Responsible Nanotechnology

CRN goes "Off Broadway"

Looking for fun today (Saturday, April 30) in or around New York City? Check out the 3:00 PM matinee performance of Happy Hour at The Event Horizon at Blue Heron Arts Center in Manhattan.

Here is what you can expect:

An electron, a proton and a neutron walk into a bar...

It's always Happy Hour at The Event Horizon, a bar at the edge of a black hole where legendary scientific mixologists Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr pass infinite good times with their loyal patrons. Particles collide, customers perform experiments with shot glasses and ashtrays, and the laws of physics come home to roost.

Regulars at this establishment include a photon that has daringly escaped from a black hole, the oldest galaxy in the universe who imparts the wisdom of her age, and a gaggle of theories that challenge one another to pub games to determine which one will prevail.

After the show, which is around 90 minutes, I will be part of a panel discussion on "Science in the Media." We'll discuss how science is treated -- and ought to be treated -- in news and entertainment media. My focus will be on increasing public appreciation of the real risks and benefits of emerging technologies, especially nanotechnology.

Hope to see you there!

Mike Treder

Changing Times

He's a brainy guy, that Marshall Brain. In addition to being founder of How Stuff Works and author of the well-known Robotic Nation essay series, he also writes a blog filled with cool stuff about robotics.

That's where I found an interesting entry called "What can change in 25 years?"

To illustrate his point, Brain uses images of a Pacman game from 1980 and a current video game from 2005. As you can imagine, there's no comparison. In addition, he shows an illustration of a slow, bulky computer from 1979.

How much change could science and technology bring between 2005 and 2030? What impacts will advanced nanotechnology have on who we are and how we live in the next 25 years? Will the intersection of robotics and manufacturing create a better world, or will lack of preparedness lead to disaster? What can we do today to change the future?

Mike Treder

Science Misinformation

Nanotechnology: No problem? Don't worry, be positive? Nothing dangerous about it?

If you listen to UK's current Science Minister, plus two others vying for his position, evidently that's what you'll hear.

The Guardian asked Minister David Sainsbury (Labour), and rival candidates Robert Key (Conservative) and Evan Harris (Liberal Democrat), a series of questions about scientific issues and science policy, including one about nanotech. You can read the whole article here, but for our purposes, we'll just report how each of them responded to this query:

How will you stop Nanotechnology becoming another farce like GM food?

Sainsbury: Early on in the development of technology, you need a dialogue between scientists and the public, which really looks at whether there are any ethical, safety, health or environmental problems which might arise, so you can look at the regulatory environment and see whether it's capable of dealing with the new technology or whether changes need to be made. With nanotechnology, we asked the Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering to produce a report on whether there were any implications and we've now responded to that. We're drawing up a programme of research to check out whether there are any problems in one or two of the areas where we just don't know enough.

Sounds like a politician, doesn't he? Given what we've heard from him before, though, we shouldn't be too surprised by this non-answer.

Oh, well, let's see how the others did.

How will you stop Nanotechnology becoming another farce like GM food?

Key: You can't prevent it, and when we get people talking about grey goo it makes it more difficult, but it is articulating a very genuine fear and misunderstanding of what it is all about. It goes back to science education in schools and to the media having a responsibility to expose these arguments and explore them so the public can understand them. Nanotechnology has the most wonderful potential for not only human economic gain, but for human health as well, for the delivery of designer drugs which would benefit an enormous number of people, yet people are frightened of it. It's an everyday thing, nanotechnology. It has been going on for decades. It's not something to be frightened of, it's something to understand and be positive about.

Um, you can't prevent what -- grey goo? nanotechnology? a farce? It's not at all clear what he's talking about.

Also, while we agree that nanotech has wonderful potential for human gain, should be better understood, and need not be unreasonably feared, it's not enough to simply tell people they should stop fretting and be positive.

"Don't worry, be happy" may be typical political palaver, but the serious implications of molecular manufacturing deserve -- no, demand -- a more considered response than that.

Next?

How will you stop Nanotechnology becoming another farce like GM food?

Harris: There's a role for government and opinion leaders to take issue with people, even if they are the heir to the throne. The idea of grey goo has been comprehensively dismissed, which is why it is probably only found in the upper echelons of the royal family. We have to be more proactive in dealing with the scare stories. We need to make sure we educate people as to the potential benefits and indeed the downsides, though it's difficult to see what the danger of nanotechnology per se is.

This is even worse. To suggest that nanotech poses no risk at all is just plain irresponsible.

Mr. Harris -- in fact, all three gentlemen -- could use some education of their own about the real dangers of advanced nanotechnology.

Yes, there are wonderful potential benefits, and we concur that scare stories about grey goo aren't necessary. But any person who holds or seeks a position of responsibility for science policy needs a deeper understanding than that. Misinforming the public about such grave issues, whether through ignorance or by equivocation, is intolerable.

Mike Treder

System of Global Management

Whenever we say anything good about the United Nations or suggest that the U.N. might be part of a plan for safe, responsible development and use of advanced nanotechnology, we receive shrill comments from readers. Some cast doubts on the efficacy of the U.N., some point to its alleged corruption, and others question its very need for existence.

On the other hand, the U.N. currently is the only functioning pan-national body with the necessary reach (if not the authority) to serve as a platform for organizing cooperative international administration of molecular manufacturing (MM). Whether or not such an administration is needed, desirable, or even possible is still open to debate, of course.

Along these lines, it's interesting to read this opinion about the U.N.:

The United Nations is not a popularly elected world government; it isn't even a collection of well-meaning people who just want peace. It is a group of different agencies with different agendas, some of which are relatively effective and some of which are ineffective or even dangerous. The United Nations provides the relief workers who are coordinating international aid for tsunami victims, and people delivering aid and democracy assistance in Afghanistan. The U.N. umbrella includes critical agencies such as the World Health Organization, whose work to prevent another flu pandemic could save millions of lives.

That's columnist Anne Applebaum writing in the Washington Post. She also says:

Infamously, the United Nations has lately been implicated in a vast and tangled scandal, the oil-for-food scam. It was not the only culprit -- dozens of governments, including ours, knew of, or even cooperated with, smuggling in Iraq -- but unfortunately this corruption is part of a larger pattern. Financial scandals plagued U.N. operations in Cambodia. Trafficking scandals plagued U.N. operations in Kosovo. What the world body spends on pointless conferences and unnecessary publications would feed many, many children in Africa.

I especially like this part:

But if the United Nations isn't good in and of itself, neither is it evil. It is only as good or bad as its employees, all political appointees whose activities are, by ordinary government or business standards, subjected to shockingly little oversight. Unlike, say, the U.S. civil service, or the Japanese bureaucracy, the U.N. bureaucracy is not beholden to a democratic government or even a sovereign government. There is no electorate that can toss the Libyans out of the human rights commissioner's chair, no judicial system that can try corrupt officials. . .

The trouble with many U.N. defenders is that they refuse to see this fundamental problem, and demand a constantly expanding role for the United Nations without explaining how its lack of democratic accountability is to be addressed. The trouble with many U.N. detractors, in Congress and elsewhere, is that they see the corruption and nothing else. But there is a role for U.N. institutions -- in Afghanistan, or in international health -- as long as that role is limited in time and cost.

If a consensus arises in favor of some system of global MM management, then either an existing organization will have to be charged with that duty, or an entirely new body will need to be created. CRN has been unable to identify any existing institution presently capable of performing this critical function. We think something new will be needed, although we can't say for sure yet how -- or even whether -- this can be accomplished. If it cannot, we fear the worst.

You may or not agree with Ms. Applebaum's final conclusion, but her objective appraisal of the U.N.'s usefulness and limitations does illuminate the challenges and pitfalls of developing a wholly new organization.

My point here is not to defend the U.N. but to show that we might have to start somewhere. Learning how the U.N. works (or doesn't work), and what its strengths and flaws are, could help in deciding what sort of pan-national administrative structure would suffice to ensure safe, responsible development and use of advanced nanotechnology.

Mike Treder

Search for Solutions

An interesting -- and potentially quite important -- debate on "global administration of advanced nanotechnology" got underway on the Wise-Nano.org site last fall.

Sooner or later, this question will demand an answer. Probably sooner.

CRN expects that improved understanding of the steps required to achieve general-purpose molecular manufacturing, together with growing recognition of its disruptive nature and severe societal and environmental implications, is likely to trigger a public debate about the need for global administration within the next few years.

It is wise, then, for people who already have a reasonably clear understanding of the issues involved to begin exploring all the alternatives and the SWOT -- Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats -- presented by various proposed approaches.

Mike Treder

Global Nanotech Leaders

Chinese researchers are second in the world in nanotechnology, according to an unpublished report by a Dutch-Chinese research team.

This is from a story on SciDevNet.

The study compared the research positions of several countries and regions, including the United States, the European Union, China and South Korea, in terms of the number of papers published in nanotechnology journals.

The unpublished version of the report, which has been submitted to the journal Research Policy, has been posted on the website of research leader Loet Leydesdorff of the Amsterdam School of Communications Research.

In addition:

The findings loosely corroborate the conclusions of a report the US President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) is preparing.

According to the Washington Post, a preview of the PCAST findings shows that Europe and Asia are gaining fast on the US lead in the field. The document ... reportedly shows that the US government's 2004 funding lead in nanotechnology was only slightly ahead of China, Europe and Japan: while the US government spent US$1 billion on nanotechnology research the other three each spent about US$900 million.

On the other hand:

Leydesdorff and co-author Ping Zhou measured the contribution of Chinese researchers to global research in nanotechnology by assessing the number of papers they published in specialist journals.

The authors found that in 2004, Chinese authors contributed ten per cent of papers to these journals, placing them second behind US researchers. With nearly 50 per cent of papers, however, the United States was a clear leader.

In the abstract of their paper, Leydesdorff and Zhou write:

Within only five years, China has become the fifth leading nation in terms of its share of the world’s scientific publications. The citation rate of papers with a Chinese address for the corresponding author also exhibits exponential growth. More specifically, China has become a major player in critical technologies like nanotechnology. Although it is difficult to delineate nanoscience and nanotechnology, we show that China has recently achieved a position second only to that of the USA. Funding for R&D has been growing exponentially... Because of the sustained increase in Chinese government funding and the virtually unlimited reservoir of highly-skilled human resources, one may expect a continuation of this exponential growth pattern in the near future.

Will this "exponential growth pattern" of research and development in China make it more likely that molecular manufacturing will emerge there first, instead of in the U.S.? That is one possible conclusion.

Considering the potential for military force multiplication offered by advanced nanotechnology, the dangerously unstable nature of a nano arms race and the foreseeable temptation to make a premptive first strike, the emergence of China as a major player in the field (which is not unexpected) should be cause for concern.

In CRN's view, this increases the urgency for international dialogue that could lead to peaceful, cooperative development and administration of molecular manufacturing.

Mike Treder

Information Revolution

Blogging is making a difference. Uniting communities. Spreading ideas. Worldchanging.

All this has not escaped the attention of BusinessWeek, which made blogging its cover story this week.

Here is some of what they say, in a long, meandering, but stimulating article:

How big are blogs? Try Johannes Gutenberg out for size. His printing press, unveiled in 1440, sparked a publishing boom and an information revolution. Some say it led to the Protestant Reformation and Western democracy. Along the way, societies established the rights and rules of the game for the privileged few who could afford to buy printing presses and grind forests into paper.

The printing press set the model for mass media. A lucky handful owns the publishing machinery and controls the information. Whether at newspapers or global manufacturing giants, they decide what the masses will learn. . .That's the world of mass media, and the blogs are turning it on its head.

But thanks to blogging...

The divide between the publishers and the public is collapsing. This turns mass media upside down. It creates media of the masses.

How does business change when everyone is a potential publisher? A vast new stretch of the information world opens up. For now, it's a digital hinterland. The laws and norms covering fairness, advertising, and libel? They don't exist, not yet anyway.

Hm, reminds me of what CRN says about nanofactories. How does business (or the economy, or society, or geopolitics--choose your term) change when everyone is a potential manufacturer? Will today's laws and norms covering fairness, security, and privacy still hold sway?

Okay, back to BusinessWeek:

Blogs are different. They evolve with every posting, each one tied to a moment. So if a company can track millions of blogs simultaneously, it gets a heat map of what a growing part of the world is thinking about, minute by minute. E-mail has carried on billions of conversations over the past decade. But those exchanges were private. Most blogs are open to the world. As the bloggers read each other, comment, and link from one page to the next, they create a global conversation.

Pretty cool, huh? Just by reading this blog, and especially by adding your own comments, you are part of a global conversation!

Picture the blog world as the biggest coffeehouse on Earth. Hunched over their laptops at one table sit six or seven experts in nanotechnology. Right across from them are teenage goths dressed in black and thoroughly pierced. Not too many links between those two tables. But the café goes on and on. Saudi women here, Labradoodle lovers there, a huge table of people fooling around with cell phones. Those are the mobile-photo crowd, busily sending camera-phone pictures up to their blogs. . .

Wait a minute. Six or seven experts in nanotechnology have blogs? Well, let's see, there's Howard Lovy, there's Josh Wolfe, there's Nanodot and TNTlog, there's Richard Jones, and then there's us. That's six. Can you think of a seventh?

BusinessWeek concludes:

In a world chock-full of citizen publishers, we mainstream types control an ever-smaller chunk of human knowledge. Some of us will work to draw in more of what the bloggers know, vetting it, editing it, and packaging it into our closed productions. But here's betting that we also forge ahead in the open world. The measure of success in that world is not a finished product. The winners will be those who host the very best conversations.

Speaking of blogs, nanotech-aware journalist Dan Gillmor has started his own weblog focused on "grassroots journalism." It's informative and entertaining, so far, and worth a look every day or two (or an XML feed).

On Gillmor's blog, we read an item about "Why Current Intellectual Property Law is So Wrong-Headed" that points to a Financial Times column written by James Boyle. Here's a taste of Boyle's essay:

Since only about 4 per cent of copyrighted works more than 20 years old are commercially available, this locks up 96 per cent of 20th century culture to benefit 4 per cent. The harm to the public is huge, the benefit to authors, tiny. In any other field, the officials responsible would be fired. Not here.

It is as if we had signed an international stupidity pact, one that required us to ignore the evidence, to hand out new rights without asking for the simplest assessment of need. If the stakes were trivial, no one would care. But intellectual property (IP) is important. These are the ground rules of the information society. Mistakes hurt us. They have costs to free speech, competition, innovation, and science. Why are we making them?

Read the whole thing. Post a comment here about your thoughts. Take part in the worldwide conversation. We're glad you could join us!

Mike Treder

Power and Struggle

Not Necessarily Relevant Quote of the Week:

Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will. — Frederick Douglass

Nano Research Future?

"We now stand at the threshold of an age in which materials and devices can be fashioned atom by atom," said a Democrat on the floor of the [U.S.] House of Representatives.

Nanotechnology is a "bottom-up approach much like building a sculpture atom by atom and molecule by molecule instead of cutting it from a larger rock," said a Republican Senator.

They were describing an area of advanced nanotechnology called molecular manufacturing. Clearly, Congress desired at least some federal funding to be spent on pursuing molecular manufacturing, but instead virtually all of it has gone into far more mundane nanoscale research. The research the government is presently funding will lead to useful progress in several fields, but molecular manufacturing could lead to revolutionary breakthroughs in production, medicine, aerospace, and more.

An editorial in the current issue of The New Atlantis, from which the above is taken, describes what they see as a "discrepancy between what Congress expects and what federal funds in fact support."

In reviewing the activities of a U.S. National Research Council committee tasked to evaluate the goals and progress of the NNI, the editorial says...

It is our hope that the committee will offer a clear analysis of the technical potential of molecular manufacturing, and a clear recommendation on whether federal nanotechnology funds should be allocated toward theoretical and practical research into molecular manufacturing.

CRN believes that any serious, unbiased investigation into the steps required to move from today's nanoscale technologies to exponential general-purpose molecular manufacturing will conclude that the matter raises serious implications, and that actions heretofore ignored should be undertaken with urgency. By that, we mean a well-funded, dedicated program of inquiry something like our Thirty Essential Studies.

We hope the NRC committee will agree, and that their recommendation will spur similar -- or, better yet, coordinated -- actions from other major governmental and civil society organizations around the world.

Nanotechnology and the Singularity

How soon do you expect integrated, exponential, general-purpose molecular manufacturing (MM) to be developed? Will it take place before artificial general intelligence (AGI) is achieved? Or will the robust power of AGI be required to make MM attainable?

These questions have been debated from time to time on this blog, but now someone with considerable expertise in the field of artificial intelligence has made a rather startling pronouncement.

In this week's edition of NewScientist, Doug Lenat of Cycorp, creator of the "Cyc" system, says, "I believe we are heading towards a singularity and we will see it in less than 10 years."

Lenat makes this bold prediction based on the progress his system has made towards achieving human-level common sense. The Cyc system now contains some 3 million "assertions," or statements of fact contained within logical clauses.

Impressive as that is, sheer numbers are not the point. "We are not trying to maximise the number of assertions," Lenat says. Rather, he wants to limit them to the bare minimum that will allow Cyc to collect data on its own. He says Cyc is getting close to achieving that number, and it is already advanced enough to query each input itself, asking the human operator to clarify exactly what is meant.

Sometime this year it will be let loose onto the web, allowing millions of people to contribute to its fund of knowledge by submitting questions to Cyc through a web page and correcting it if it gets the answers wrong. "We're very close to a system that will allow the average person to enter knowledge," Lenat says. He envisages Cyc eventually being connected to webcams and other sensors monitoring environments around the globe, building its knowledge of the world more or less by itself.

Of course, we've heard predictions before about how quickly superhuman artificial intelligence would arise and how significant its impact would be, i.e., the Singularity.

We're not experts on AGI, and so we can't say how soon, if ever, human-equivalent cognition will be achieved on a synthetic brain. But we are experts on advanced nanotechnology, and we do feel safe in stating that integrated, exponential, general-purpose molecular manufacturing is likely to be developed within the next ten years.

Indeed, the more we learn about progress being made in enabling technologies, and the more we study and refine basic MM theory, the more clear it becomes that we don't have much time.

Will MM come first? Or will AGI precede MM and trigger a technological singularity? Only time will tell, obviously. But whether or not smarter-than-human intelligence is just around the corner, the anticipated societal and environmental impacts of molecular manufacturing are potentially so disruptive that we cannot afford a "wait and see" attitude.

If MM is developed before the world is prepared to manage it safely and responsibly, the result could be nano-anarchy, nano-tyranny, or something even worse. Devising and implementing wise, comprehensive, and balanced plans for global management of this transformative technology is not just an interesting challenge. It may in fact be a matter of life and death.

Mike Treder