Low Nanotech Awareness

SOURCE: Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

A story at Science Daily is headlined "Public Awareness Of Nanotechnology Stuck At Low Level, According To Polls."

National survey findings recently released indicate that Americans' awareness of nanotechnology remains low. Popular awareness is nearly as small as the tiny nanoscale materials and nano-enabled devices and products now flowing onto the market from this rapidly progressing technology that experts believe will usher in a new industrial revolution.

Even with an estimated $50 billion worth of nanotechnology manufactured goods on the global market last year, only 6 percent of Americans -- or fewer than one in 16 -- say they have "heard a lot" about nanotechnology, as compared with 10 percent in 2006. In 2007, 21 percent say they have "heard some" about nanotechnology, unchanged from the previous year. Similarly, as in 2006, about 70 percent of adults say they have heard "just a little" or "nothing at all."

Does this bother me? Actually, no.

In fact, I'm strongly inclined to think that's about how it should be.

As currently defined and generally in use by everyone except a tiny minority (CRN, Foresight, Lifeboat Foundation, etc.), nanotechnology is not of pressing importance. So, when the public is asked about it, and only a few people are aware and the rest apparently shrug their shoulders, I'm neither surprised nor alarmed.

The kind of nanotech being funded by the U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative and researched at places like the Woodrow Wilson Center doesn't merit much more attention than it's already getting.

Environmental activists worry about nanoparticle toxicity and product life cycle assessments, and they should. Reasonable discussions of incremental impacts are taking place at NSF-supported Centers for Nanotechnology in Society -- in Arizona, California, and South Carolina -- and that's fine.

What is not being discussed nearly enough are the transformative and disruptive implications of molecular manufacturing. But that specialty field has been so overshadowed by the big dollars and big hype surrounding today's nanoscale technologies that it might best be treated as something else completely apart from nanotechnology.

The excerpt above from Science Daily makes the common mistake of lumping two things together -- the huge spending on "nanoscale materials and nano-enabled devices and products" with the concept of a "new industrial revolution." But let's be clear: the former is unlikely to lead to the latter.

This conflation of themes and confusion of terms is so acute and so distracting that we at CRN may have to rethink our labeling.

Mike Treder

Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics weblog blog

Comments

[Michael Anissimov]

How often do you guys get invited to talks and are expected to talk about NNI nanotechnology?

[Mike Treder, CRN]

That happens a lot, Michael. Probably more than half the time. Of course, we make it clear what our focus is and sometimes that means we don't end up giving talks if what they're looking for is NNI stuff.

[Richard Jones]

I'm puzzled by the way you insist that NNI type science can have no connection with your MNT aspirations. There are two pathways that, it is suggested, might lead to MNT - the development of soft, self-assembling systems inspired by biology, as Drexler favours, and which are probably best exemplified by the DNA structures and nanomachines of Ned Seeman, Paul Rothemund, Andrew Turberfield and others, and the development of direct mechanosythesis routes using scanning probe microscopy, as favoured by Freitas. The experimental work going on in both approaches is predominantly carried out in publically funded labs funded through NNI type initiatives in the USA and other countries.

Of course, publically funded nanotechnology programs will want to have a balanced portfolio, with some research aimed at demonstrating relatively quick economic impact, and other research with a longer term focus. So in the UK, for example, we have a program that is developing a long-term element in the "Software control of matter" project, and a short-term focus on things like producing low-cost, large area solar cells, with a lot of investigator driven projects in the middle.

As for what the Centers for Nanotechnology in Society are doing, I doubt that this is as incremental as you think. I don't know what the US centres are focusing on, but I know what their European counterparts are thinking about, and given the rather close links between the relevant academic communities I'd be surprised if they were approaching things very differently. Rather than being worried about short term issues of toxicity and environmental impacts of nanoparticles, they're concerned with privacy and other issues emerging from a world of universally integrated computing devices, they're thinking about issues arising from bionanotechnology, the blurring of lines between living and non-living, and human enhancement, and they're concerned about the interaction between human values and the democratic process and the technoscientific enterprise.

What they do start out with a presumption to reject, of course, is a position of technological determinism. This is both from an appreciation of historical arguments against such a point of view, and from the normative position that they generally start with, that it is desirable for technology to coevolve with society in a way that responds to people's aspirations, expressed through democratic mechanisms of one kind or another. So even if they weren't exposed to the scientific consensus against the likelihood of the MNT project coming to fruition in the way CRN imagines, they would be predisposed to imagine a much broader range of possible futures than simply considering the arrival of MNT as a historical inevitability.

What other possible futures might there be? I can think of at least three, each of which individually I think is more likely than the CRN position.

1. Technology plateaued. The current rapid burst of technological innovation reaches technical and economic limits within the next 20 years. CMOS scaling comes to an end and the putative replacements - molecular electronics, spintronics etc - turn out not to be manufacturable. Moore's law ends with computers roughly 100 times faster than what we have now. What follows is a long period of social innovation and incremental developments, as the impacts of evolutionary developments of current technology are absorbed and adapted.

2. Technology arrested. A rapid deterioration in conditions for humanity, caused by unexpectedly dramatic climate change, resource depletion together with widespread conflict, leads to a situation where people are focused on local survival, and the technological innovation system, together with the globalised economic system on which it is based, essentially stops. Innovation is limited to the ingenious recycling of the contents of today's rubbish dumps.

3. Technology flourishing. Developments in current nanotechnology lead, not to MNT, but to a set of quite different breakthroughs. Semiconductor nano-optoelectronics makes cheap, integrated quantum computing possible. Bionanotechnology and synthetic biology lead to true artificial self-replicating systems and a seamless integration of the living and the non-living.

It's not that CRN doesn't think about the broader issues that emerge if one is open to a wider range of possible futures; the impact of this thinking, though, is lessened (in my view) by CRNs attachment to the MNT vision at the expense of all other possibilities.

[Mike Treder, CRN]

Richard, thanks for your thoughtful comments.

We appreciate (sincerely!) the admonition to consider "a much broader range of possible futures." In the scenario project we're working on, we've tried to imagine and pursue outcomes that vary from what CRN originally posited as the most likely path for development of atomically-precise exponential manufacturing systems.

You're right to suggest that some of the publicly funded work in the US and Europe has relevance to molecular manufacturing. It would be quite a stretch, though, to say that enough funding is being directed toward that effort. We're hopeful, but not optimistic, that the recommendations of the NMAB report for experimental investigation of MM concepts will be adopted. Until they are, we'll continue to say that NNI-funded research is not likely to result in a "new industrial revolution."

I disagree that groups like the CNS or their European counterparts are looking sufficiently far ahead. I'm not saying their work isn't important or valuable. But it's a bit like a group in the 1860's looking into the implications of better, faster horses for the Pony Express while ignoring the transformative potential of the telegraph.

[jim moore]

Hi Richard,
It’s always good to hear from you, and thanks again for all your work on the Software Control of Matter projects. You folks in the UK are doing some real exciting work there. Are there going to be yearly updates on the projects or just after the 3 years are up?

But, let me defend CRN's focus. I think of CRN as the Center for Responsible Nano-Factories, not the center for responsible nanotechnology. The focus has been on the societal implications of the programmable manufacture of a wide range of products by very small, automated, machine systems. Others are looking at the implications of bio-nanotech, ubiquitous computing, and other outcomes from nano-science and nano-technology. And sense CRN is a relatively small organization focusing on what they consider to be the biggest "game changer" is appropriate.

[Brian Wang]

I do not see how a technological plateau in terms of scaling causes computers to be only 100 times faster than now. The technological plateau argument tends to be lithography plateaus over the next 20 years.

There are large number of different various kinds of improved computer memory which are fast and persistent. Replacing DRAM and harddrives with that any of those possible memory alternatives would provide a massive boost in performance.

Flash memory is progressing faster than Moore's law. Integration of off CPU electronics is progressing faster than Moore's law. Getting all of those parts up to a 20 year lithography plateau would provide far more computer performance.
There are working lasers from silicon semiconductors. This or superior alternative will be able to accelerate communication between processors and between computers.

So even if lithography plateaus there are several computer bottlenecks in commmunication and memory that would provide more computer performance improvements.

Innovations which have not been needed because of the simpler progress of Moore's law has been to convert more commmonly used software programs into optimized specially built silicon. This gives 100 to 1000 times the performance. Innovations with FPGAs where the hardware is adjusted on the fly would allow those gains to be captured.

There are alternative methods to improving performance that have not been explored because of the success of improving lithography to not justify the effort. The performance gains would not be small incremental amounts.

There are alternative methods to patterning than lithography. But by themselves those might add only 10 to 20 years to a lithography plateaued Moore's law. But they would make a plateau more like a slowing down.

There would also be the question of being able to go three dimensional.

Other open areas for improvement would be to look at alternatives to transistors like the Ovonic Quantum control device. Architectural alternatives such as the recent shift massive numbers of parallel cores.

There are a lot of performance gains possible after lithography limits are hit. These will have to be explored even if we have molecular control. It would just happen sooner if there were qute hard lithography limits.

Technology arrested: I do not see how without a far larger disruption how progress gets stopped.

There is the greenhouse high rise concept, which could blunt any climate change hit to agriculture.

There are orders of magnitude of inefficiency in our food supply system which would have to be reduced before there is mass starvation or a hit to technological progress. If we start getting an agriculture hit, we would force a rise in the price of meat, which takes several times the amount of feed and water to make. Demand for meat goes down with higher prices and more of the reduced agricultural capacity goes to vegatables. The world is making a billion tons of cement and steel every year. If we had to force a WW2 style mobilization to make the high rise greenhouses it could be done.
There are several simple, reversable and vey affordable ways to blunt harsh climate change. (artificial volcanoes, iron seeding etc...)

There is a lot of nuclear power and more can and is being built. So any peak oil hit does not send us back to the pre-industrial age. Transportation can shift more to electric bikes (60 million in china, electric scooters can go up to 60 mph).

If there is widespread conflict, if things get really desparate and we are talking all out war. Then for the next 20 years, it is clear who wins. The US goes WW2 mode, institutes draft, and war bonds. Other lose. Plus I do not see the scenario where the main nuclear and military powers in a pressure situation do not collude to suppress the other states.

[Brian Wang]

A clarification: Actually the improvements are being explored but are niche markets or are trailing Moore's law and mainstream computing. If Moore's law and lithography stall out then those alteratives become more important. Just like the multi-core alternative did not get used until there were problems just increasing the cycle times in chips.

[Chris Phoenix, CRN]

I have to agree with Brian on computer performance: there's lots of room left. Manufacturing can get less expensive and more defect-free. Circuits can get error-tolerant. Chips can be stacked. Multicore and reprogrammable logic are only starting to be touched for general-purpose computing.

Richard's techno-collapse scenario 2 doesn't look likely to me, as described. I don't think we'd be in a holding pattern; I think we'd be in a rapid downward spiral everywhere, a vicious cycle between social breakdown and environmental destruction.

On NNI vs. molecular manufacturing: much of what the NNI is doing has *nothing* to do with MM. Not diamondoid, not bio. There's a little bit of work going toward biopolymer structures. There's even less work going toward probe-mediated synthesis of covalent solids. I'd almost say it's in the noise level; I'd be pretty surprised if it was over 5% for soft and hard MM combined.

The money seems to be mostly following the products, and the products are materials and films, sensors, medical applications... not kinematic structures. (Conformation-changing structures, e.g. triggered drug release vesicles, are a grey area that may eventually become interesting, but so far they don't even look like an enabling technology.)

The ELSI implications that Richard mentioned don't sound like they're focused on MM consequences, but rather on the consequences of incremental tech development. Therefore, it seems unlikely that they'll produce work that's capable of dealing with disruptive change in manufacturing capabilities.

It's worth remarking once again that wet/soft nano appears to be performance-limited in ways that dry/hard nano may not be. Fluid drag costs you a whole lot when you have 10^17 nm-sized parts moving at m/s speeds. And in proteins, the slow relaxation time of entropic springs may also limit their operation frequency.

Chris

[Richard Jones]

It's very tempting to think about the trajectory from the present to the future as being a journey or a road, with an obvious destination (after all, this is implicit in all the idea of a technology roadmap). But to me the image that seems more helpful is that of a "Garden of forking paths", in the words of the famous story by Borges, in which at any time many different futures present themselves. Looking backwards, since only one of the forking paths materialised, it's easy to delude ourselves that this outcome was inevitable. So Mike's thought experiment, of a group in the 1860's neglecting to plan for the influence of the telegraph makes the mistake of supposing that the future we know did unfold from the 1860's was, at that time, inevitable.

Jim, thanks for the kind words. I'm hoping to persuade the software control of matter teams to give some occasional updates. What I can say now is that it has been possible to find some further funding (another million pounds, roughly) for the projects.

Brian, the figure of 100 times more powerful computers than now is of course fairly arbitrary, but it comes from extrapolating current growth until the arrival of the series of barriers to CMOS scaling with no currently known solution (the red brick wall) in the ITRS. The point you make is one that I essentially agree with, that even if this happens there will still be much more innovation (much of it optimising things that nobody bothered to optimise in an environment of continually increasing computing power), but the point remains that this will be of a very different, and much more incremental, character to the exponential growth we've grown used to - as you say, a slowing down rather than a strict plateau.

I'm much less sanguine than Brian about the robustness of our current world food supply situation. You might want to look at the very careful calculations in "Feeding the World" by Vaclav Smil. The point is that food output at current levels depends crucially on cheap energy, because of the importance of the artificially fixed nitrogen from the Haber-Bosch process. I'm inclined to agree with Chris that the disruption from an unexpectedly rapid end to cheap hydrocarbons would lead to a very vicious downward spiral.

[Tom Craver]

From a bit of net research, it looks like US energy consumption for fertilizer amounts to about 2% of total BTUs - about 10% of natural gas.

Assuming food is about at the top of our priorities, we'd have to see fossil fuels get in REALLY tight supply before we had to cut back substantially on fertilizer.

For example, around 10% of the US corn crop fairly suddenly went into ethanol in the past couple years, thanks to foolish subsidies, and corn prices shot up 50%-60%.

If fertilizer and fuel currently amount to as much as 20% of price of corn, the price for fertilizer and fuel could double or triple in price and we'd expect the food supply to fall no more than 10% before the price increase covered the increase in costs. Of course, a doubling or tripling in energy prices could happen with only a modest decrease in energy supply.

If the world suddenly lost 40% of it's oil supply - say if the Straits of Hormuz were blocked due to war with Iran - fuel prices could easily increase 10x, resulting in at least a 3x increase in food prices and a global economic depression.

A president would have to be an utter madman and fool to risk triggering such an event in the name of improving national security.

Unfortunately...

[Chris Phoenix, CRN]

Tom, was that fertilizer production *in the US*? I read that a lot of US fertilizer prodution moved overseas a few years ago, due to tightening natural gas supplies. It's a lot easier to ship ammonia than methane...

Chris

[Tom Craver]

Good point. Here's a good reference article:

http://deltafarmpress.com/news/070521-nitrogen-fertilizer/

According to that, nitrogen imports accounted for 85% of use, and 50% of nitrogen supply. (I presume that means we re-export some.)

From this:

http://www.ers.usda.gov/Data/FertilizerUse/Tables/Table1.xls

the US consumes around 12.3 million tons of nitrogen in about 25 million tons of a variety of fertilizers. One ton of anhydrous ammonia - about 90% nitrogen - takes 34 M-Btu. Figure about 37 M-Btu per ton of nitrogen, or about 455 T-Btu consumption in the form of various nitrogen fertilizers (i.e. assuming rough energy parity per nitrogen content for different forms of fertilizer ).

But the US consumes ~22000 Trillion BTU of natural gas (note: 1000 BTU/cu-ft):

http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/ng/ng_cons_sum_dcu_nus_a.htm

So 2% going into nitrogen fertilizers still seems about right. Let me know if I messed up my calculations somewhere.

It is worth noting that natural gas prices have soared in recent years, and fluctuated wildly this year. Supposedly we're still years away from "peak natural gas" - but it appears that demand is already outstripping supply, forcing harsh adjustments in many industries. Fertilizer production went overseas because NG costs about 1/10th as much in producing nations. NG transport is difficult, so perhaps that became a bottleneck limiting supply.