Responsible Nanotechnology

Embedded Security

Because uncontrolled molecular manufacturing (MM) could be quite dangerous, the best solution appears to be careful and comprehensive administration of advanced nanotechnology, including some mandatory restrictions. Fortunately, the same features that make MM dangerous also allow the implementation of several kinds of technological restriction that may form useful components of an overall administration program.

Products that might be adapted for unauthorized molecular manufacturing pose a serious threat to nanotech security. Other products pose other kinds of threats, and additional restriction will probably be desirable. Still, many products, once approved, could be built freely—and for some classes of products, approval should be a rapid and automated process. Nano-built functionality will be amazingly compact: a supercomputer could fit inside a grain of sand. This allows a human-scale product, such as a tabletop nanofactory, to include dedicated security or monitoring hardware. Massive computer power can help with several other problems, including privacy-safe surveillance and patent reform.

If you've studied CRN's research to any significant degree, it should be clear by now that no simple solution will work—any effective solution must be multifaceted. Technological capabilities and restrictions deserve special attention because of the unprecedented power and compactness of the technology. This power and compactness is what makes nano-built products so dangerous. However, it also allows the design and use of very small security devices. Surveillance and/or restrictive devices can be integrated into many products of MM, including nanofactories. On our main website, we describe a system called Embedded Security Management for applying flexible controls at the most effective points.

Before raising objections, please read at least this whole page, including the "Devil's Advocate" questions and answers at the bottom. It's vital that such discussions move forward in a constructive way, because time may not be on our side. You can contribute most effectively by first developing a thorough understanding of the issues, the proposed solutions, and the complex interactions between them.

Nanotechnology in Taiwan

According to Taiwan's Central News Agency:

Taiwan authorities are planning to spend NT$21.5 billion (US$663.27 million) over six years on a national project to develop the nanotechnology and relevant industries, Vice President Annette Lu said Thursday.

Addressing the 2004 Taiwan Chemical Technology Forum at the Taipei International Convention Center, Lu said the goal of the project is to create an output value of NT$300 billion in the nanotechnology industry by 2008, with more than 800 companies in the business, while by 2012, the output will expand to NT$1 trillion, with over 1,500 companies in the sector. The project is expected to help local industries to upgrade or transform and to further sharpen Taiwan's national competitiveness, she noted.

In her speech, the vice president pointed out that Taiwan is now in good shape in terms of technological development compared with other countries in the world, quoting the 2004 global competitiveness report of the Switzerland-based World Economic Forum, which put Taiwan in first place in Asia and second in the world in terms of national competitiveness in technological manufacture and research.

Does this mean that Taiwan is preparing to develop molecular manufacturing? Not necessarily, since indications are that these funds will focus first on nanomaterials. But the project could go a long way toward positioning the small island nation as a serious contender, since they will be making great strides in enabling technologies.

Mike Treder

Enabling Technologies

Progress is moving forward rapidly in many fields that may contribute to molecular manufacturing. What we're witnessing is the surprisingly fast filling of the nanoscale toolbox.

Here's a report from CNSI, a joint enterprise between UCLA and UC Santa Barbara, about molecular electronics. It's not only that the work they are doing is quite impressive, but also what they see in the future.

"Dreams I was having less than a decade ago are becoming a reality in our labs," said UCLA's Fraser Stoddart, whose areas of expertise include nanoelectronics, mechanically interlocked molecules, molecular machines, molecular nanotechnology, molecular self-assembly processes and molecular recognition, among many other fields of chemistry. . .

CNSI [researchers are] exploring the power and potential of organizing and manipulating matter atom-by-atom, molecule-by-molecule, to engineer "new devices and systems that will extend the scope of many existing technologies and foster commercial development far beyond anything we might have contemplated up until now," Stoddart said.

Wow, don't blink!

World Politics and Nanotechnology

To analyze policy options for administration of molecular manufacturing, it's necessary to predict the future, or at least to make an educated guess about likely geopolitical conditions a decade or so from now.

Until now, CRN has generally assumed that the United States will maintain a dominant position of strength, both militarily and economically. Now, however, some analysts are pointing to an emerging "tendency toward a multipolar configuration of world politics, in which a number of regional power centers compete for hegemony over their spheres of influence..."

This quote is from "Testing the Currents of Multipolarity", an essay in the current edition of The Power and Interest News Report.

The transition to multipolarity -- if it prevails -- has been set off by the severe problems confronted by the United States in its occupation of Iraq and by the decline of the dollar in international currency markets. The former has revealed the limitations and vulnerabilities of U.S. military power and the latter has brought forward underlying weaknesses in the U.S. economic system that are symbolized by persistent trade and budget deficits, and are rooted in changes in the world balance of economic power.

At present, the U.S. has lost the position that it was perceived to have after the fall of the Soviet Union as the undisputed global superpower presiding over an economic order integrating a world of market democracies. Contemporary global politics are structured primarily by a struggle of regional powers to assert themselves against efforts by Washington to reclaim at least some of its dominance.

What does this mean for CRN? Nothing immediately. But it bears watching, because if these currents remain strong, the task of proposing effective and acceptable solutions for managing the power of nanotechnology may require new thinking.

Mike Treder

Planning Ahead

In early November, CRN's Chris Phoenix wrote a blog entry saying, "In a sense, we'll be reinventing ourselves over the next few months..."

At the time, I thought that might have been overstating the case a little bit. But the fact is that we are making plans and changes to significantly alter how we are organized and the way we try to have an impact.

The most notable change, from the outside, will be our offering of two-day Nano-Workshops, designed to educate interested groups of people about the impending impacts of molecular manufacturing, to assess how it may affect them and their organizations, and to guide them in deciding what they might do about it.

A second offering will be CRN's Nano-Workbooks, published separately from the workshops, and aimed at assisting individuals and self-guided groups to learn about various options for wise management of this powerful new technology, and to empower them to take part in the process. These workbooks will be published as pages on Wise-Nano, and will also be available for download in PDF format, or may be purchased as bound volumes.

Behind the scenes, we will aggressively develop a network of volunteers to assist us in this vital endeavor. We will soon begin recruiting individuals to work in specific areas of activity, including the publication of our monthly C-R-Newsletter and our quarterly Responsible Nanotechnology Report, to serve as Topic Trackers (more on that in days to come), and to help with general bookkeeping and paperwork. If you'd like to take part, but have not yet signed up as a member of the C-R-Network, today would be a good time to do that!

Because Chris and I are now both working full-time for CRN, we have a pressing need to find sustainable means of financial support. Most of our new projects are aimed at achieving that, although our commitment is always to responsibly share what we know, whether or not it pays.

This month marks the second anniversary of CRN's founding in December 2002. Thanks to all of you reading this blog, and many other people around the world, we enter our third year excited about new possibilities for collaboration and genuine progress toward a world in which molecular manufacturing is widely used for productive and beneficial purposes, and where malicious uses are limited by effective administration of the technology.

Mike Treder, Executive Director

Wisdom isn't easy

I'll start by quoting a comment that "John B" wrote in the "Massive Change" thread:

However, this is besides the point. We have here a small group of very intelligent, coherent posters, who're quite familiar with the technology's concepts and who all mostly agree that it's coming.

Yet we can't agree on how to safely use it. Astounding.

The appropriate use and administration of immensely powerful technology will be very difficult. Those who are trying to come up with workable plans will need to examine all the options--and examine themselves.

Last night I got an important insight into a running argument I've had with Janessa over whether international administration can be part of a solution. I was responding to a discussion on Wise-Nano. Matt had posted a page "Law enforcement by AI" recommending that an "AI" be installed in people's spines, able to watch their actions and disable their muscles temporarily if they started to do something dangerous and illegal.

The proposal made me itch, and I responded rather sharply. Matt objected to my response, and I started to write a clearer explanation. I wrote:

If you ask the question, "Do we know how to do Step 1 [invent a superintelligence]? Is it something we can use as a plan?" Then I'd simply give the answer, "No, we have no clue how to do it or when it might be achieved. We can't count on it as a solution." The other problem is that Step 1 is likely to go wrong. If you ask, "If we tried to invent a safe superintelligence for the purpose of giving it intimate control over our lives, what's the chance we'd get it wrong and create a very icky situation?" My first reaction is, "We'd be babies playing with fire."

Then I noticed that this was very close to Janessa's argument against international administration. Do we know how to invent an international adminstration? Is it something we can use as a plan? Could we invent a safe administration and give it intimate control over our lives, or would we be likely to get it wrong and create a very icky situation?

Even the tone of my original response to Matt--You have no idea what you're talking about; even the proposal is dangerous because someone might think it meant something--is rather reminiscent of Janessa's tone on occasion.

I now have a lot more sympathy for Janessa's position.

Janessa and I both live in a country that was invented, and got it pretty darn close to right. Not perfect, by a long shot. But good enough to self-correct. We survived the Alien and Sedition Acts, the Civil War, and McCarthyism, among many others. We will survive Abu Ghraib.

But we also live in a world where the League of Nations failed, and the United Nations is frequently ignored by the world's most powerful country and distrusted by many of its citizens.

Unlike superintelligence, we do know something about governance. We know that "Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried." We know that separation of powers seems to work pretty well at providing checks and balances. We know that good governments can be invented, but it's hard to get it right.

What I wrote to Matt is at least partly applicable to CRN's call for international administration. "Without even the sketchiest architecture for this "AI," there's no way to evaluate what its effects will be or how reliably it will work. This is not yet a proposal, just a wish." But there is at least the beginnings of an architecture, in our Three Systems paper. Is it enough? No. Is it a good start? Maybe.

Should CRN be advocating an international administration at this point? It's a good question. The only excuse for proposing it even before it's defined is if 1) it would happen anyway, and it's better to try to guide it than let it develop unguided; or 2) not having some kind of coordinated administration would be intolerably destructive. It seems to me that 2) is the case; Tom Craver is making a good argument against that, but so far I have to disagree with him. And if we don't have an effective international administration, it seems likely that some powerful nation will feel that it can't be safe as long as people outside its influence have molecular manufacturing--and will create a global control-freak empire, which is likely to be worse (even for its own citizens) than a planned special-purpose administration.

These arguments should continue.

Chris

Real Robots

Now you can buy robot vacuum cleaners, robot pets, robot pet-minders, and even fish-shaped robots (for your underwater archeological research), not to mention specialized robots for explosive ordnance disposal. Um, that last one is presumably disposable.

But wait, that's not all! Make sure you add bloodstream robots to your gift list this holiday season.

A microscopic swimming robot unveiled by Chinese scientists could eventually be used for drug delivery or to clear arteries in humans, say researchers.

The 3 millimetre-long triangular machine was constructed by Tao Mei of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, and colleagues from the University of Science and Technology of China.

The craft is propelled using an external magnetic field which controls its microscopic fins. The fins are made from an alloy that contracts in response to application of the field. Applying the field quickly makes the tiny submersible paddle forwards and gradually switching the field off slowly moves the fins back to their original position.

It is possible to control the speed of the craft by altering the resonant frequency of the magnetic field. The next stage is to build a robot with fins that respond to different magnetic field resonances. This would enable an operator to control the fin separately and steer the robot around.

Okay, at 3 mm, it's not quite small enough for your blood vessels yet, but that may not be far away...

So far the Chinese scientists have tested a swimming device measuring 3mm x 2mm x 0.4mm but are working a new model just 1 mm long.

"We would like to make a 0.1mm one that could go inside the bloodstream," Mei told New Scientist. "Maybe we can make it even smaller using nanotechnology."

Bloodstream nanobots. One more item that's quickly passing from science fiction into science fact.

16 DEC 04 UPDATE: Asimo has learned to run!

Accelerating Change

Ever watch old movies? There's a film noir series showing now at a repertory theater in New York, and I've enjoyed seeing several of them. One thing I noticed is how much different is the world we live in today. Watching films from the 1930's or 40's is a good way to get a feel for what life was like then, and how much things have changed. In addition to being good entertainment, those movies also serve as documents of a bygone era.

Not only are the hairstyles and clothing different (fedoras!), but it's interesting to see how much technology has changed our world. In those old movies, there's almost no sign of plastic, for instance. There is no fiberglass or formica, no cell phones or PDA's, and certainly no computers. No transistor radios, or cassette tapes, or flourescent lighting. The cars and trucks are big, clunky gas hogs with no seatbelts, airbags, catalytic converters, or GPS systems. There are no microwave ovens, no frost-free refrigerators, virtually no central air conditioning, and almost no television. I could go on and on, but I won't.

I bring all this up to make the point that technology change is a fact of life in our modern society. In fact, it can be argued convincingly that the rate of change is itself accelerating.

Seeing all this, it's not so hard to imagine a similar level of change in the next decade or two. We might not be able to predict exactly how things will be diiferent, but we can say with confidence that the future -- even the near future of 10 or 15 years from now -- will be strikingly different. And we can commit ourselves to learn as much about this change as possible, and to try to prepare wisely for it.

Mike Treder

Down with goo, up with AI!

In the early years of speculation about risks and benefits of nanotechnology, a primary concern was so-called gray goo, hypothetical runaway self-replicating nanomachines that could, if unchecked, consume the planet. In more recent years, worries about such goo have receded, at least among the cognoscenti, and have been replaced by other fears.

Today, CRN and other investigators are more prone to highlight the danger of a nano-fueled arms race, which could be unstable and spiral out of control. Other issues of concern include environmental damage caused by overproduction of cheap products, ill-considered massive engineering projects with unforeseen disastrous consequences, social disruption from ubiquitous intrusive surveillance, and economic upheavals from the nearly overnight collapse of numerous industries. All of these are worthy of study today and perhaps of action at an appropriate time.

Another danger which has not received much attention, at least outside of a limited circle, is the possibility of runaway artificial intelligence. The projected ability of molecular manufacturing to build supercomputers smaller than a grain of sand, and to enable networking of these vastly powerful computers, could provide a substrate for a recursively self-improving "intelligent" software product. In theory, if this potentially smarter-than-human AI was not designed carefully in the first place, it might go off in a direction unfriendly to humans, or even to human existence.

This AI worry is one that sounds so much like science fiction that CRN has been reluctant to discuss it. However, as Stephen Hawking has said, "Today's science fiction is often tomorrow's science fact." We don't yet have an answer to this perplexing problem; indeed, no one has. But it surely must be added to the list of matters to be studied diligently as we head into the nano era.

Mike Treder

Science, Power, and Nanotechnology

The following is a warning we've heard before. I'm quoting extensively because the points are made so well. Then I'll place it in the context of CRN's concerns regarding responsible nanotechnology.

When Science Flees the U.S., by David Baltimore
(link requires free subscription)

The United States is the richest nation on Earth, the world's biggest beneficiary of the global economy. But will it last?

Not that long ago, the "global economy" meant that routine factory jobs were going overseas. The unions squawked, but others recognized that the U.S. could concentrate on high- value-added commerce: discovery, innovation, high-technology manufacturing, knowledge-based industries. And we've done very well developing technology and growing our economic base in these areas. . .

But the system is overtaking us. We no longer have a lock on technology. Europe is increasingly competitive, and Asia has the potential to blow us out of the water.

In the last 20 years, many of the students in American universities who majored in the sciences and engineering came from Asia. Today, significant numbers are staying in Asia because the schooling there is so improved, and because we have made it harder to study here. And Asian scientists who have been successful here are returning home. None of this is lost on the governments of, say, India and China, which are putting huge sums into modernizing their science infrastructure and universities.

The proof of their success is the number of U.S. companies opening laboratories in China. Intel and Cisco are leading the way, and many others are seriously looking at the possibility. Wages there are a third of wages here, and some estimate that the cost of employing an engineer in China is as little as a tenth of the cost of employing the same person in the U.S.

Baltimore, a Nobel Prize-winner and president of Caltech University, goes on to decry the declining work ethic, the failure of education, and the lack of U.S. federal leadership. Then he asks:

Now, what are the implications of all this? If technology is done well and more cheaply abroad, we will either have to seriously reduce salaries here or see the technology-intensive jobs go abroad. If technologists continue to be plentiful in foreign countries, wages there will only rise. Demand could fall at home, which would further drive down wages here.

This will have huge implications for our domestic industries as Asians open their own companies. The harbinger is Taiwan, whose citizens we have been training for decades and where many competitive industries already exist. And Taiwan is a small island with only 20 million people. China, an entrepreneurial powerhouse in the formative stages, has 1.3 billion.

So the cascade could begin: If America becomes a less affluent society, we will see a diminution in support for the research that is critical to our future. There are already clouds on the horizon: because of the deficit, federal budgets will get tighter and science funding is likely to suffer. The economic recovery is generating too few jobs. Silicon Valley still has lots of vacant space. The venture capital industry is scared and conservative.

These trends are real. We cannot afford to ignore them. We must think deeply about the realities we face. We need to respond to the newest challenges of globalism. A fortress-America approach will get us nowhere.

From CRN's perspective, there is another, extremely serious implication.

If this trend continues, it is probable that several nations will acquire the technical and financial capability for mounting a successful program to develop molecular manufacturing (MM). In fact, some may already be at that point.

As time goes by, the cost to develop MM will decline sharply, while, at the same time, the American economy may continue to suffer and the American standard of living may fall behind numerous competitors. This will put intense pressure on U.S. leadership. Should it then be discovered that a rival nation is close to achieving -- or has achieved -- a technology breakthrough that will vastly widen the gap, how might America react?

In this scenario, which points only a dozen or so years ahead, the U.S. still possesses by far the world's greatest military capability, both in conventional forces and nuclear arms. The temptation to use that power to protect American interests may be irresistible. And, in the nano era, the consequences of war are terrifying to consider.

This does not have to happen. It might be avoided, but if present trends continue, it seems chillingly plausible. To avert such a disaster, CRN urges a cooperative international program of development for molecular manufacturing, coupled with a treaty arrangement governing responsible global use of advanced nanotechnology.

Mike Treder