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Students often ask me, "I want to study nanotechnology. What should I study? And where?"
Eric Drexler has written an excellent answer to this question. A partial summary of his several pages of good advice:
Start with the fundamentals.
Remember that science and engineering are different. Focus on problem-solving at the interface between them.
Expect nanotech to continue moving toward more precise and useful nanostructures, in more materials.
Decide where to study after you decide what to study.
Computerized text generation may be getting close to passing the Turing test. (Turing, an early computer scientist, suggested that if a person couldn't tell whether they were text-chatting with a human or a computer, the computer must be intelligent.)
In response to a comment I made about special interests within government, the following comment showed up, which I think may have been computer-generated:governments differ from what is it's purpose and it's characteristics. Interests also makes every government unique. Thanks for the post by the way.
The username was the same as the URL (for a commercial site), so I'm pretty sure it was spam and not a legitimate comment. But I'm not totally sure... I did delete it, and will continue to delete similar comments. But it was spooky to be unsure whether the text I was reading was created by a human or a computer.
It seems unlikely that spammers would spend the effort to write several on-topic sentences that will probably be deleted, just to get a single mention of their URL on a blog site that doesn't let search engines register the URL link.
I think it's plausible, nowadays, that chatbots fed a few key words from my comment could generate the above text.
I got curious whether these sentences had been found by Google search from the keywords, so I googled for "governments "purpose and it's characteristics"" to see whether that phrase existed on the web. Google corrected my grammar.
A decade or two ago, the phrase "paperless office" was often heard, meaning that everything on paper could be delivered on your computer screen, so there'd be no need to create, read, and store flattened inky dead trees anymore.
It didn't quite work that way. Instead, according to Wikipedia, the amount of paper in offices doubled from 1980 to 2000. Computers made it easier to create and print documents, and it turned out that people just like paper.
When we can "print" 3D objects as easily as we can print documents, will the amount of stuff we own double? Will we find ourselves printing new, generic stuff and then throwing it away, only to print more the next day? Or will we print it, become attached to it, and try to store it forever?
How many of you have stuff that you are reluctant to throw away, but have not actually touched or used in more than a year? Would you throw it away (or better yet, recycle it) if you knew you could print out a new copy in 5 minutes or less if you ever needed it again? I can think of some kitchen gadgets that fit this category. And what about stuff you've bought and never ever used?
Of course, personal-use objects are only one application of advanced 3D printing. Large objects like jumbo jets may also be easier and cheaper to produce. But that's a subject for another blog post.
Why do we need more manufacturing capability?
I've heard that by working as little as two hours per week, Americans could keep themselves comfortably supplied with the necessities of life. This actually seems plausible, given that something like 1.5% of the population is engaged in agriculture, and manufacturing has had many decades to become similarly mature.
In the next few blog posts, I'll be exploring several interlocking questions about economy, productivity, and society, on the way to grappling with the big question: If molecular manufacturing really will provide revolutionary manufacturing capabilities... do we need it? Do we want it?
And what if we need it, but we don't want it?
Over on Metamodern, there's a discussion of whether advanced molecular manufacturing systems could be developed by a small private effort.
Drexler thinks it's not possible today, and I agree with him that it doesn't look very likely; enabling technologies are not yet at the point where a small effort can succeed. But what if special-purpose nanotechnologies become increasingly sophisticated, continually out-competing the possibilities of general-purpose manufacturing for another 20 years?
Even though the cost of developing general-purpose manufacturing (where the space of products includes the manufacturing system) will continue to drop rapidly - perhaps exponentially - there may not be enough commercial incentive to develop it in the near future. The end of this projection is that it may not be developed until it becomes really easy.
I have thought for years that, even if no one did any work toward general-purpose nanomanufacturing, around about 2030 it would be a moot point - it would be something that a university lab could cook up in a few semesters, but many of the applications would have been achieved already. So, if no one tries to develop a nanofactory, then in two decades or so we may have one - and it won't be that big a deal - at least not at first...
On the other hand, the technology of DNA shapes has advanced with incredible rapidity over the last decade. With comparable advances in nanoscale actuators, it might not be all that difficult to put together a basic machine that could build general-purpose DNA-machine manufacturing systems. They wouldn't be diamondoid nanofactories, but they might be a major enabler for further work in that direction.
The world could have had digital programmable computers before 1900, but too many people didn't really see the point. Perhaps, in the end, molecular manufacturing will be driven not by technological capabilities, not even by recognition of the possibilities, but by the appearance of a problem that only molecular manufacturing can solve.
Of course, that depends on the definition of "problem" - it doesn't seem to be a problem that tens of millions of people per year die of preventable causes - but that's another blog post.
Give the world safe drinking water, using nanotechnology!
A water treatment system that can provide thousands of gallons of sterile water from even the most diseased source... it's portable, suitable for home use, doubles as a 5-gallon jerry can... it exists today, and when manufactured in volume, can provide clean water for the billions who don't have it today, for only $20 billion.
The heart of the system is a filter with 15-nanometer pores. The smallest water-borne virus, polio, is 25 nanometers. Thus, no disease can get through, and no chemicals are needed to make the water completely sterile. (A similar approach is the LifeStraw, which uses a larger filter plus iodine. It's even less expensive, but Wikipedia says that it may not remove all organisms.)
Here's a TED talk where the inventor, Michael Pritchard, mixes up a thoroughly disgusting concoction, filters it, and then drinks it. Pritchard talks about the potential of the technology for disaster relief and explains how little it could cost to provide clean drinking water for everyone.
A friend of mine grew up in Venezuela, and when I would talk about nanotechnology, she would always answer with stories of conditions in developing nations, asking "What can technology do about that?" I'm glad to finally have an answer for her.
Although this isn't the first solution to be proposed for the problem of clean water, it may be enough less expensive, more effective, more independent of infrastructure, and easier to distribute and use... it may be the answer that finally inspires the world to solve the problem rather than just chipping away at it. I'll be donating and fundraising for it.
I just received an unsolicited email advertising the first nanotechnology rap music artist / album. Since it was spam, I won't help them out by posting their name or URL, but I thought it was worth mentioning that nanotech has now entered rap music.
A few words on freedom from the Lab Lemming, on the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago.
He has some good points: many of us take freedom for granted today, but it's not so long ago that people were routinely shot or imprisoned for trying to leave the Soviet Union. And even in the West, today, our freedom is far from perfect.
Freedom is not an absolute or universal good. I've heard a Chinese woman say, "Choice is pain." How much freedom do you want? The same police who give me tickets for parking my car on the grass in my own front yard, also prevent my neighbors from blasting loud music late at night. And there are other tradeoffs. Do I want to live in a society where kids are protected? Of course... to some extent... but recently in Holland a teenage girl was taken away from her family because they were letting her go on long sailing voyages alone.Freedom is, to a large extent, a product of society. As the basis of our economy changes, our various freedoms are likely to change as well.
How much freedom will be appropriate to an economy where a few percent of workers are enough to do the manufacturing (just as a few percent are enough to do the agriculture) and the rest have to find other kinds of work? On the face of it, manufacturing jobs don't seem especially free, so we might expect our freedom to increase. But the transition will probably come with economic pain, which decreases freedom.
And if we get more freedom than we are comfortable with, we are likely to give it away... perhaps even give too much of it away... or perhaps give away freedoms that we really need, while fighting to keep less important freedoms. This process may be encouraged by people who are good at making us worry about the wrong things (which includes a wide range of media - fear sells).
In the end, if molecular manufacturing leads to an economic revolution, what effects will that have on freedom? If the products of molecular manufacturing revolutionize military and police forces, what effects will that have? Will we recognize the new choice points - not just governmental, but also corporate and social?
Not so many years ago, computer-aided design was an arcane skill, requiring programs costing thousands of dollars. Today, CAD is used widely, and the programs have gotten cheaper and easier to use.
How cheap? How about free. And how easy? How about a CAD program designed for children?
Hat tip to Tom Craver for pointing me at this website. It is a free CAD program that will let anyone design an object, see it in 3D, and calculate what needs to be purchased to build the object. Once purchased, the components are easily assembled. A wide range of robots can be built, and the robot-programming system was also designed for kids.
When you click the link, you may at first think, "This is a toy, not a real system!" But why shouldn't it be both?
It's not hard to imagine incremental evolution of this "toy" to enable stronger and more capable robots, or some other manufacturer producing a system that was designed from the ground up for building robots. There's already a robotics contest based on the current system.
So our kids are going to grow up familiar with the idea that they can design stuff on the computer in 3D and then build it quickly. By the time they graduate college, they might possibly be using molecular manufacturing to do the building.
Molecular manufacturing designs have traditionally looked a lot more like machines than like life's biochemistry, and molecular manufacturing has even been criticized for not taking more inspiration from life's techniques. But there is a fundamental connection between them.
The digital nature of chemistry (to be specific, molecule-forming chemistry) is what will allow molecular manufacturing systems to build duplicate systems, driving down the cost of manufacturing and enabling high throughput and large products. It's easy to think of life as squishy and analog, or complex and chaotic, but at its core, life is digital too. And it may even be the case that this is what allowed life to form in the first place.
I was recently discussing the origin of life with some biologists and other scientists. During the course of the discussion, I suggested that life might have developed from a soup of simple organic molecules when a fairly simple self-replicating molecule was templated by clay particles. (This conjecture is not original to me, but I think it sounds at least somewhat plausible.)
Someone objected that, during the time needed for the next advance to develop, any tiny perturbation would destroy the pre-life structure. Someone else pointed me at the work of L. L. Whyte[PDF]. Now, Whyte was writing before much was known about molecular biology, and his theories are about as accurate as the early descriptions of electricity as a fluid. But his observations and logic are first-rate, and one of his observations is that there must be some core that implements heredity and provides an organizing principle to organisms, and that core must be replicated with unusually high fidelity.
As a computer scientist who's studied molecular manufacturing for two decades, I had gotten used to thinking of self-replication as digital and highly accurate, in the physical domain as well as the computer domain. Reading Whyte got me thinking, and I realized that indeed, life does depend on near-perfect duplication of information - and it's not guaranteed that any particular process of copying will provide that.
Of course, this is what DNA does. Using the highly nonlinear forces of chemistry, DNA can be copied with an extremely low error rate - orders of magnitude lower than most organic chemistry processes. If this were not the case, then life would devolve - errors would accumulate faster than they could be selected out. But with the ability to produce essentially perfect copies of DNA, the total number of accurate copies can increase with each generation. Then, the small percentage of random mutations that are beneficial will lead to an increase in the total number of improved copies in each generation - at which point the improved copies will out-compete the degenerated copies, and the species will improve.
In discussing the conjecture that life originated with simple molecular self-replicators, many people will not make explicit their assumptions about whether the copying process is digital and accurate, or analog and lossy. It seems clear to me, now, that 1) the copying process must have been digital, because lossy processes could not have produced a lineage of ever-improving self-replicators leading to life; 2) Since the formation of molecules is, in general, a digital process, the theory survives this restriction.
I could say that this means molecular manufacturing is biomimetic after all. But I suspect that the use of digital copying processes in molecular manufacturing owes its inspiration at least as much to computer science as to biology. The bottom line is that digital copying works, and if molecule-forming chemistry were not digital, there's a good chance we wouldn't be here to talk about it.
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