded. Imagine embedding "smart" gadgetry into everything you own or might want to have. Demand for these new products will be intense. The cost of manufacturing them may be almost negligible.

It becomes impossible to predict what might be devised then. The intelligent components and easy design systems of the nanotech revolution will rewrite the rules.

NanoHumor

My favorite weekly news source has a special "Infograph" this week on Nanotechnology. It lists eight exciting applications, including this one:

By altering earth's atmosphere on the microscopic level, nanotechnologists can turn whole world into delicious ice-cream wonderland.

Check out the complete list here.