Responsible Nanotechnology

Anticipating Bad Laws?

A few days ago, Tom Craver suggested that even if CRN couldn't promote good policy for the anticipated manufacturing breakthrough, we might be able to anticipate bad laws.

The idea was that if we knew what bad laws might get passed, "maybe you can convince those who will develop the nanofactories to take approaches that avoid triggering the worst traps until it's too late to mess MNT up too badly."

One approach, of course, might be to deny that molecular manufacturing is possible; not work on it openly; not develop any intermediate technologies; then, when it gets easy enough, suddenly produce a nanofactory in some out-of-the-way lab. By the time any laws got written, nanofactories might have proliferated too widely for laws to catch up.

Funny, but that seems to be what's happening today.

But there are at least two problems with this approach. First, the developers would have to give away the technology - quickly and widely - or risk it being quietly but firmly suppressed. It would be difficult to go from below-the-radar to desktop giveaway nanofactory before someone spilled the beans and brought in the feds.

Second, a free-for-all approach might not be the wisest...

Thoughts?

Chris Phoenix

CRN Inspired Cutting-Edge Nano-science

Back in 2005, I had several long discussions / debates (e.g. this discussion) with two scientists, Richard Jones and Philip Moriarty. They attempted to convince me that molecular manufacturing couldn't work. (Richard Jones is the author of Soft Machines, which argues that biochemical-based systems are far superior to diamond-like systems.) I attempted to convince them that it could. The argument was somewhat frustrating on both sides...

In an online interview, Philip Moriarty has recently acknowledged those discussions as being the inspiration for his current research: attempting to demonstrate or disprove calculations of atomic bond manipulation and structure formation - including 3D structures - on silicon and diamond surfaces.

In other words, he's trying to learn whether or not Drexler-style mechanical chemistry works the way it's been calculated to work. This does not make him a supporter of Drexler, but it does mean he has an open mind. Open-minded scientists are what makes science work, and Moriarty's work is doubly valuable for its rarity.

(Richard Jones, by the way, went on to lead a group that was convened in order to allocate several million dollars of scientific funding; the funds went toward projects that had the potential to substantially advance molecular manufacturing.)

I'm glad to see that CRN made this contribution to scientific progress in the field of molecular manufacturing.

(Hat tip to Brian Wang at NextBigFuture.com.)

Chris Phoenix

Was CRN Wrong?

From the start, CRN's message has been pretty simple:

1. Nanotechnology will lead to a manufacturing breakthrough (molecular manufacturing, or MM).
2. MM will be revolutionary, disruptive, probably destructive in several ways.
3. Therefore, wise policy needs to be made in advance.

Molecular manufacturing is potentially very powerful - I remain convinced that we were right about that.

I still think MM has strong potential to be revolutionary, disruptive, and even destructive. (As well as providing many potential benefits.)

But I'm becoming less and less sure that this should, or even can, be dealt with by making wise policy in advance. It's too hard to predict what will happen. It's hard enough to predict what shape the technology will take - and much harder to predict how that will interact with politics.

If one-third of CRN's message were to disappear, what would CRN's proper role be, going forward?

Chris Phoenix

Chem Prof Teaches Bad Physics

Why does it matter whether atoms are moved by quantum effects?

A few days ago, I received an email from a student who was interested in molecular manufacturing. He had asked a chemistry professor whether molecular manufacturing could work.

The professor said no: quantum uncertainty would mean that the atoms could be in two places at once, so they couldn't be picked up by machines or used to make gears.

It is a crying shame that in 2010, some university professors are 1) so uninformed about the physics of atoms and 2) so willing to talk beyond their knowledge.

Richard Feynman, who won his Nobel Prize for his work in quantum physics, believed that mechanical-style molecular manufacturing would work just fine.

Single atoms have been imaged using scanning probe microscopes, even at room temperature.

I hesitate to make blunt statements that other people are wrong. It's not good politics, and it's not good debating tactics. But I don't know what else to say in this case. Dozens of experiments, plus Richard Feynman, say that the chemistry professor is simply wrong.

Why does it matter? First, it's shameful to teach students incorrect scientific information. And second, if we don't know what can be done with nanotechnology, we cannot prepare for the problems nanotechnology will create, and we cannot benefit from the potential advantages.

Chris Phoenix

Electron Microscope Images, Free

An electron microscope company, Aspex, is advertising that they'll scan a sample you send in, for free, and post the image on their website for you.

Here's the page with the signup form: "Send Us Your Sample." 

While browsing their site, I notice that they have a desktop SEM (scanning electron microscope), about the size of a laser printer. It only goes down to 100 nanometers (several hundred times the size of an atom) but still, that's small enough to count as nanotech.

Chris Phoenix

What Should Nanotech Students Study?

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.

Chris Phoenix

Blog Comment Spam and Turing tests

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.

Chris Phoenix

Nanofactory Implications Interview

Nanofactories: How, and why, might they change the world?

I explain a few of the reasons in an interview published on the New Haven Independent's web site: "Nanofactories: Brave, or Grave New World?"

In the interview, I point out that the entire World Wide Web, along with lots of intellectual property issues (yes, I really did say "kerfluffle"), came about because we learned to manufacture just one thing - transistors - in almost unlimited quantity. Nanofactories will let us manufacture a wide variety of stuff in almost unlimited quantity.

I also discuss the likely cost of developing nanofactories before 2020, and I talk about the "Gray Goo" concerns.

I was quite happy with how the interview turned out. Alex Halperin did an excellent job of reducing an hour of technical discussion to a very readable interview that preserved and presented the key points effectively.

Chris Phoenix

Molecular Manufacturing vs. Self-Assembly

Why was I so excited about the FNANO10 conference on self-assembly, given that self-assembly is not molecular manufacturing?

Self-assembly is a way of making large structures out of small pieces, by designing the pieces so that random ("Brownian") motion will jiggle them into place. DNA self-assembles very nicely into quite large structures - as big as 100 nanometers, almost bacteria-sized - almost big enough to see with an ordinary microscope.

A problem with self-assembly is that the pieces have to use their own structure or other properties to template their assembly. That limits and complicates the design. So templates, created by other means, are sometimes used to guide the self-assembly.

With a template, larger and more intricate structures can be built than by pure self-assembly. For example, self-assembled monolayers, using a flat surface as a template, can produce square centimeters of high-precision arrangements of molecules. Lithographed templates can arrange DNA structures in arbitrary orientations over large areas (this is cutting-edge stuff).

Molecular manufacturing uses nanoscale tools to guide the fabrication of more tools. Once you can computer-control those tools to make a programmable range of shapes, you can make more tools (both in quantity and variety) than you started with.

Self-assembly is already using templates, and templated self-assembly is pretty darn close to molecular manufacturing. Once the templates become programmable and are built using the same processes and building blocks that they guide... then that is molecular manufacturing.

With so many advances on self-assembly, it seems pretty clear that just a few years from now, we'll have primitive molecular manufacturing. More steps will be needed, of course, to design a full nanofactory and get it working. But the conceptual and practical hurdles are falling fast.

Chris Phoenix

Basic Survival Package

A few days ago, Tom Craver asked what, other than food, would I put on a list of basic life needs.

Here's my initial list of manufactured things I'd like to see everyone on earth have access to:

• Clean water
• Weatherproof and burglar-resistant housing
• Light at night
• The Web and voice communication
• Mosquito nets with long-lasting insecticide
• Optional birth control
• Clean cookstoves and/or solar cookers
• Vaccines

Many of these things are available today, at a cost where the world could afford to supply them to everyone... if we all got together and really tried. Some of these things are quite inexpensive, on a global scale. For example, the UN says that everyone could have clean water for $20 billion per year, which seems like a lot... but we spend somewhere around $20-$100 billion per year on bottled water.

There's already significant movement in this direction, as seen in these Google proposals:

As manufacturing gets less and less expensive (in large part, thanks to nanotechnology), it will be more and more possible for private individuals to make a world-class difference. According to The Soul of Money by Lynne Twist, Buckminster Fuller said in the 1970s that the planet now has the ability to provide for everyone, but it would take 50 years for us to fully act on it. In another ten years, a basic web appliance (with display, or maybe full voice interface) might cost $10 instead of $100. Likewise for a water filter. Adequate lighting might cost $3 instead of $30.

I'm not talking charity, nor communism, but simply preferring to live in a world where a small expenditure of money can give the world a billion fewer "poor people" and a billion more productive, participating citizens.

Some important things that didn't make the list:

• Clothing: Depends on individual taste; already available in most areas
• Medical care: Can't be automated and manufactured (yet)
• Food: Grown, not manufactured; should be produced locally
• Education: Some comes with the Web; some requires major human resources
• Sanitation: Probably more about education, water, and habits than manufactured stuff
• Employment opportunities
• Healthy social structures
• Decent government (information can help keep governments accountable)

I'm just starting to study this stuff, so please suggest additional ideas and corrections.

Chris Phoenix