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C-R-Newsletter #48 December 29, 2006
* SPECIAL YEAR-END ISSUE *
Happy Birthday to Us!
This month marks the four-year anniversary of CRN's founding. In this special
expanded edition of the C-R-Newsletter, we'll review some of the major
nano-related events of 2006 and highlight a few of our proudest accomplishments
from the past 12 months.
January: Feature Article
on Nanofactories
February: WorldChanging
Interview
February: CRN Goes to
Switzerland
March: CRN Task Force
Publishes First 11 Essays
April: State of Global
Emergency
April: CRN Goes to New Jersey
May: CRN Task Force Publishes 11
More Essays
June: Nanofactory
Development Project
July: Back to Switzerland
August: CRN Goes to
Tennessee
September: New Zealand and
Australia
October: Doomsday Discussion
October: CRN at the Naval War
College
October: Global Futures
Strategist
November: CRN Goes to South
America
December: National Academy of
Sciences Report
Every month is full of activity for CRN. To follow the latest
happenings on a daily basis, be sure to check our
Responsible Nanotechnology weblog.
==========
January: Feature Article on Nanofactories
A special report titled
"Nanofactories: Glimpsing the future of process technology" was the cover
article for the January 2006 issue of CleanRooms Magazine. The lengthy
article, subtitled "Making sense of the molecular machine shop," quoted
extensively from CRN Research Director Chris Phoenix, as well as from nanotech
researchers Robert A. Freitas Jr. and Ralph Merkle. We described it on our blog
as a "must read."
February: WorldChanging Interview
"Revolution in a Box" was the title of a
long
interview about CRN's work posted by Jamais Cascio at the popular
WorldChanging web site. This is how the article was introduced:
Founded in December 2002, the Center for Responsible
Nanotechnology has a modest goal: to ensure that the planet navigates the
emerging nanotech era safely. That's a lot for a couple of volunteers to
shoulder, but Mike Treder and Chris Phoenix have carried their burden well, and
done much to raise awareness of the potential risks and benefits of molecular
manufacturing, including a major presentation at the US Environmental Protection
Agency on the impacts of nanotechnology. We first linked to CRN back in October
of 2003, and have long considered them a real WorldChanging ally.
February: CRN Goes to Switzerland
Twice this year, CRN Executive Director Mike Treder traveled to Zurich,
Switzerland, to participate in "Risk Governance for Nanotechnology" workshops
organized by the International
Risk Governance Council. Among the 30 attendees at the February event were
representatives from the European Commission, the Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development (OECD), the World Economic Forum, Environmental
Defense, CBEN at Rice University, Swiss RE, Pfizer, and the NanoBusiness
Alliance.
This event was coordinated by Ortwinn Renn from the University of Stuttgart and
Mike Roco from the U.S. National Science and Technology Council, and moderated
by Tim Mealey of the Meridian Institute. CRN was pleased overall with the
direction taken and with the content of the workshop. It was refreshing to see
that some international leaders were willing to consider longer-term risks and
more serious implications than nanoparticle toxicity.
March: CRN Task Force Publishes First 11 Essays
In August 2005, the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology
announced the formation of a Global Task Force
convened to study the societal implications of this rapidly emerging technology.
For their first major project, members of the CRN Task Force
chose to generate a range of independent essays identifying and defining
specific concerns about the possibilities of advanced nanotechnology. The first
11 of those essays were published in the March 2006 issue of
Nanotechnology
Perceptions, a peer-reviewed academic journal of the Collegium Basilea
in Basel, Switzerland. The essays also were posted for
reader commentary at KurzweilAI.net, and on Wise-Nano.org.
April: State of Global Emergency
CRN Executive Director Mike Treder was invited to take part in a special meeting
in Bellevue, Washington, called "Crossroads for Planet Earth" sponsored by the
Foundation
For the Future. Topics included human population, extreme and widespread
poverty, biodiversity, energy and environment, public health, world economies,
and global priorities. Nine participants, described as "experts in these
fields...plus additional voices from the USA and abroad," made presentations and
were joined in discussion by principals from the foundation.
Based on what was shared at the meeting, it is clear that we are in a state of
global emergency regarding the potential for rapid and disastrous climate
change. This may not be news for most C-R-Newsletter readers, but the
statistical evidence presented at this event was highly alarming. CRN's
presentation on "Nanotechnology: Driving Toward a Crisis" emphasized the
opportunity for exponential general-purpose molecular manufacturing to enable
intervention in the rapid deterioration of global climate stability. Of course,
the same technology that will provide many potential
benefits also can be misused and cause great harm.
April: CRN Goes to New Jersey
The New Jersey Institute of
Technology invited Chris Phoenix, CRN's Director of Research, to conduct a
two-hour public seminar on "Nanotechnology: Its Promises and Perils." The event
took place on April 5 and was well attended.
A
video archive
of the talk is online.
The following day, Chris was able
to have several informal group discussions with physics students and professors
from NJIT about both technical matters and ethical implications of advanced
nanotechnology.
May: CRN Task Force Publishes 11 More Essays
The second set of essays written by members of CRN's Global
Task Force on Implications and Policy were published in the May 2006 issue
of
Nanotechnology Perceptions, and also online.
These essays covered topics from commerce to criminology, from ethics to
economics, and from our remote past to our distant future. Taken together, they
begin to illustrate the profoundly transformative impact that
molecular manufacturing will have on every aspect of
human society.
June: Nanofactory Development Project
In a highly significant development, Robert A. Freitas Jr. and Ralph Merkle
launched a website announcing a "Nanofactory
Collaboration." This is the first project explicitly aimed at building a
high-performance general-purpose nanofactory manufacturing system based on
molecular manufacturing. (The
Foresight/Battelle Roadmap is
focused more on near-term
technologies leading toward molecular manufacturing.) The timeline of the project calls for initial
diamond mechanosynthesis in 2010, with "nanofactories and nanorobotic products"
beginning around 2020. CRN will continue watching with great interest to see how
this project progresses, and working to steer it in responsible directions.
July: Back to Switzerland
In early July, CRN Executive Director Mike Treder returned to Zurich,
Switzerland, for another meeting sponsored by the International Risk Governance
Council. Participants reviewed a
white paper [PDF] on risk
governance of nanotechnology, deliberated in breakout groups, and listened to
several distinguished speakers. Here is part of
Mike's report about the event:
During one of the breakout sessions, some people complained about
an overemphasis on human enhancement issues in the white paper, especially when
compared with the scant references to the risk of a nanotechnology arms race and
possible warfare. I made the point that a nano-enabled arms race is almost
certain to be less stable than the nuclear arms race, and therefore more likely
to result in devastating war. I also proposed, on behalf of CRN, the need for an
International NanoTechnology Arms Control Treaty, or INTACT.
CRN was not the only NGO (non-governmental organization) among the 100 or so
conference attendees. Representatives from Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth,
Practical Action, the Meridian Institute, the Woodrow Wilson Center, Demos, the
Foresight Nanotech Institute and others were there. Although we had a wide range
of concerns and points of view, there was strong consensus between NGOs on the
need for a longer-range outlook and more serious consideration of the
potentially transformative impacts of molecular manufacturing.
August: CRN Goes to Tennessee
CRN's Director of Research, Chris Phoenix, traveled to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in
August to speak at a
conference titled "The Next Industrial Revolution: Nanotechnology and
Manufacturing." The conference was sponsored by the Society of Manufacturing
Engineers. Chris's talk, "From Nanotechnology to Molecular Manufacturing,"
focused on why molecular manufacturing will be very attractive to develop and
described several pathways to development. Two other speakers, Josh Hall and
Tihamer Toth-Fejel, also made molecular manufacturing the topic of their
remarks.
September: New Zealand and Australia
CRN Executive Director Mike Treder was the featured speaker in the annual
Pickering Lecture Tour organized by the
Institution of
Professional Engineers New Zealand. Mike gave talks in ten New Zealand
cities over a two-week period, with
overflow audiences in many places and lots of interest in CRN's ideas about
responsible use of molecular manufacturing. He was interviewed twice on the
country's national radio network. After New Zealand, Mike spent a week in
Australia, giving talks to large audiences at three universities. That trip
prompted significant
media coverage.
October: Doomsday Discussion
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists -- famed for its
Doomsday
Clock that now sits at seven minutes to midnight -- held a series of
"Doomsday Reconsidered" meetings throughout 2006 to look at future threats to
civilization. In October, CRN Director of Research Chris Phoenix took part in a
program in Washington DC sponsored by the group. Chris was invited to speak
about "Threats to Society from Nanotechnology."
October: CRN at the Naval War College
Also in October, CRN Executive Director Mike Treder met with a group of senior
officers and affiliated civilian researchers at the US
Naval War College in
Newport, Rhode Island. Mike was invited to address the
Strategic Studies Group
on the subject of the disruptive potential of molecular manufacturing. The
wide-ranging three-hour conversation covered not just military applications, but
other societal implications as well.
October: Global Futures Strategist
Jamais Cascio, who writes about the intersection of emerging technologies and
cultural transformation, and who specializes in the design and creation of
plausible scenarios of the future, was appointed this year as a
Global Futures Strategist for CRN. In
2003, Jamais co-founded the award-winning weblog
WorldChanging.com,
covering topics including energy and the environment, global development, open
source technologies, and catalysts for social change. His essays about
technology and society have appeared in a variety of publications, and he has
worked on a number of television, film, and game projects, including two books
for the science fiction game series
Transhuman Space.
November: CRN Goes to South America
Chris Phoenix, Director of Research for CRN, visited Sao Paulo, Brazil, to
participate in the
Third International Seminar on Nanotechnology, Society, and the Environment.
He spoke on the subject of nanotechnology and economics.
Chris went from Brazil to
Caracas, Venezuela, where he was the featured speaker at a
half-day symposium on nanotechnology. Chris talked about the implications of
nanotechnology for developing countries. His remarks were written up in detail
in El Nacional, a major Venezuelan newspaper.
December: National Academy of Sciences Report
At the end of the year, the US National Academy of Sciences released its
long-awaited analysis of molecular manufacturing, in "A Matter of Size:
Triennial Review of the National Nanotechnology Initiative." Conclusions
published in the report are likely to accelerate research toward the development
of molecularly-precise manufacturing. However, without adequate understanding
and preparation, exponential atom-by-atom construction of advanced products
could have catastrophic results. Because increased funding of research leading
toward exponential construction of atomically-precise products is now a strong
possibility, CRN urgently recommends equivalent
funding and priority for research into the profound societal and environmental
implications of molecular manufacturing, including consideration of the most
aggressive potential timelines and powerful capabilities.
That concludes our year-end wrap up -- Happy New Year!
C-R-Newsletter #47 November 30, 2006
CRN at
Brazil Nanotech Seminar
CRN Speaks in Venezuela
CRN Goes Around the World
WorldChanging Book Published
IEEE Fellows Predictions
Website Upgrade Begins
Feature Essay:
Preventing Errors in Molecular
Manufacturing
Every month is full of activity for CRN. To follow the latest
happenings on a daily basis, be sure to check our
Responsible Nanotechnology weblog.
==========
CRN at Brazil
Nanotech Seminar
Chris Phoenix, Director of
Research for CRN, was in Brazil earlier this month to participate in the
Third International Seminar on Nanotechnology, Society, and the Environment.
He spoke on the subject of nanotechnology and economics.
Much of the conference focus was on the social and economic aspects of
technology. Nanotechnology was seen as one of a cluster of new technologies,
such as new agricultural and medical technologies, that raise social as well as
technical issues. Chris made connections with attendees and speakers from
several different continents.
CRN Speaks in Venezuela
After leaving Brazil, Chris
traveled to Caracas, Venezuela, where he was the featured speaker at a half-day
symposium on nanotechnology. Chris talked about the implications of
nanotechnology for developing countries. His remarks were
well received by an audience of about forty, and were written up in detail in
El Nacional, a major Venezuelan
newspaper.
We want to thank José Luis
Cordeiro, from CRN's Board of Advisors, for
helping to make this event possible.
CRN Goes Around the World
Since the founding of CRN in
December 2002, we have had the opportunity to address conferences and groups in
twelve countries on five continents. Our work has been published extensively
in Chinese, Russian, Spanish, and Portuguese (as well as English), and
references to "Center for Responsible Nanotechnology" can be found
on the Internet in at least 15 additional languages, including Arabic,
Czech, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Persian,
Polish, Swedish, and Turkish.
Based on
one analysis of the world’s most influential languages, the next most
valuable language to have our ideas published in would be French, although
Arabic, German, Japanese, and Hindu/Urdu also would be very useful.
Previous translation of CRN's work has been accomplished by
volunteers. We thank them, and encourage volunteer translators in other
languages to come forward.
WorldChanging Book Published
Worldchanging: A
User's Guide for the 21st Century was published on November 1. This
608-page book includes chapters on Cities, Communities, Business, Politics,
Shelter, and more. CRN wrote quite a bit of material for the book's section on
nanotechnology. We’ve received our contributor’s copy and have to say we’ve seen
nothing else like it since the good old days of the Whole Earth Catalog.
According to the book’s editor,
Alex
Steffen, sales are brisk and reviews have been almost uniformly positive.
IEEE Fellows Predictions
More than 700
IEEE Fellows — about half of them academic researchers, the rest working in
industry — were asked to forecast trends within their area of expertise over the
next 50 years.
The survey was a joint study conducted earlier this year by the Institute
for the Future and IEEE Spectrum. CRN’s Chris Phoenix analyzed some of
the results in
an article for our blog. Here is some of what he wrote:
56% of experts thought it was likely that it will be "commercially viable to
manufacture nanostructured materials to exact specifications without machining."
And of those, over 75% thought that this would happen within 20 years or less.
Meanwhile, almost 2/3 of experts expected "robust design tools for fabrication
at the nanoscale" to become available. They weren't asked directly about
molecular manufacturing, but enabling technologies are certainly looking
plausible. If you can do NEMS, five-nanometer commercial lithography, robust
design, and built-to-order nanostructured materials, then it's not a very big
step from there to NEMS-building-NEMS.
The paradigm is shifting. The nanoscale is rapidly moving from the domain of
scientists to the domain of engineers -- and the engineers know it, and are
looking forward to it.
Website Upgrade Begins
CRN’s main website (the one
you're on) has not changed much — in terms of its software platform and its
design — since we first went online in December 2002. We have added a
significant amount of content, of course, and many new features, but the site
has been in need of an overall upgrade for some time. Now we’re pleased to
announce that we have begun that process. We expect to have an improved
navigation structure, a cleaner look, and, most important, a more stable
software platform along with a more reliable server host. Great stuff ahead.
Feature Essay:
Preventing Errors in Molecular Manufacturing
Chris Phoenix, Director of Research, Center for Responsible Nanotechnology
What kind of system can perform a
billion manufacturing operations without an error?
Many people familiar with today's manufacturing technologies will assume that
such a thing is near-impossible. Today's manufacturing operations are doing very
well to get one error in a million products. To reduce the error to one in a
billion--to say nothing of one in a million billion, which Drexler talks about
in
Nanosystems--seems
ridiculously difficult. None of today's technologies could do it, despite many
decades of improvement. So how can molecular manufacturing theorists reasonably
expect to develop systems with such low error rates--much less, to develop them
on a schedule measured in years rather than decades?
There are physical systems today that have error rates even lower than molecular
manufacturing systems would require. A desktop computer executes more than a
billion instructions each second, and can operate for years without a single
error. Each instruction involves tens of millions of transistors, flipping on or
off with near-perfect reliability. If each transistor operation were an atom,
the computer would process about a gram of atoms each day--and they would all be
flawlessly handled.
The existence of computers demonstrates that an engineered, real-world system,
containing millions of interacting components, can handle simple operations in
vast numbers with an insignificant error rate. The computer must continue
working flawlessly despite changes in temperature, line voltage, and
electromagnetic noise, and regardless of what program it is asked to run.
The computer can do this because it is digital. Digital values are
discrete--each signal in the computer is either on or off, never in-between. The
signals are generated by transistor circuits which have a non-linear response to
input signals; an input that is anywhere near the ideal "on" or "off" level will
produce an output that is closer to the ideal. Deviations from perfection,
rather than building up, are reduced as the signal propagates from one
transistor to another. Even without active error detection, correction, or
feedback, the non-linear behavior of transistors means that error rates can be
kept as low as desired: for the purposes of computer designers, the error rate
of any signal is effectively zero.
An error rate of zero means that the signals inside a computer are perfectly
characterized: each signal and computation is exactly predictable. This allows a
very powerful design technique to be used, called "levels of abstraction."
Error-free operations can be combined in intricate patterns and in large
numbers, with perfectly predictable results. The result of any sequence of
operations can be calculated with certainty and precision. Thousands of
transistors can be combined into number-processing circuits that do arithmetic
and other calculations. Thousands of those circuits can be combined in
general-purpose processor chips that execute simple instructions. Thousands of
those instructions can be combined into data-processing functions. And those
functions can be executed thousands or even billions of times, in any desired
sequence, to perform any calculation that humans can invent... performing
billions of billions of operations with reliably zero errors.
Modern manufacturing operations, for all their precision, are not digital. There
is no discrete line between a good and a bad part--just as it's impossible to
say exactly when someone who loses one hair at a time becomes bald. Worse, there
is no mechanism in manufacturing that naturally restores precision. Difficult
and complicated processes are required to construct a machine more precise than
the machines used to build it. To build a modern machine such as a
computer-controlled lathe requires so many different techniques--polymer
chemistry, semiconductor lithography, metallurgy and metal working, and
thousands of others--that the "real world" will inevitably create errors that
must be detected and corrected. And to top it off, machines suffer from
wear--their dimensions change as they are used.
Given the problems inherent in today's manufacturing methods and machine
designs, the idea of building a fully automated general-purpose manufacturing
system that could build a complete duplicate of itself... is ridiculous.
The ability to form covalent solids by placing individual molecules changes all
that. Fundamentally, covalent bonds are digital: two atoms are either bonded, or
they are held some distance apart by a repelling force. (Not all bond types are
fully covalent, but many useful bonds including carbon-carbon bonds are.) If a
covalent bond is stretched out of shape, it will return to its ideal
configuration all by itself, without any need for external error detection,
correction, or feedback.
If a covalent-bonding manufacturing system performs an operation with less than
one atom out of place, then the resulting product will have exactly zero atoms
out of place. Just like transistor signals in a digital computer, imperfections
fade away all by themselves. (In both cases, a bit of energy is used up in
making the imperfections disappear.) In digital systems, there is no physical
law that requires imperfections to accumulate into errors--not in digital
computer logic, and not in atomic fabrication systems.
Atomic fabrication operations, like transistor operations, can be characterized
with great reliability. Only a few transistor operations are a sufficient
toolkit with which to design a computer. A general-purpose molecular
manufacturing system may use a dozen or so different kinds of atoms, and perhaps
100 reactions between the atoms. That is a small enough number to study each
reaction in detail, and know how it works with as much precision as necessary.
Each reaction can proceed in a predictable way each and every time it is
attempted.
A sequence of completely predictable operations will itself have a completely
predictable outcome, regardless of the length of the sequence. If each one of a
sequence of a billion reactions is carried out as expected, then the final
product can be produced reliably.
Chemists who read this may be objecting that there's no such thing as a reaction
with 100% yield. Answering that objection in detail would require a separate
essay--but briefly, mechanical manipulation and control of reactants can in many
cases prevent unwanted reaction pathways as well as shifting the energetics so
far (hundreds of zJ/bond or kJ/mole) that the missed reaction rate is reduced by
many orders of magnitude.
At this point, it is necessary to consider the "real world." What factors, in
practice, will reduce the predictability of mechanically-guided molecular
reaction machinery?
One factor that doesn't have to be considered in a well-designed system of this
type is wear. Again, it would take a separate essay to discuss wear in detail,
but wear in a covalent solid requires breaking strong inter-atomic bonds, and a
well-designed system will never, in normal operation, exert enough force on any
single atom to cause its bonds to break. Likewise, machines built with the same
sequence of reliable operations will themselves be identical. Once a machine is
characterized, all of its siblings will be just as fully understood.
Mechanical vibration from outside the system is unlikely to be a problem. It is
a problem in today's nanotech tools because the tools are far bigger than the
manipulations or measurements those tools perform--big enough to have slow
vibrational periods and high momentum. Nanoscale tools, such as would be used in
a molecular manufacturing system, would have vibrational frequencies in the
gigahertz or higher, and momentum vanishingly small compared to restoring
forces.
It is possible that vibrations generated within the system, from previous
operations of the system or of neighboring systems, could be a problem. In
computers, transistor operations can cause voltage ripples that cause headaches
for designers, and are probably analogous. But these problems are practical, not
fundamental.
Contaminant molecules should not be a problem in a well-designed system. The
ability to build covalent solids without error implies the ability to build
hermetically sealed enclosures. Feedstock molecules would have to be taken in
through the enclosures, but sorting mechanisms have been planned that should
reject any contaminants in the feedstock stream with extremely low error rates.
There are ways for a manufacturing system inside a sealed enclosure to build
another system of the same size or larger without breaking the seal. It would
take a third essay to discuss these topics in detail, but they have been
considered and none of the problems appears unlikely to be addressable in
practice.
Despite everything written above, there will be some fraction of molecular
manufacturing systems that suffer from errors--if nothing else, background
levels of ionizing radiation will cause at least some bond breakage. In theory,
an imperfect machine could fabricate more imperfect machines, perpetuating and
perhaps exacerbating the error. However, in practice, this seems unlikely.
Whereas a perfect manufacturing machine could do a billion operations without
error, an imperfect machine would probably make at least one atom-placement
error fairly early in the fabrication sequence. That first error would leave an
atom out of its expected position on the surface of the workpiece. A flawed
workpiece surface would usually cause a cascade of further fabrication errors in
the same product, and long before a product could be completed, the process
would be hopelessly jammed. Thus, imperfect machines would quickly become inert,
before producing even one imperfect product.
The biggest source of unpredictability probably will be thermal noise, sometimes
referred to as Brownian motion. (Quantum uncertainty and Heisenberg uncertainty
are similar but smaller sources of unpredictability.) Thermal noise means that
the exact dimensions of a mechanical system will change unpredictably, too
rapidly to permit active compensation. In other words, the exact position of the
operating machinery cannot be known. The degree of variance depends on the
temperature of the system, as well as the stiffness of the mechanical design. If
the position varies too far, then a molecule-bonding operation may result in one
of several unpredictable outcomes. This is a practical problem, not a
fundamental limitation; in any given system, the variance is limited, and there
are a number of ways to reduce it. More research on this point is needed, but so
far, high-resolution computational chemistry experiments by Robert Freitas seem
to show that even without using some of the available tricks, difficult
molecule-placement operations can be carried out with high reliability at liquid
nitrogen temperatures and possibly at room temperature. If positional variance
can be reduced to the point where the molecule is placed in approximately the
right position, the digital nature of covalent bonding will do the rest.
This is a key point:
The mechanical unpredictability in
the system does not have to be reduced to zero, or even extremely close to zero,
in order to achieve extremely high levels of reliability in the product.
As long as each reaction trajectory leads closer to the right outcome than to
competing outcomes, the atoms will naturally be pulled into their proper
configuration each time--and by the time the next atoms are deposited, any
positional error will have dissipated into heat, leaving the physical bond
structure perfectly predictable for the next operation.
Molecular manufacturing requires an error rate that is extremely low by most
standards, but is quite permissive compared to the error rates necessary for
digital computers. Error rate is an extremely important topic, and
unfortunately, understanding of errors in mechanically guided chemistry is
susceptible to incorrect intuitions from chemistry, manufacturing, and even
physics (many physicists assume that entropy must increase without considering
that the system is not closed). It appears that the nature of covalent bonds
provides an automatic error-reducing mechanism that will make molecular
manufacturing closer in significant ways to computer logic than to today's
manufacturing or chemistry.
Three previous science essays have touched on related topics:
Who remembers
analog computers? (February 2006)
Coping with
Nanoscale Errors (September 2004)
The Bugbear of
Entropy (May 2004)
Subsequent CRN science
essays will cover topics that this essay raised but did not have space to cover
in detail.
C-R-Newsletter #46 October 30, 2006
Doomsday Discussion
CRN at the Naval War College
Global Futures Strategist
New Zealand Gets Organized
Treder Speech for Download
CRN Goes to Brazil
Books in the Works
Feature Essay: Recycling
Nano-Products
Every month is full of activity for CRN. To follow the latest
happenings on a daily basis, be sure to check our
Responsible Nanotechnology weblog.
==========
Doomsday Discussion
The Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists—famed for its
Doomsday
Clock that now sits at seven minutes to midnight—is holding a series of
“Doomsday Reconsidered” meetings this year to look at future threats to
civilization. On October 12-13, CRN Director of Research
Chris Phoenix took part in a program in Washington
DC sponsored by the group. Chris was invited to speak about “Threats to Society
from Nanotechnology.” The organization’s executive director
Kennette Benedict says:
“What we're doing is taking stock of the threats that might be catastrophic to
human societies.”
As well as the continuing danger of atomic weapons, new threats are being
investigated. Benedict says: "We're looking at new developments in life
sciences, in synthetic biology, for instance, and some of the emerging
technologies, nanotechnologies and how these may converge with life and
developments in biotechnologies, and at information technology and the
vulnerabilities of civilian infrastructure."
CRN at the Naval War College
On October 24, CRN Executive Director Mike Treder
met with a group of senior officers and affiliated civilian researchers at the
US Naval War College in
Newport, Rhode Island. Mike was invited to address the
Strategic Studies Group
on the subject of the disruptive potential of molecular manufacturing. The
wide-ranging three-hour conversation covered not just military applications, but
other societal implications as well.
Global Futures Strategist
We are pleased to announce the appointment of
Jamais Cascio as a
new Special Associate of CRN. Jamais, who
writes about the intersection of emerging technologies and cultural
transformation, and specializes in the design and creation of plausible
scenarios of the future, will serve as a Global Futures Strategist for CRN.
In 2003, Jamais co-founded the award-winning weblog
WorldChanging.com,
covering topics including energy and the environment, global development, open
source technologies, and catalysts for social change. His essays about
technology and society have appeared in a variety of publications, and he has
worked on a number of television, film, and game projects, including two books
for the science fiction game series
Transhuman Space.
New Zealand Gets Organized
As part of Mike Treder’s recent speaking tour of New
Zealand and Australia, he was
interviewed for a program on New Zealand’s national radio network. Fern
Evitt, a resident of Auckland, heard the program, was impressed, and decided to
attend Mike’s public presentation on September 14 in Auckland. That night, she
introduced herself to Mike and said she would like to support CRN’s work by
creating an organization in New Zealand for others who are interested in
learning more about the societal implications of advanced nanotechnology.
Fern Evitt has a background in international trade, marketing, and general
management, and is a member of the New Zealand Institute of Directors. We are quite pleased to have someone of Fern’s caliber making a
commitment to help CRN on a local basis. If you live in New Zealand and would
like to get involved, please contact her at
fernevitt@yahoo.com
Treder Speech for Download
A radio station in Nelson, New Zealand, recorded one of the 30-minute
presentations that Mike Treder made on his lecture tour.
They have posted (with our permission) the audio file on their website for
downloading. You may enjoy listening to it. Thanks, 'Fresh FM'!
CRN Goes to Brazil
Chris Phoenix, Director of Research for CRN, will give a talk in Brazil next
month at the
Third International Seminar on Nanotechnology, Society, and the Environment.
The event is November 6-10, and is sponsored by the University of Sao Paulo.
Chris will speak on the subject of nanotechnology and economics.
Books in the Works
Mike Treder and Chris Phoenix, the principals
of CRN, have been asked to contribute chapters for three new non-fiction books
that will cover nanotechnology and its implications. Nanoethics is being
compiled and edited by Patrick Lin; Global Catastrophic Risks by Nick
Bostrom and Milan Cirkovic; and Green Nanotech by Geoffrey Hunt.
In addition, Chris and Mike contributed to Worldchanging: A User's Guide for
the 21st Century, which is scheduled for publication on November 1. This
608-page book
includes chapters on Cities, Communities, Business, Politics, Shelter, and more.
And, yes, as we have often been asked, we are planning to write our own book.
It’s a big undertaking, but we’ll keep you informed as progress is made.
Feature Essay: Recycling Nano-Products
Chris Phoenix, Director of Research, Center for Responsible Nanotechnology
We are often asked, "How will nanofactory-built products be recycled?"
One of the advantages of molecular manufacturing is
that it will use very strong and high-performance materials. Most of them
probably will not be biodegradable. So what will save us from being buried in
nano-litter?
The first piece of good news is that nano-built products will use materials more
efficiently. Mechanical parts can be built mostly without defects, making them a
lot stronger than today's materials. Active components can be even more compact,
because scaling laws are advantageous to small machines: motors may have a
million times the power density, and computers may be a million times as
compact. So for equivalent functionality, nano-built products will use perhaps
100-1000 times less material. In fact, some products may be so light that they
have to be ballasted with water. (This would also make carbon-based products
fireproof.)
The second good news is that carbon-based products will burn once any water
ballast is removed. Traditionally, incineration has been a dirty way to dispose
of trash; heavy metals, chlorine compounds, and other nasty stuff goes up the
smokestack and pollutes wherever the wind blows. Fortunately, one of the first
products of molecular manufacturing will be efficient molecular sorting systems.
It will be possible to remove the harmless and useful gases from the combustion
products--perhaps using them to build the next products--and send the rest back
to be re-burned.
The third good news is that fewer exotic materials and elements should be
needed. Today's products use a lot of different substances for different jobs.
Molecular manufacturing, by contrast, will be able to implement different
functions by building different molecular shapes out of a much smaller set of
materials. For example, carbon can be either an insulator or a conductor, shapes
built of carbon can be both flexible or rigid, and carbon molecules can be
transparent (diamond) or opaque (graphite).
Finally, it may be possible to build many full-size products out of modular
building blocks: microscopic
nanoblocks
that might contain a billion atoms and provide flexible functionality. In
theory, rather than discarding and recycling a product, it could be pulled apart
into its constituent blocks, which could then be reassembled into a new product.
However, this may be impractical, since the nanoblocks would have to be
carefully cleaned in order to fit together precisely enough to make a reliable
product. But re-using rather than scrapping products is certainly a possibility
that's worth investigating further.
Not surprisingly, there is also some bad news. The first bad news is that carbon
is not the only possible material for molecular manufacturing. It is probably
the most flexible, but others have been proposed. For example, sapphire
(corundum, alumina) is a very strong crystal of aluminum oxide. It will not
burn, and alumina products probably will have to be scrapped into landfills if
their nanoblocks cannot be re-used. Of course, if we are still using industrial
abrasives, old nano-built products might simply be crushed and used for that
purpose.
The second bad news is that nano-built products will come in a range of sizes,
and some will be small enough that they will be easy to lose. Let me stress that
a nano-built product is not a grey goo robot, any more
than a toaster is. Tiny products may be sensors, computer nodes, or medical
devices, but they will have specialized functionality--not general-purpose
manufacturing capability. A lost product will likely be totally inert. But
enough tiny lost products could add up to an irritating dust.
The third bad news is that widespread use of personal
nanofactories will make it very easy and inexpensive to build stuff.
Although each product will use far less material than today's versions, we may
be using far more products.
Some readers may be wondering about "disassemblers" and whether they could be
used for recycling. Unfortunately, the "disassembler" described in Eric
Drexler's
Engines of Creation was a slow and energy-intensive research tool, not
an efficient way of taking apart large amounts of matter. It might be possible
to take apart old nano-products molecule by molecule, but it would probably be
less efficient than incinerating them.
Collecting products for disposal of is an interesting problem. Large products
can be handled one at a time. Small and medium-sized products might be enough of
a hassle to keep track of that people will be tempted to use them and forget
them. For example, networked sensors with one-year batteries might be scattered
around, used for two months, and then forgotten--better models would have been
developed long before the battery would wear out. In such cases, the products
might need to be collected robotically. Any product big enough to have an RFID
antenna would be able to be interrogated as to its age and when it was last
used. Ideally, it would also tell who its owner had been, so the owner could be
billed, fined, or warned as appropriate.
This essay has described what could be. Environmentally friendly cleanup and
disposal schemes will not be difficult to implement in most cases. However, as
with so much else about molecular manufacturing, the availability of good
choices does not mean that the best options necessarily will be chosen. It is
likely that profligate manufacturing and bad design will lead to some amount of
nano-litter. But the world will be very fortunate if nano-litter turns out to be
the biggest problem created by molecular
manufacturing.
C-R-Newsletter #45 September 30, 2006
CRN Down Under
CRN at MIT, LiveBlogging
CRN in Albany
Molecular Manufacturing “Idea
Factory” Funded
New Ideas for DNA
Construction
Molecular Manufacturing Video
Foresight Institute Awards
Feynman Prizes
Feature Essay: New
Opportunities for DNA Design
Every month is full of activity for CRN. To follow the latest
happenings on a daily basis, be sure to check our
Responsible Nanotechnology weblog.
==========
CRN Down Under
CRN’s Executive Director, Mike Treder, spent two
weeks in New Zealand and one week in Australia this month, giving numerous talks
on molecular manufacturing. Mike reports that he spoke to large audiences, and
that he encountered no skepticism about whether molecular manufacturing was
possible. In the middle of his busy schedule, Mike was able to blog his
experiences
here,
here,
here,
and
here.
The trip was covered by
ABC News. The article was a good summary of CRN’s message. At the end, they
included opinions from four scientists. None of the scientists asserted that
molecular manufacturing was impossible – a nice change from a few years ago,
when it seemed every article on any kind of nanotech had to end with some
scientist giving a bogus explanation of why it couldn’t possibly work. The
scientists did say that CRN’s timeline was too optimistic, prompting
this
blog post from our Director of Research, Chris
Phoenix.
CRN at MIT, LiveBlogging
On September 27 and 28, Mike attended the Emerging Technologies Conference at
MIT, and LiveBlogged it in eight articles, covering
Amazon.com,
online media,
innovation,
cheap
human genomes,
autonomous vehicles,
U.S.
technology level,
energy, and
anti-aging research.
CRN in Albany
Defying alphabetical order, Albany came between Australia and Boston on Mike’s
itinerary. He spoke at
Nanotechnology 2006, a two-day international conference September 25-26
hosted by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The title of Mike’s talk was
“Fourth-Generation Nanotechnology: Disruptive Abundance.”
Molecular Manufacturing “Idea Factory” Funded
The UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) does
something they call “IDEAS Factory” which involves 20-30 interdisciplinary
researchers spending two days brainstorming on how to generate cutting-edge
research on an interesting topic.
An IDEAS factory has been announced to study “Software Control of Matter at the
Atomic or Molecular Scale.” The project description includes this statement:
“One route to this goal might be to take inspiration from 3D rapid prototyping
devices, and conceive of some kind of pick-and-place mechanism operating at the
atomic or molecular level, perhaps based on scanning probe techniques.” In
addition to hosting the brainstorming “sandbox,” 1.5 million GBP have been
earmarked for whatever research ideas are generated by this proposal.
For more details and technical commentary, see
our
blog, Richard Jones’s
Soft
Machines blog, or the
project website.
New Ideas for DNA Construction
CRN Research Director Chris Phoenix got inspired recently, thinking about the
possible molecular manufacturing implications of the new DNA design technique
that uses short, easily manufactured “staples” to stitch together a long, easily
obtained DNA strand into folds. Chris wrote several blog posts
here,
here,
and
here, and has made that the topic of this month’s
Feature Essay.
Molecular Manufacturing Video
The Society of Manufacturing Engineers has created a new video focused on
molecular manufacturing, as well as nanomanufacturing. The video is a series of
interviews with people working on various aspects. Although the video is not
free, SME has made a transcript available free on
their page, and Chris
reviewed it on our blog.
Foresight Institute Awards Feynman Prizes
Each year, Foresight Nanotech Institute awards Feynman Prizes for experimental
and theoretical work toward molecular manufacturing, as well as a Communication
Prize and a Distinguished Student award.
This year, the experimental and theoretical prizes were both awarded to the same
group – the team that invented the DNA stapling technique, Drs.
Erik Winfree
and Paul W.K.
Rothemund of Caltech.
The Communication prize was awarded to Dr. J. Storrs (Josh) Hall. Josh was a
longtime moderator of the sci.nanotech newsgroup, and recently the author of
Nanofuture: What's Next For
Nanotechnology.
The Distinguished Student award was received by
Berhane Temelso.
CRN congratulates all the prize winners for their excellent work.
Feature Essay: New Opportunities for DNA Design
Chris Phoenix, Director of Research, Center for Responsible Nanotechnology
DNA is a very versatile molecule, if you know how to use it. Of course, the
genetic material for all organisms (except some viruses) is made of DNA. But it
is also useful for building shapes and structures, and it is this use that is
most interesting to a nanotechnologist.
Readers familiar with DNA complementarity should skip this paragraph.
Non-technical readers should read my earlier
science essay on DNA folding. Briefly, DNA is made of four molecules,
abbreviated A, C, G, and T, in a long string (polymer). G and C attract each
other, as do A and T. A string with the sequence AACGC will tend to attach
itself to another string with the sequence GCGTT (the strings match
head-to-tail). Longer sequences attach more permanently. Heating up a mixture of
DNA makes the matched strings vibrate apart; slowly cooling a mixture makes the
strings reattach in (hopefully) their closest-matched configuration.
Until recently, designing a shape out of DNA was a painstaking process of
planning sequences that would match in just the right way – and none of the
wrong ways. Over the years, a number of useful design patterns were developed,
including ways to attach four strands of DNA side by side for extra stiffness;
ways to make structures that would contract or twist when a third strand was
added to bridge two strands in the structure; and three-way junctions between
strands, useful for building geometric shapes. A new structure or technique
would make the news every year or so. In addition to design difficulties, it was
hard to make sufficiently long error-free strands to form useful shapes.
A few months ago, a
new technique was invented by Dr. Paul Rothemund. Instead of building all
the DNA artificially for his shapes, he realized that half of it could be
derived from a high-quality natural source with a fixed but random sequence, and
the other half could be divided into short, easily synthesized pieces –
“staples” – with sequences chosen to match whatever sequence the natural strand
happens to have at the place the staple needs to attach. Although the random
strand will tend to fold up on itself randomly to some extent, the use of large
numbers of precisely-matching staples will pull it into the desired
configuration.
If a bit of extra DNA is appended to the end of a staple piece, the extra bit
will stick out from the shape. This extra DNA can be used to attach multiple
shapes together, or to grab on to a DNA-tagged molecule or particle. This
implies that DNA-shape structures can be built that include other molecules for
increased strength or stiffness, or useful features such as actuation.
Although the first shapes designed were planar, because planar shapes are easier
to scan with atomic force microscopes so as to verify what’s been built, the
stapling technique can also be used to pull the DNA strand into a
three-dimensional shape. So this implies that with a rather small design effort
(at least by the standards of a year ago), 3D structures built of DNA can be
constructed, with “Velcro” hanging off of them to attach them to other DNA
structures, and with other molecules either attached to the surface or embedded
in the interior.
The staple strands are short and easy to synthesize (and don’t need to be
purified), so the cost is quite low. According to page 81 of
Rothemund’s notes [PDF],
a single staple costs about $7.00 – for 80 nmol, or 50 quintillion molecules.
Enough different staples to make a DNA shape cost about $1,500 to synthesize.
The backbone strand costs about $12.50 per trillion molecules. Now, those
trillion molecules only add up to 4 micrograms. Building a human-scale product
out of that material would be far too costly. But a computer chip with only 100
million transistors costs a lot more than $12.50.
The goal that’s the focus of this essay is combining a lot of these molecular
“bricks” to build engineered heterogeneous structures with huge numbers of
atoms. In other words, rather than creating simple tilings of a few bricks,
stick them together in arbitrary computer-controlled patterns, constructs in
which every brick can be different and independently designed.
I was hoping that nano-manipulation robotics had advanced to the point where the
molecular shapes could be attached to large handles that would be grabbed and
positioned by a robot, making the brick go exactly where it’s wanted relative to
the growing construct, but I’m told that the state of the art probably isn’t
there yet. Just one of the many problems is that if you can’t sense the molecule
as you’re positioning it, you don’t know if temperature shifts have caused the
handle to expand or contract. However, there may be another way to do it.
An atomic force microscope (AFM) uses a small tip. With focused ion beam (FIB)
nano-machining, the tip can be hollowed out so as to form a pocket suitable for
a brick to nestle in. By depositing DNA Velcro with different sequences at
different places in the pocket (which could probably be done by coating the
whole tip, burning away a patch with the FIB, then depositing a different
sequence), it should be possible to orient the brick relative to the tip. (If
the brick has two kinds of Velcro on each face, and the tip only has one kind
deposited, the brick will stick less strongly to the tip than to its target
position.)
Now, the tip can be used for ordinary microscopy, except that instead of having
a silicon point, it will have a corner of the DNA brick. It should still be
usable to scan the construct, hopefully with enough resolution to tell where the
tip is relative to the construct. This would solve the nano-positioning problem.
I said above that the brick would have DNA Velcro sticking out all over. For
convenience, it may be desirable to have a lot of bricks of identical design,
floating around the construct – as long as they would not get stuck in places
they’re not wanted. This would allow the microscope tip to pick up a brick from
solution, then deposit it, then pick up another right away, without having to
move away to a separate “inkwell.” But why don’t the bricks stick to the
construct and each other, and if they don’t, then how can the tip deposit them,
and why do they stay where they’re put?
To make the bricks attach only when and where they’re put requires three
conditions. First, the Velcro should be designed to be sticky, so that the
bricks will stay firmly in place once attached. Second, the Velcro should be
capped with other DNA strands so that the bricks will not attach by accident.
Third, the capping strands should be designed so that physically pushing the
brick against a surface will weaken the bond between Velcro and cap, allowing
the Velcro to get free and bind to the target surface. For example, if the cap
strands stick stiffly out away from the block (perhaps by being bound to two
Velcro strands at once), then mechanical pressure will weaken the connection.
Mechanical pressure, of course, can be applied by an AFM. Scan with low force,
and when the brick is in the right place, press down with the microscope. Wait
for the cap strands to float away and the Velcro to pair up, and the brick is
deposited. With multiple Velcro strands between each brick, the chance of them
all coming loose at once and allowing the brick to be re-capped can be made
miniscule, especially since the effective concentration of Velcro strands would
be far higher than the concentration of cap strands. But before the brick was
pushed into place, the chance of all the cap strands coming loose at once also
would have been miniscule. (For any physicists reading this, thermodynamic
equilibrium between bound and free bricks still applies, but the transition rate
can be made even slower than the above concentration argument implies, since the
use of mechanical force allows an extremely high energy barrier. If the
mechanical force applied is 100 pN over 5 nm, that is 500 zJ, approximately the
dissociation energy of a C-C bond.)
So, it seems that with lots of R&D (but without a whole lot of DNA design), it
might be possible to stick DNA bricks (plus attached molecules) together in
arbitrary patterns, using an AFM. But an AFM is going to be pretty slow. It
would be nice to make the work go faster by doing it in parallel. My
NIAC project suggests a
way to do that.
The plan is to build an array of “towers” or “needles” out of DNA bricks. In the
tip of each one, put a brick-binding cavity. Use an AFM to build the first one
in the middle of a flat surface. Then use that to build a second and third
needle on an opposing surface. (One of the surfaces would be attached to a nano-positioner.)
Use those two towers to build a fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh on the first
surface. The number of towers could grow exponentially.
By the time this is working, there may be molecules available that can act as
fast, independently addressable, nanoscale actuators. Build a mechanism into
each tower that lets it extend or retract – just a nanometer or so. Now, when
the towers are used to build something, the user can select which bricks to
place and which ones to hold back. This means that different towers, all
attached to the same surface and moved by the same nano-positioner, can be doing
different things. Now, instead of an exponential number of identical designs, it
has become possible to build an exponential number of different designs, or to
work on many areas of a large heterogeneous design in parallel.
A cubic micron is not large by human standards, but it is bigger than most
bacteria. There would be about 35,000 DNA bricks in a cubic micron. If a brick
could be placed every fifteen seconds, then it would take a week to build a
cubic micron out of bricks. This seems a little fast for a single AFM that has
to bind bricks from solution, find a position, and then push the brick into
place, even if all steps were fully automated – but it might be doable with a
parallel array (either an array of DNA needles, or a multi-tip AFM). If every
brick were different, it would cost about $50 million for the staples, but of
course not every brick will be different. For 1,000 different bricks, it would
cost only about $1.5 million.
We will want the system to deposit any of a number of brick types in any
location. How to select one of numerous types? The simplest way is to make all
bricks bind to the same tip, then flush them through one type at a time. This is
slow and wasteful. Better to include several tips in one machine, and then flush
through a mixture of bricks that will each bind to only one tip. The best
answer, once really high-function bricks are available and you’re using
DNA-built tips instead of hollowed-out AFM tips, is to make the tips
reconfigurable by using fast internal actuators to present various combinations
of DNA strands for binding of various differently-tagged bricks.
I started by suggesting that a scanning probe microscope be used to build the
first construct. Self-assembly also could be used to build small constructs, if
you can generate enough distinct blocks. But you may not have to build hundreds
of different bricks to make them join in arbitrary patterns. Instead, build
identical bricks, and cap the Velcro strands with a second-level “Velcro
staple.” Start with a generic brick coated with Velcro – optionally, put a
different Velcro sequence on each side. Stir that together with strands that are
complementary to the Velcro at one end and contain a recognition pattern on the
other end. Now, with one generic brick and six custom-made Velcro staples, you
have a brick with a completely unique recognition pattern on each side. Do that
for a number of bricks, and you can make them bind together any way you want.
One possible problem with this is that DNA binding operations usually need to be
“annealed” – heated to a temperature where the DNA falls apart, then cooled
slowly. This implies that the Velcro-staple approach would need three different
temperature ranges: one to form the shapes, one to attach the staples, and one
to let the shapes join together.
The Velcro-staple idea might even be tested today, using only the basic
DNA-shape technology, with one low-cost shape and a few dozen very-low-cost
staples. Plus, of course, whatever analysis tools you’ll need to convince you
that you’re making what you think you’re making.
There is a major issue involved here that I have not yet touched on. Although
the DNA staple technique makes a high percentage of good shapes, it also makes a
lot of broken or incomplete shapes. How can the usable shapes be sorted from the
broken shapes? Incomplete shapes may be sorted out by chromatography. Broken
shapes might possibly be rejected by adding a fluorescence pair and using a cell
sorter to reject shapes that did not fluoresce properly. Another possibility, if
using a scanning probe microscope (as opposed to the “blind” multi-needle
approach) is to detect the overall shape of the brick by deconvolving it against
a known surface feature, and if an unwanted shape is found, heat the tip to make
it dissociate.
This is just a sketch of some preliminary ideas. But it does go to show that the
new DNA staple technology makes things seem plausible that would not have been
thinkable before it was developed.
C-R-Newsletter #44 August 28, 2006
Mike Treder on the BBC
CRN Goes to Tennessee
Existential Risks of
Nanotechnology
Nanomedicine Web Site
Sander Olson Interviews
CRN Goes Down Under
CRN Goes to Albany
Feature Essay: Military
Implications of Molecular Manufacturing
Every month is full of activity for CRN. To follow the latest
happenings on a daily basis, be sure to check our
Responsible Nanotechnology
weblog.
==========
Mike Treder on the BBC
Nanotechnology was the subject of the August 14, 2006, edition of BBC Radio’s
Business Daily, a program that “focuses on issues and trends, providing
context, reportage, debate, opinion, and in-depth interviews.” CRN Executive
Director Mike Treder was a
featured guest on the show, offering an overview of the benefits and risks
of advanced nanotechnology. The program was heard not only in the UK and in
Europe, but also in the US on National Public Radio.
CRN Goes to Tennessee
Last week, CRN’s Director of Research, Chris Phoenix,
traveled to Oak Ridge, Tennessee (USA) to speak at a conference titled “The
Next Industrial Revolution: Nanotechnology and Manufacturing.” The
conference was sponsored by the Society of
Manufacturing Engineers.
Chris's talk
was titled, "From Nanotechnology to Molecular Manufacturing," explaining to a
mostly-technical audience why molecular manufacturing will be very attractive to
develop, and touching on several pathways to development. The audience appeared
receptive. Two other speakers, Josh Hall and Tihamer Toth-Fejel, made molecular
manufacturing the focus of their remarks. Other speakers referred to it in
passing. Some were supportive and some were skeptical of the technical utility
of MM, but the skeptical ones spoke carefully and moderately about their doubts.
The
conference also included one talk on nanoparticle health risks by Charlene
Bayer, Principal Research Scientist at Georgia Tech Research Institute. Most of
her presentation consisted of explaining how much we don't know yet — and by
implication, how many risks might be waiting for us. She discussed pathways for
nanoparticles to enter the body and be transported inside it. Although the talk
was short on actual evidence for toxicity, she showed one very impressive slide,
showing the difference in immune system response to 21 nm vs. 250 nm TiO2
nanoparticles. Not only was the response an order of magnitude greater, but also
it lasted for many months.
Existential Risks of Nanotechnology
Nanomedicine Web Site
Sander Olson Interviews
Sander Olson
is one of the original developers of the NanoApex and NanoMagazine
web sites. Over the years, Sander has conducted numerous interviews with notable
figures working in or commenting on the field of nanotechnology. Since the
acquisition of his sites in 2005 by the International Small Technology Network,
many of Sander's interviews have not been available on the web. To correct this,
CRN has published a number of them on our site.
Recently added are interviews with Britt Gillette, Christine Peterson, Damien
Broderick, and several others. More will be posted in the weeks to come.
The Institution of
Professional Engineers New Zealand (IPENZ) has invited CRN Executive Director
Mike Treder to go on a speaking tour of 11 cities over two weeks, from September
2-14, 2006. The full
itinerary has just been posted on their web site, along with this
introduction:
Nanotechnology is the
engineering of tiny machines - the projected ability to build things from the
bottom up inside nanofactories, using techniques and tools being
developed today to make complete, highly advanced products. Shortly after this
envisioned molecular machinery is created, it will result in a manufacturing
revolution, probably causing severe disruption. It also has serious economic,
social, environmental, and military implications.
After New Zealand, Mike will
travel to Australia for a series of meetings and speaking events organized by
universities in Melbourne, Sydney, and Canberra, and made possible by
Nanotechnology Victoria.
CRN Goes to Albany
Immediately after returning from Australia and New Zealand, CRN’s Mike Treder
will go to Albany, New York, to speak at Nanotechnology 2006, a two-day
international conference September 25-26 hosted by Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute. The title of Mike’s talk is “Fourth-Generation Nanotechnology:
Disruptive Abundance.”
Feature Essay: Military Implications of Molecular Manufacturing
Chris Phoenix, Director of Research, Center for Responsible Nanotechnology
(Originally published in the July 2006 issue of
NanoNews-Now -- reprinted by permission)
This essay
will survey the technology of molecular manufacturing, the basic capabilities of
its products, some possible weapon systems, some tactical and strategic
considerations, and some possible effects of molecular manufacturing on the
broader context of societies and nations. However, all of this discussion must
take place in the context of the underlying fact that the effects and outcome of
molecular manufacturing will be almost inconceivable, and certainly not
susceptible to shallow or linear analysis.
Take a
minute and try to imagine a modern battlefield without electricity. No radar or
radios; no satellites; no computers; no night vision, or even flashlights; no
airplanes, and few ground vehicles of any kind. Imagination is not sufficient to
generate this picture—it simply doesn't make sense to talk of a modern military
without electricity.
Molecular
manufacturing will have a similarly profound effect on near-future military
affairs.
Electricity
is a general-purpose energy technology, useful for applications from motors to
data processing. A few inventions, ramified and combined—the storage battery,
transistor, electromagnet, and a few others—are powerful enough to be necessary
components of almost all modern military equipment and activities.
If it is
impossible to conceive of a modern military without electricity—a technology
that exists, and the use of which we can study—it will be even less feasible to
try to imagine a military with molecular manufacturing.
Molecular
manufacturing will be the world's first general-purpose manufacturing
technology. Its products will be many times more plentiful, more intricate, and
higher performance than any existing product. They will be built faster and less
expensively, speeding research and development. They will cover a far greater
range of size, energy, and distance than today's weapons systems. As
increasingly powerful weapons make the battlefield untenable for human soldiers,
computers vastly more powerful and compact than today's will enable far higher
degrees of automation and remote operation. Kilogram-scale manufacturing
systems, building directly from the latest blueprints in minutes, will utterly
transform supply, logistics, and deployment.
Radium and
X-rays were discovered within months of each other. Within a few years, X-rays
had inspired stories about military uses of “death rays.” Decades later, Madame
Curie gave speeches on the wonderful anti-cancer properties of radium. It would
have been difficult or impossible to predict that a few decades after that,
X-rays would be a ubiquitous medical technology, and nuclear radiation would be
the basis of the world's most horrific weapons. While reading the rest of this
article, keep in mind that the implications of various molecular manufacturing
products and capabilities will be at least as unpredictable and
counterintuitive.
Technical Basis of Molecular
Manufacturing
At its
foundation, molecular manufacturing works by doing a few precise fabrication
operations, very rapidly, at the molecular level, under computer control. It can
thus be viewed as a combination of mechanical engineering and chemistry, with
some additional help from rapid prototyping, automated assembly, and related
fields of research.
Atoms and
inter-atomic bonds are completely precise: every atom of a type is identical to
every other, and there are only a few types. Barring an identifiable error in
fabrication, two molecules manufactured according to the same blueprint will be
identical in structure and shape (with transient variations of predictable scale
due to thermal noise and other known physical effects). This consistency will
allow fully automated fabrication. Computer controlled addition of molecular
fragments, creating a few well-characterized bond types in a multitude of
selected locations, will enable a vast range of components to be built with
extremely high reliability. Building with reliable components, higher levels of
structure can retain the same predictability and engineerability.
A
fundamental “scaling law” of physics is that small systems operate faster than
large systems. Moving at moderate speed over tiny distances, a nanoscale
fabrication system could perform many millions of operations per second,
creating products of its own mass and complexity in hours or even minutes. Along
with faster operation comes higher power density, again proportional to the
shrinkage: nanoscale machines might be a million times more compact than today's
technology. Computers would shrink even more profoundly, and non-electronic
technologies already analyzed could dissipate enough less power to make the
shrinkage feasible. Although individual nanoscale machines would have small
capacity, massive arrays could work together; it appears that gram-scale
computer and motor systems, and ton-scale manufacturing systems, preserving
nanoscale performance levels, can be built without running afoul of scaling laws
or other architectural constraints including cooling. Thus, products will be
buildable in a wide range of sizes.
A complete
list of advantages and capabilities of molecularly manufactured products, much
less an analysis of the physical basis of the advantages, would be beyond the
scope of this paper. But several additional advantages should be noted.
Precisely fabricated covalent materials will be much stronger than materials
formed by today's imprecise manufacturing processes. Precise, well-designed,
covalently structured bearings should suffer neither from wear nor from static
friction (stiction). Carbon can be an excellent conductor, an excellent
insulator, or a semiconductor, allowing a wide range of electrical and
electronic devices to be built in-place by a molecular manufacturing system.
Development of Molecular Manufacturing
Although its
capabilities will be far-reaching, the development of molecular manufacturing
may require a surprisingly small effort. A finite, and possibly small, number of
deposition reactions may suffice to build molecular structures with programmable
shape—and therefore, diverse and engineerable function. High-level architectures
for integrated kilogram-scale arrays of nanoscale manufacturing systems have
already been worked out in some detail. Current-day tools are already able to
remove and deposit atoms from selected locations in covalent solids. Engineering
of protein and other biopolymers is another pathway to molecularly precise
fabrication of engineered nanosystem components. Analysis tools, both physical
and theoretical, are developing rapidly.
As a general
rule, nanoscale research and development capabilities are advancing in
proportion to Moore's Law—even faster in some cases. Conceptual barriers to
developing molecular manufacturing systems are also falling rapidly. It seems
likely that within a few years, a program to develop a nanofactory will be
launched; some observers believe that one or more covert programs may already
have been launched. It also seems likely that, within a few years of the first
success, the cost of developing an independent capability will have dropped to
the point where relatively small groups can tackle the project. Without
stringent and widespread restrictions on technology, it most likely will not be
possible to prevent the development of multiple molecular manufacturing systems
with diverse owners.
Products of Molecular Manufacturing
All
exploratory engineering in the field to date has pointed to the same set of
conclusions about molecular manufacturing-built products:
1.
Manufacturing systems can build more manufacturing systems.
2. Small
products can be extremely compact.
3.
Human-scale products can be extremely inexpensive and lightweight.
4. Large
products can be astonishingly powerful.
If a
self-contained manufacturing system can be its own product, then manufacturing
systems can be inexpensive—even non-scarce. Product cost can approach the cost
of the feedstock and energy required to make it (plus licensing and regulatory
overhead). Although molecular manufacturing systems will be extremely portable,
most products will not include one—it will be more efficient to manufacture at a
dedicated facility with installed feedstock, energy, and cooling supplies.
The feature
size of nanosystems will probably be about 1 nanometer (nm), implying a million
features in a bacteria-sized object, a billion features per cubic micron, or a
trillion features in the volume of a ten-micron human cell. A million features
is enough to implement a simple CPU, along with sensors, actuators, power
supply, and supporting structure. Thus, the smallest robots may be
bacteria-sized, with all the scaling law advantages that implies, and a medical
system (or weapon system based thereon) could be able to interact with cells and
even sub-cellular structures on an equal footing. (See
Nanomedicine Vol. I:
Basic Capabilities for further exploration.)
As a general
rule of thumb, human-scale products may be expected to be 100-1000 times lighter
than today's versions. Covalent carbon-based materials such as buckytubes should
be at least 100 times stronger than steel, and materials could be used more
efficiently with more elegant construction techniques. Active components will
shrink even more. (Of course, inconveniently light products could be ballasted
with water.)
Large
nanofactories could build very large products, from spacecraft to particle
accelerators. Large products, like smaller ones, could benefit from stronger
materials and from active systems that are quite compact. Nanofactories should
scale to at least ton-per-hour production rates for integrated products, though
this might require massive cooling capacity depending on the sophistication of
the nanofactory design.
Possible Weapons Systems
The smallest
systems may not be actual weapons, but computer platforms for sensing and
surveillance. Such platforms could be micron-scale. The power requirement of a
1-MIPS computer might be on the order of 10-100 pW; at that rate, a cubic micron
of fuel might last for 100-1000 seconds. The computer itself would occupy
approximately one cubic micron.
Very small
devices could deliver fatal quantities of toxins to unprotected humans.
Even the
smallest ballistic projectiles (bullets) could contain supercomputers, sensors,
and avionics sufficient to guide them to targets with great accuracy. Flying
devices could be quite small. It should be noted that small devices could
benefit from a process of automated design tuning; milligram-scale devices could
be built by the millions, with slight variations in each design, and the best
designs used as the basis for the next “generation” of improvements; this could
enable, for example, UAV's in the laminar regime to be developed without a full
understanding of the relevant physics. The possibility of rapid design is far
more general than this, and will be discussed below.
The line
between bullets, missiles, aircraft, and spacecraft would blur. With lightweight
motors and inexpensive manufacturing, a vehicle could contain a number of
different disposable propulsion systems for different flight regimes. A
“briefcase to orbit” system appears feasible, though such a small device might
have to fly slowly to conserve fuel until it reached the upper atmosphere. It
might be feasible to use 1 kg of airframe (largely discarded) and 20 kg of fuel
(not counting oxidizer) to place 1 kg into orbit; some of the fuel would be used
to gather and liquify oxygen in the upper atmosphere for the rocket portion of
its flight. (Engineering studies have not yet been done for such a device, and
it might require somewhat more fuel than stated here.)
Advanced
construction could produce novel energy-absorbing materials involving
high-friction mechanical slippage under high stress via micro- or nano-scale
mechanical components. In effect, every molecule would be a shock absorber, and
the material could probably absorb mechanical energy until it was destroyed by
heat.
New kinds of
weapons might be developed more quickly with rapid inexpensive fabrication. Many
classes of device will be buildable monolithically. For example, a new type of
aircraft or even spacecraft might be tested an order of magnitude more rapidly
and inexpensively, reducing the cost of failure and allowing further
acceleration in schedule and more aggressive experimentation. Although materials
and molecular structures would not encompass today's full range of manufactured
substances, they could encompass many of the properties of those substances,
especially mechanical and electrical properties. This may enable construction of
weapons such as battlefield lasers, rail guns, and even more exotic
technologies.
Passive
armor certainly could not stop attacks from a rapid series of impacts by
precisely targeted projectiles. However, armor could get a lot smarter,
detecting incoming attacks and rapidly shifting to interpose material at the
right point. There may be a continuum from self-reconfiguring armor, to armor
that detaches parts of itself to hurl in the path of incoming attacks, to armor
that consists of a detached cloud of semi-independent counterweapons.
A new class
of weapon for wide-area destruction is kinetic impact from space. Small
impactors would be slowed by the atmosphere, but medium-to-large asteroids,
redirected onto a collision course, could destroy many square miles. The attack
would be detectable far in advance, but asteroid deflection and destruction
technology is not sufficiently advanced at this time to say whether a defender
with comparable space capacity could avoid being struck, especially if the
asteroid was defended by the attacker. Another class of space impactor is
lightweight solar sails accelerated to a respectable fraction of light speed by
passage near the sun. These could require massive amounts of inert shielding to
stop; it is not clear whether or not the atmosphere would perform this function
adequately.
A
hypothetical device often associated with molecular manufacturing is a small,
uncontrolled, exponentially self-replicating system. However, a self-replicating
system would not make a very good weapon. In popular conception, such a system
could be built to use a wide range of feedstocks, deriving energy from oxidizing
part of the material (or from ambient light), and converting the rest into
duplicate systems. In practice, such flexibility would be quite difficult to
achieve; however, a system using a few readily available chemicals and bypassing
the rest might be able to replicate itself—though even the simplest such system
would be extremely difficult to design. Although unrestrained replication of
inorganic systems poses a theoretical risk of widespread biosphere destruction
through competition for resources—the so-called “grey goo” threat—it seems
unlikely that anyone would bother to develop grey goo as a weapon, even a
doomsday deterrent. It would be more difficult to guide than a biological
weapon. It would be slower than a device designed simply to disrupt the physical
structure of its target. And it would be susceptible to detection and cleanup by
the defenders.
Tactics
A detailed
analysis of attack and defense is impossible at this point. It is not known
whether sensor systems will be able to effectively detect and repel an
encroachment by small, stealthy robotic systems; it should be noted that the
smallest such systems might be smaller than a wavelength of visible light,
making detection at a distance problematic. It is unknown whether armor will be
able to stop the variety of penetrating objects and forces that could be
directed at it. Semi-automated R&D may or may not produce new designs so quickly
that the side with the better software will have an overwhelming advantage. The
energy cost of construction has only been roughly estimated, and is uncertain
within at least two orders of magnitude; active systems, including airframes for
nano-built weapons, will probably be cost-effective in any case, but passive or
static systems including armor may or may not be worth deploying.
Some things
appear relatively certain. Unprotected humans, whether civilian or soldier, will
be utterly vulnerable to nano-built weapons. In a scenario of interpenetrating
forces, where a widespread physical perimeter cannot be established, humans on
both sides can be killed at will unless protected at great expense and
inconvenience. Even relatively primitive weapons such as hummingbird-sized
flying guns with human target recognition and poisoned bullets could make an
area unsurvivable without countermeasures; the weight of each gun platform would
be well under one gram. Given the potential for both remote and semi-autonomous
operation of advanced robotics and weapons, a force with a developed molecular
manufacturing capability should have no need to field soldiers; this implies
that battlefield death rates will be low to zero for such forces.
A concern
commonly raised in discussions of nanotech weapons is the creation of new
diseases. Molecular manufacturing seems likely to reduce the danger of this.
Diseases act slowly and spread slowly. A sufficiently capable bio-sensor and
diagnostic infrastructure should allow a very effective and responsive
quarantine to be implemented. Rapid testing of newly manufactured treatment
methods, perhaps combined with metabolism-slowing techniques to allow additional
R&D time, could minimize disease even in infected persons
Despite the
amazing power and flexibility of molecular manufactured devices, a lesson from
World War I should not be forgotten: Dirt makes a surprisingly effective shield.
It is possible that a worthwhile defensive tactic would be to embed an item to
be protected deeply in earth or water. Without active defenses, which would also
be hampered by the embedding material, this would be at best a delaying tactic.
Information
is likely to be a key determiner of military success. If, as seems likely,
unexpected offense with unexpected weapons can overwhelm defense, then rapid
detection and analysis of an attacker's weapons will be very important.
Information-gathering systems are likely to survive more by stealth than by
force, leading to a “spy vs. spy” game. To the extent that this involves
destruction of opposing spy-bots, it is similar to the problem of defending
against small-scale weapons. Note that except for the very smallest systems, the
high functional density of molecularly constructed devices will frequently allow
both weapon and sensor technology to be piggybacked on platforms primarily
intended for other purposes.
It seems
likely that, with the possible exception of a few small, fiercely defended
volumes, a robotic battleground would consist of interpenetrated forces rather
than defensive lines (or defensive walls). This implies that any non-active
matter could be destroyed with little difficulty unless shielded heavily enough
to outlast the battle.
Strategy
As implied
above, a major strategy is to avoid putting soldiers on the battlefield via the
use of autonomous or remotely operated weapons. Unfortunately, this implies that
an enemy wanting to damage human resources will have to attack either civilian
populations or people in leadership positions. To further darken the picture,
civilian populations will be almost impossible to protect from a determined
attack without maintaining a near-hermetic seal around their physical location.
Since the resource cost of such a shield increases as the shield grows (and the
vulnerability and unreliability probably also increase), this implies that
civilians under threat will face severe physical restrictions from their own
defenders.
A
substantial variety of attack mechanisms will be available, including kinetic
impact, cutting, sonic shock and pressure, plasma, electromagnetic beam,
electromagnetic jamming and EMP, heat, toxic or destructive chemicals, and
perhaps more exotic technologies such as particle beam and relativistic
projectile. A variety of defensive techniques will be available, including
camouflage, small size, physical avoidance of attack, interposing of sacrificial
mass, jamming or hacking of enemy sensors and computers, and preemptive strike.
Many of these offensive and defensive techniques will be available to devices
across a wide range of sizes. As explored above, development of new weapon
systems may be quite rapid, especially if automated or semi-automated design is
employed.
In addition
to the variety of physical modes of attack and defense, the cyber sphere will
become an increasingly important and complex battleground, as weapon systems
increasingly depend on networking and computer control. It remains to be seen
whether a major electronic security breach might destroy one side's military
capacity, but with increasing system complexity, such an occurrence cannot be
ruled out.
Depending on
what is being defended, it may or may not be possible to prepare an efficient
defense for all possible modes of attack. If defense is not possible, then the
available choices would seem to be either preemptive strike or avoidance of
conflict. Defense of civilians, as stated above, is likely to be difficult to
impossible. Conflict may be avoided by deterrence only in certain cases—where
the opponent has a comparable amount to lose. In asymmetric situations, where
opponents may have very different resources and may value them very differently,
deterrence may not work at all. Conflict may also be avoided by reducing the
sources of tension
Broader Context
Military
activity does not take place in isolation. It is frequently motivated by
non-military politics, though warlords can fight simply to improve their
military position. Molecular manufacturing will be able to revolutionize
economic infrastructures, creating material abundance and security that may
reduce the desire for war—if it is distributed wisely.
It appears
that an all-out war between molecular manufacturing powers would be highly
destructive of humans and of natural resources; the objects of protection would
be destroyed long before the war-fighting ability of the enemy. In contrast, a
war between molecular manufacturing and a conventionally armed power would
probably be rapid and decisive. The same is true against a nuclear power that
was prevented from using its nuclear weapons, either by politics or by
anti-missile technologies. Even if nuclear weapons were used, the
decentralization allowed by self-contained exponentially manufacturing
nanofactories would allow survival, continued prosecution of the war, and rapid
post-war rebuilding.
The line
between policing and military action is increasingly blurred. Civilians are
becoming very effective at attacking soldiers. Meanwhile, soldiers are
increasingly expected to treat civilians under occupation as citizens (albeit
second-class citizens) rather than enemy. At least in the US, paramilitary
organizations (both governmental and commercial) are being deployed in internal
civilian settings, such as the use of SWAT teams in some crime situations, and
Blackwater in post-Katrina New Orleans.
Many
molecular manufactured weapon systems will be useable for policing. Several
factors will make the systems desirable for police activity: a wide range of
weapon effects and intensities to choose from; less risk to police as
telepresence is employed; maintaining parity with increasingly armed criminals;
and increased deterrence due to increased information-gathering and
surveillance. This means that even without military conflict, a variety of
military-type systems will be not only developed, but also deployed and used.
It is
tempting to think that the absence of nuclear war after six decades of nuclear
weapons implies that we know how to handle insanely destructive weapons.
However, a number of factors will make molecular manufacturing arms races less
stable than the nuclear arms race—and it should be remembered that on several
different occasions, a single fortuitous person or event has prevented a nuclear
attack. Nuclear weapons are hard to design, hard to build, require easily
monitored testing, do indiscriminate and lasting damage, do not rapidly become
obsolete, have almost no peaceful use, and are universally abhorred. Molecular
manufactured weapons will be easy to build, will in many cases allow easily
concealable testing, will be relatively easy to control and deactivate, and
would become obsolete very rapidly; almost every design is dual-use, and
peaceful and non-lethal (police) use will be common. Nuclear weapons are easier
to stockpile than to use; molecular manufactured weapons will be the opposite.
Interpenetrating arrays of multi-scale complex weapons cannot be stable for
long. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, a perceived attack will be answered
by an actual attack. Whether this mushrooms out of control into a full-scale
conflict will depend on the programming of the weapon systems. As long as it is
only inanimate hardware at stake, probing attacks and small-scale accidental
attacks may be tolerated.
Given the
amount of damage that a hostile power armed with molecular manufacturing
products could do to the civilian sector, it seems likely that hostile actors
will be tolerated only as a last resort, and even apparently non-hostile but
untrustworthy actors will be highly undesirable. As mentioned above, an
asymmetry in values may prevent deterrence from working. An asymmetry in force,
such as between a molecular manufacturing and a pre-MM power, may tempt a
preemptive strike to prevent molecular manufacturing proliferation. Likewise, a
substantial but decreasing lead in military capability may lead to a preemptive
strike. It is unclear whether in general a well-planned surprise attack would
lead to rapid and/or inexpensive victory; this may not become clear until
offensive and defensive systems are actually developed.
One stable
situation appears to be that in which a single power deploys sufficient sensors
and weapons to prevent any other power from developing molecular manufacturing.
This would probably require substantial oppression of civilians and crippling of
industrial and scientific capacity. The government in power would have
near-absolute control, being threatened only by internal factors; near-absolute
power, combined with an ongoing need for oppression, would likely lead to
disastrous corruption.
Widespread
recognition of the dangers of arms race, preemptive strike, and war might
inspire widespread desire to avoid such an outcome. This would require an
unprecedented degree of trust and accountability, worldwide. Current government
paradigms are probably not compatible with allowing foreign powers such intimate
access to their secrets; however, in the absence of this degree of openness,
spying and hostile inspections will only raise tension and reduce trust. One
possible solution is for governments to allow their own citizens to observe
them, and then allow the information gained by such distributed and
non-combative (and thus presumably more trustworthy) observation to be made
available to foreign powers.
Conclusion
Molecular
manufacturing will introduce a wide diversity of new weapon systems and modes of
warfighting. In the absence of actual systems to test, it is difficult if not
impossible to know key facts about offensive and defensive capability, and how
the balance between offense and defense may change over time. Incentives for
devastating war are unknown, but potentially large—the current geopolitical
context may favor a strategy of preemptive strike.
Full
information about molecular manufacturing's capabilities will probably be
lacking until a nanofactory is developed. At that point, once an exponential
manufacturing capacity exists that can make virtually unlimited quantities of
high-performance products, sudden development of unfamiliar and powerful weapon
systems appears likely. It is impossible, from today's knowledge, to predict
what a molecular manufacturing-enabled war will be like—but it is possible to
predict that it would be most destructive to our most precious resources.
Given these facts and observations, an immediate and urgent search for
alternatives to arms races and armed conflict is imperative.
C-R-Newsletter #43 July 30, 2006
Nanofactory Development
Project
Mike Roco on Molecular
Nanosystems
Risk Governance Report
Printable Robots and UAV's
Anticipating Vicious Cycles
Friends Say "Size Matters"
CRN Goes Down Under
New Zealand is Listening
CRN Goes to Tennessee
Feature Essay: Inapplicable
Intuitions
Every month is full of activity for CRN. To follow the latest happenings on a
daily basis, be
sure to check our
Responsible Nanotechnology weblog.
=========
Nanofactory Development Project
Robert A.
Freitas Jr. and Ralph Merkle have launched a website announcing a
Nanofactory Collaboration. This is very significant. It's the first project
explicitly aimed at building a high-performance general-purpose nanofactory
manufacturing system based on molecular manufacturing. (The
Foresight/Battelle Roadmap is an important theoretical investigation, but
doesn't include development work.) The timeline of the project (bottom of this
page) calls for initial diamond mechanosynthesis in 2010, with "nanofactories
and nanorobotic products" beginning around 2020. CRN will be watching with great
interest to see how this project progresses, and working to steer it in
responsible directions.
Mike Roco on Molecular Nanosystems
Mihail
(Mike) Roco is senior adviser for nanotechnology to the US National Science
Foundation, and he's also been the driving force behind the US National
Nanotechnology Initiative. In a
recent article for
Scientific American titled "Nanotechnology's Future", he wrote:
After
2015-2020, the field will expand to include molecular nanosystems --
heterogeneous networks in which molecules and supramolecular structures serve
as distinct devices. The proteins inside cells work together this way, but
whereas biological systems are water-based and markedly temperature-sensitive,
these molecular nanosystems will be able to operate in a far wider range of
environments and should be much faster. Computers and robots could be reduced
to extraordinarily small sizes. Medical applications might be as ambitious as
new types of genetic therapies and antiaging treatments. New interfaces
linking people directly to electronics could change telecommunications.
This sounds
a lot like molecular manufacturing, with
non-biological systems operating in a eutactic environment and capable of
greatly improved throughput. Note that components similar to those
"extraordinarily small" computers and robots that Mike foresees not only will
provide smaller, faster, better medical applications and communications
interfaces, but also will form the internal structure of a
nanofactory.
Risk Governance Report
Printable Robots and UAV's
Anticipating Vicious Cycles
The July
2006 issue of Australian R& D Review contains an
opinion piece by CRN’s Mike Treder called "Anticipating Vicious Cycles." It
says, in part:
By its very nature, molecular
manufacturing machinery could be portable and easy to duplicate, which means
this capability might quickly slip from the control of responsible parties into
the hands of tyrants or terrorists. Thus, nanotechnology represents not only
wonderful benefits, but also grave risks.
Imagine a technology so great that
everyone wants it, but potentially so dangerous that maybe no one should be
allowed to have it. Now we have the makings of a vicious cycle, including: 1)
threat perception, 2) unwise restrictions, 3) illicit trafficking, 4) increased
threat perception, 5) more unwise restrictions, etc.
Because the impacts of molecular
manufacturing could occur quickly and with little warning, obtaining a thorough
understanding of these issues is essential and urgent. Nanotechnology should be
developed, as rapidly as it can be done safely and responsibly. The benefits are
simply too great to pass up. But we must not allow efforts to prepare for the
impacts of nanotech to lag behind advances on the technical side. If we do, the
results could be viciously calamitous.
"Size Does
Matter" is the heading on a
special issue
[PDF] Friends of the Earth (Australia) magazine devoted to nanotechnology. Much
of the issue is devoted to concerns about early generation nanotechnologies, but
they also address longer-term worries associated with molecular manufacturing:
Certainly our
current model of representative democracy can not be upheld in a society where
most people have nothing to do and are resentful of the elite which can
entertain itself with work. Concurrent with the rise of molecular manufacture
then would be the need for ubiquitous surveillance powered and facilitated by
nano machines. . . Apart from the obvious impact of molecular manufacturing
on democratic society and employment levels, its creation also invites the
risks of escalating global terrorism and fuelling an unstable omnicidal arms
race.
We're
pleased to see these weighty problems being highlighted, and we're especially
grateful that the authors of the above article mentioned the recent
series of essays produced by the CRN Global Task
Force on Implications and Policy. Near the end of the magazine, however, Friends
of the Earth calls for a halt to all commercial development of nanotechnology.
CRN disagrees with the value of a moratorium on
commercial research and development. But we applaud Friends of the Earth for
bringing attention to the many important ethical, social, political, and
humanitarian issues of nanotechnology -- especially
molecular manufacturing.
CRN Goes Down Under
The Institution of Professional Engineers New
Zealand (IPENZ) has invited Mike Treder to go on a
speaking tour of 11 cities over two weeks, from September 2-14, 2006. Just
added to the itinerary is an assembly of 600 high school students being bused in
to Christchurch on September 6 from all around the area. After New Zealand, Mike
will travel to Australia for a series of meetings and speaking events organized
by universities in Melbourne, Sydney, and Canberra, and made possible by
Nanotechnology Victoria.
New Zealand is Listening
Listener
is the leading news magazine in New Zealand. Their July 22 cover story about the
coming "Techno Revolution" features several prominent quotes from CRN executive
director Mike Treder. You can view a scanned copy of the magazine article
here
[PDF].
CRN Goes to Tennessee
Chris Phoenix, CRN’s Director of Research, will be a featured speaker at
a conference on “The Next
Industrial Revolution: Nanotechnology and Manufacturing” to be held August 23-24
in Oak Ridge, Tennessee (USA). Chris will talk about “Molecular Nanotechnology
and Productive Nanosystems: Beyond Nanomanufacturing.” J. Storrs Hall, author of
Nanofuture: What's Next for Nanotechnology, and a member of CRN’s
Global Task Force on Implications and Policy, will be the
keynote speaker. The conference is sponsored by the Society of Manufacturing
Engineers.
Feature Essay: Inapplicable Intuitions
Chris Phoenix, Director of Research, Center for Responsible Nanotechnology
Experts in a
field develop intuitions about the way things work. For example, a biochemist
will develop intuitions about the complexity of interactions between
biomolecules. When faced with a new idea, a scientist will first evaluate it in
light of existing intuitions.
Interest in
molecular manufacturing is rapidly growing, and many scientists may be
encountering the ideas for the first time. Because molecular manufacturing cuts
across a number of fields -- physics, chemistry, mechanical engineering,
software, and more -- and because it uses a rather novel approach to building
stuff, almost any scientist will find something in the proposal that violates
one or more intuitions. It is worth examining some of these intuitions. Notice
that each intuition is true, although in a limited context, and molecular
manufacturing avoids that context.
In addition
to personally developed intuitions, scientists new to molecular manufacturing
may run across objections formerly raised by others in different fields. In
general, these objections were the result of similarly misplaced intuitions. The
intent here is not to re-fight old battles, but simply to explain what the
battles were about.
Here in a
nutshell is the molecular manufacturing plan: Build a system that does a billion
chemical reactions, one after the other, on the same molecule, with very high
reliability, to make perfect molecular products. The system does chemical
reactions by holding molecules and moving them into place through a vacuum, to
transfer atoms to the product, adding a few atoms at a time to build molecular
shapes. Use that system to build nanoscale machine components, and assemble the
components into nanoscale machines. Control a bunch of these machines to build
more machine components, one deposition at a time; then combine those machine
components into large products. This will need huge numbers of machines, arrayed
in a factory. Use an initial small factory to make another bigger factory,
repeating enough times to grow to kilogram scale. Use the resulting big factory
to make products from downloaded blueprints.
As we will
see, nearly every phrase in this description may evoke skepticism from someone;
however, all of these objections, and many others, have been addressed. The
technical foundation for the modern approach to molecular manufacturing was laid
with the 1992 publication of Nanosystems. After so
many years, any objection that comes readily to mind has probably been thought
of before. We encourage those who are just encountering the ideas of MM to work
through the initial skepticism and misunderstanding that comes from
unfamiliarity, recognizing that a large number of scientists have been unable to
identify any showstoppers. Although the theory has not yet reached the point of
being proved by the existence of a nanofactory, it has reached the point where a
conversation that assumes most of it is correct will be more productive than a
conversation that assumes it's fatally flawed.
The following
is an imagined conversation between an MM researcher (MMer) and a room full of
scientists who are new to the ideas.
MMer:
OK, we're going to build a system that does a billion chemical reactions, one
after the other, on the same molecule, with very high reliability.
Chemist:
Wait a minute. 99% is an excellent yield, but 99% times 99% times 99%... a
billion times is a big fat ZERO. You would reliably get zero molecules of
desired product.
MMer:
A chemist is used to reactions between molecules that bump into each other
randomly. In molecular manufacturing, the molecules would be held in place,
and only allowed to react at chosen locations. Yield could be many "nines"
better than 99%.
MMer:
So we take a system that does chemical reactions by holding molecules and
moving them into place through a vacuum...
Chemist:
Wait. You're going to hold the molecules in a vacuum and make them react as
you want? Chemistry's more complex than that; you need more control, and you
may even need water to help out with really complex reactions.
MMer:
Yes, chemistry is complex when you have lots of potentially reactive molecules
bumping around. But if the motion of the molecules is constrained, then the
set of potential reaction products is also constrained. Also, there are new
kinds of freedom that traditional chemistry doesn't have, including freedom to
select from nearly identical reaction sites, and freedom to keep very reactive
molecules from touching anything until you're ready. And by the way, even
enzymes evolved for water don't necessarily need water -- this has been known
since the mid-80's.
MMer:
So we move the molecules into place to transfer atoms...
Chemist:
Atoms are more reactive than that.
MMer:
MM wouldn't be grabbing individual unbound atoms -- it would transfer
molecular fragments from a "tool" molecule to a "workpiece" molecule, in
reactions that work according to standard chemistry laws.
MMer:
We add a few atoms at a time to build molecular shapes...
Biochemist:
Proteins make molecular shapes, and they are very, very hard to design.
MMer:
Natural proteins are indeed hard to understand. They have to fold into shape
under the influence of a large number of weak forces. But even with proteins,
desired shapes have been engineered. DNA, another biomolecule, is a lot easier
to design shapes with. And MM plans to build three-dimensional shapes
directly, not build long stringy molecules that have to fold up to make
shapes.
MMer:
Then we're going to use that system to build nanoscale machine components...
Micro-mechanical system researcher:
Wait a minute! We've tried building machine components, and friction kills
them. The smaller you make them, the worse it gets.
MMer:
The micromachines were built with a fabrication technique that left the
surfaces rough. Friction and wear between rough surfaces are in fact worse as
machines get smaller. But if the surfaces are atomically precise and smooth,
and the atoms are spaced differently on the two surfaces, they can have
extremely low friction and wear. This has been verified experimentally with
nested carbon nanotubes and with graphite sheets; it's called
"superlubricity."
MMer:
Assemble the components into nanoscale machines...
Molecular
biologist:
Why not use machines inspired by nature? Biology does a great job and has lots
of designs we could adapt.
MMer:
This isn't an argument against the feasibility of MM. If biology-based designs
work even better than mechanical designs and are more convenient to develop,
then MM could use them. The main advantage of biology is that a technical
toolkit to work with biomolecules has already been developed. However, there
are several fundamental reasons why biomachines, as good as they are, aren't
nearly as good as what MM expects to build. (For example, any machine immersed
in water must move slowly to avoid excessive drag.) And mechanical designs
will almost certainly be easier to understand and engineer than biological
designs.
MMer:
So we take a bunch of these machines and control them...
Nanotechnologist:
How can you hope to control them? It's very, very hard to get information to
the nanoscale.
MMer:
MM intends to build nanoscale data-processing systems as well as machines. And
MM also proposes to build large and multi-scale systems that can get info to
the nanoscale without requiring external nanoscale equipment to do so.
MMer:
We control the machines to build more machine components, one deposition at a
time...
Skeptic:
That'll take forever to build anything!
MMer:
It would indeed take almost forever for a large scanning probe microscope to
build its own mass of product. But as the size of the tool decreases, the time
required to build its own mass shrinks as the fourth power of the size. Shrink
by 10X, decrease the time by 10,000X. By the time you get down to a
100-nanometer scanning probe microscope, the scaling laws of volume and
operation frequency suggest it should be able to build its own mass in about
100 seconds.
MMer:
Then we'll combine those machine components into large products...
Skeptic:
You plan to build large products with nanoscale systems? It'll take billions
of years!
MMer:
MM won't be using just a few nanoscale systems; it'll be using huge numbers of
them, working together under the control of nanocomputers. Each workstation
will build one tiny sub-part.
MMer:
So we take huge numbers of machines, arrayed in a factory...
Self-assembly expert:
Whoa, how do you plan to put together this factory? Self-assembly isn't nearly
there yet.
MMer:
Use a factory, with robotic component-handling etc., to make a factory. Use a
small factory to make a bigger factory. (The first tiny sub-micron factory
would be made painstakingly in the lab.)
MMer:
So we take this factory and make another bigger factory...
Skeptic:
Wait, how can you have a dumb machine making something more complex than
itself? Only life can do things like that.
MMer:
The complexity of the manufacturing system is the physical system plus the
software that drives it. The physical manufacturing system need not be
more physically complex than the thing it makes, as long as the software makes
up the difference. And the software can be as complex as human brains can
design.
MMer:
We take this big factory and make a product...
Mechanical
engineer: How are you going to design a product with zillions of parts?
MMer:
The product will not have zillions of different parts. It will have to
be engineered in a hierarchical approach, with well-characterized re-usable
structures at all levels. Software engineers design computer programs along
these lines; the technique is called "levels of abstraction."
MMer:
Download a blueprint to the factory to make a product...
Programmer:
The factory would need amazingly advanced software to run zillions of
operations to build zillions of parts.
MMer:
Just as the product would contain zillions of parts, but only relatively few
distinct parts, so the nanofactory would contain relatively few different
types of machines to be controlled. The blueprint file format could be
designed to be divided into hierarchical patterns and sub-patterns.
Distributing the file fragments to the correct processors, and processing the
instructions to drive the workstations, would be straightforward operations.
And so on.
As you can see, each objection brought by intuition from within a specific field
has an answer that comes from the interdisciplinary approach of molecular
manufacturing theory. We are not, of course, asking anyone to take it on faith
that molecular manufacturing will work as planned. We are only asking newcomers
to the ideas to refrain from snap judgments that it can't work for some
apparently obvious reason.
C-R-Newsletter #42 June 30, 2006
Students to Explore
Molecular Machines
First-Stage Molecular
Manufacturing
A Primer for the Real Diamond
Age
Preparing for
Nanotechnology
Problems That Lie Ahead
Global NGOs and Nanotech Risk
WorldChanging Book Coming Soon
CRN Goes Back to
Switzerland
Feature Science Essay:
History of the Nanofactory
Concept
Every month is full of activity for CRN. To follow the latest happenings on a
daily basis, be
sure to check our
Responsible Nanotechnology weblog.
=========
Students to Explore Molecular
Machines
This summer, a group of California’s brightest high school kids will be using
powerful, new molecular
modeling software to learn about actual atom-by-atom construction of new
devices.
Students who report for the Nanotechnology and Robotics class at the California
State Summer School for Mathematics and Science (COSMOS) on July 9 at UC Santa
Cruz will begin testing NanoEngineer-1, the first computer aided design (CAD)
program for the nanotech age. Built by
Nanorex Inc. and scheduled
for release this fall, NanoEngineer-1’s 3-D, interactive environment and
molecular physics engine will enable the students to invent and test new kinds
of molecular machines and devices, designed atom by atom exactly to their
specifications. (Full disclosure: CRN’s Chris Phoenix is a member of the
Scientific Advisory Board for Nanorex.)
First-Stage Molecular Manufacturing
Last year Chris Phoenix, CRN’s Director of Research, published
a paper identifying three basic milestones for
molecular manufacturing. The first stage, computer-controlled fabrication of
precise molecular structures, is now being demonstrated by professor Nadrian
Seeman and his team at New York University. According to
a story at
MSNBC:
Seeman and colleagues have put DNA robots to work by
incorporating them into a self-assembling array. The composite device grabs
various molecular chains, or "polymers," from a solution and fuses them
together. By controlling the position of the nano-bots, the researchers can
specify the arrangement of the finished polymer.
A Primer for the Real Diamond Age
CRN
was asked by the popular
WorldChanging site to provide their readers with a
short introduction to nanotechnology, and so we did. Here is an excerpt from
“A Primer for the Real Diamond Age” written by Chris Phoenix:
Nanotechnology will change the
world—slowly at first, then very rapidly. Slow change will come from nanoscale
technologies already under development, which will give us better computers,
medicine, sensors, and materials. Rapid, transformative, disruptive change will
come from molecular manufacturing. . .
The implications of molecular
manufacturing are staggering. Automated programmable factories that can build
more factories on demand imply near-zero cost of manufacture, accompanied by
sharp drops in the value of both labor and capital. Precise nanoscale machines
will be thousands or millions of times more powerful than today's products. The
ability to rapidly design and build almost unlimited quantities of futuristic
weapons will disrupt geopolitics and global security. Planet-scale engineering
could save or destroy the Earth's environment. Global sensor networks could
become tools of freedom or oppression.
Preparing for Nanotechnology
Preparing for Nanotechnology, maintained by Nanotechnology Now, is an
online "guide to efforts intended to help ease the transition to a
nanotech-enabled world." More than 100 links have been gathered and categorized,
making it the most comprehensive collection we know of. Some entries are focused
on near-term applications of nanoscale materials science, while others focus on
advanced nanotechnologies such as molecular manufacturing. Also included are
links to Papers, Events, Quotes, Books, and News. It's a great resource!
Problems That Lie Ahead
On June 12,
CRN Executive Director Mike Treder posted a
short essay on the Responsible Nanotechnology blog titled “Problems That Lie
Ahead.” The article was picked up by several other popular blogs and generated
extensive discussion on the web. Here is how it opens:
We are approaching a period of perilous
geopolitical instability:
When weapons of mass destruction will be
more varied, more deadly, more available, cheaper to obtain, and easier to
hide;
When the
strength (and the ambitions) of regional powers will increase rapidly while
the stabilizing might of the U.S. could be in decline;
When new
technologies such as genetic engineering, robotics, nanotechnology, and
possibly artificial intelligence could enable radical shifts in the balance of
power;
When
global climatic conditions -- including increased frequency and severity of
killer storms, droughts, infrastructure damage, crop failures, and even whole
ecosystem collapses -- will contribute to growing tensions.
The global situation is becoming a vortex,
a maelstrom in which multiple risk factors will swirl and combine to create
sudden new crises for which we may not have time to prepare. The act of reaching
into the vortex to grab hold of and deal with one problem could send others
spinning in new, ever more dangerous directions.
Global NGOs and Nanotech Risk
A new survey
on Nanotechnology Governance:
The Role of NGOs [PDF] was released this month by the International Risk
Governance Council. The survey, conducted between September and November 2005,
was originally sent to 25 potential participants. Nine NGOs responded, including
CRN, Demos, Environmental Defense, ETC Group (Canada), Foresight Nanotech
Institute, Forum for the Future, Greenpeace (UK), the National Resources Defense
Council, and Sciencecorps (US). CRN
was quoted in the report with comments on economic, social, and
environmental issues.
WorldChanging Book Coming Soon
A
new book called WorldChanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century is
scheduled for publication on November 1, 2006. CRN contributed quite a bit of
material for the book's section on nanotechnology. As the date for publication
draws closer, we'll provide more details, but here is what they're saying so
far:
If you've been a
long-time, regular WorldChanging reader, some of what we cover in the book
will be at least familiar ground, but much of it is brand-new material, and
all of it is presented with a depth of focus that we have rarely had the time
and resources to accomplish on this site. We think you'll find it a
compelling, useful guide to some of the most interesting new and emerging
tools, models and ideas for changing the world.
CRN Goes Back to Switzerland
In February, CRN Executive Director Mike Treder was one of 30 invited
participants at
a workshop in Zurich organized by the International Risk Governance Council
(IRGC) concerning a "Conceptual Risk Governance Framework for Nanotechnology."
Based on the results of that workshop, the IRGC has developed initial risk
governance recommendations which will be presented, discussed and enhanced at an
international conference
[PDF] to be held July 6-7, again in Zurich. Mike will attend and participate in
the conference on behalf of CRN. IRGC's final recommendations for appropriate
risk governance strategies will be published shortly after the conference.
Feature Science Essay: History of the Nanofactory
Concept
Chris Phoenix, Director of Research, Center for Responsible Nanotechnology
When CRN talks about molecular manufacturing, we
usually focus on one particular implementation: a nanofactory. A
nanofactory is basically a box with a whole lot of molecular manufacturing
machines inside; feedstock and energy go in, and products come out. But why do
we focus on nanofactories? Where did the idea come from? I'll tackle the second
question first.
Richard Feynman is often credited as a founder of nanotechnology, though the
word would not exist until decades after his now famous talk, “There's
Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” in 1959. In that talk, Feynman proposed that
machines could build smaller machines until the smallest of them was working
with atomic precision, and indeed “maneuvering things atom by atom.” Materials
could be built under direct control: “Put the atoms down where the chemist says,
and so you make the substance.” Along the way to this goal, he said, “I want to
build a billion tiny factories, models of each other, which are manufacturing
simultaneously...” However, these factories would have been on the border
between microtech and nanotech, with individual machines larger than 100
nanometers. Atom manipulation would come “ultimately---in the great future.”
In the 1980's, Eric Drexler introduced most of the ideas of molecular
manufacturing (then called simply “nanotechnology”). However, instead of using
machines to make smaller machines, Drexler's plan started directly with
molecules engineered to have mechanical functionality. Build a number of
intricate molecules, he said, join them together into a programmable robotic
system, and that system could be used to perform more molecule-building and
joining operations.
Both Feynman and Drexler recognized that small machines can't do much
individually. Feynman planned to have his manufacturing process make multiple
copies of each tiny machine in parallel, growing the number exponentially with
each stage of shrinkage. Drexler, starting from nanoscale machines, planned to
design his machine so that it could build a complete duplicate. The first
machine would build two, then they would build four, then eight, and so on. This
is actually an easier problem in many ways than designing a factory to build
smaller machines than those in the factory.
Drexler was working from a biological model, in which cells build more cells.
Rather than designing a factory, Drexler pictured vast numbers of
self-contained, independent robotic fabrication systems. The systems,
“assemblers,” were intended to cooperate to build large products. In his 1986
book
Engines of Creation, Drexler described a vat of assemblers, floating in
fluid, building a rocket engine.
By 1992, when he published Nanosystems, Drexler's
plans had evolved somewhat. Instead of vast quantities of free-floating
assemblers, each with its own manufacturing system, control system, power
system, shell, and chemical input system, he planned to fasten down vast numbers
of manufacturing devices into a framework. Instead of cooperating to attach
molecules to an external product, each manufacturing workstation would build a
tiny fragment of the product. These fragments would then be combined into larger
and larger components, using a system much like a tree of assembly lines feeding
larger assembly lines.
Drexler's nanofactory proposal in Nanosystems was to be refined several times.
In Drexler's proposal, the assembly lines occupied a three-dimensional branching
structure. This structure is more complex
than it looks, because some of the smaller lines must be bent aside in order
to avoid the larger ones. In
Merkle's
1997 refinement, the assembly lines occupied a simpler stacked
configuration. The price of this is constraining the allowable dimensions of
sub-parts. Essentially, Merkle's system works best if the product is easily
divisible into cubes and sub-cubes.
In my 2003 paper “Design
of a Primitive Nanofactory”, I continued to use a convergent assembly
approach, accepting the limitations of dividing a product into sub-cubes.
Another limitation that should be noted with convergent assembly is that the
product must be small enough to fit in the assembly line: significantly smaller
than the factory. The paper includes an entire chapter on product design, much
of which is guided by the problems inherent in building diverse products out of
small dense rigid multi-scale cubes. Basically, the plan was to build the
product folded up, and then unfold it after completion and removal from the
nanofactory. My design, as well as Drexler's and Merkle's, required large
internal factory volumes for handling the product in various stages of
completion.
A few months after my Primitive Nanofactory paper was published, John Burch and
Eric Drexler unveiled their newest nanofactory concept. Instead of many levels
of converging assembly lines, the Burch/Drexler factory design deposits tiny
blocks directly onto a planar surface of a product under construction. Although
this requires many thousands of deposition operations at each position to build
each centimeter of product, the process is not actually slow, because the
smaller the blocks are, the faster each one can be placed. (Although the
physical layout of my nanofactory is now obsolete, most of the calculations in
my paper are still useful.)
Instead of requiring the product to be divisible into sub-cubes at numerous size
scales, the Burch/Drexler architecture requires only that the product be made of
aggregated tiny components—which would be necessary in any case for anything
constructed by molecular manufacturing workstations. Instead of requiring a
large internal volume for product handling, the factory only needs enough
internal volume to handle the tiny components; the growing product can be
attached to an external surface of the factory.
Focus on the Factory
So, that is how the nanofactory concept has evolved. Why does CRN use it as the
basis for talking about molecular manufacturing? The answer is that a
nanofactory will be a general-purpose manufacturing technology. Although it
could not build every product that could possibly be built by molecular
manufacturing, it will be able to build a very wide range of very powerful
products. At the same time, a personal nanofactory would be perhaps the most
user-friendly way to package molecular manufacturing. Technologies that are
user-friendly, assuming they are adequate, tend to be used more widely than more
powerful but less convenient alternatives. Although there may come a time when
computer-aided design processes run into the limits of the nanofactory approach,
it seems unlikely that humans using current design techniques would be able even
to fully map, let alone explore, the range of possible designs.
A nanofactory is easy to conceptualize. At the highest level, it's a
computer-controlled box that makes stuff, sort of like a 3D inkjet printer. Add
in a couple of key facts, and its importance becomes clear:
- It can make more nanofactories.
- Its products will be extremely powerful.
- Rapid programmable manufacture implies rapid prototyping
and rapid design.
It is difficult to see how “diamondoid mechanosynthesis of
multi-scale nanosystem-based products” can revolutionize the world. It is much
easier to imagine a nanofactory being flown in to a disaster area, used to
produce more nanofactories and feedstock factories, and then all of them
producing water filters, tents, and whatever else is needed, in any quantity
desired—within just a few days.
Nanotechnology today is largely the province of the laboratory, where most
people cannot participate. But a personal nanofactory could be made easy enough
for untrained people to use, even to the point of making new product designs.
This advantage comes with a cost: the simpler the design software, the more
limited the range of products. But molecularly constructed products will be so
intricate and high-performance that a certain amount of tradeoff will be quite
acceptable for most applications. If a design has an array of a thousand tiny
motors where one hundred would suffice, that probably would not even be
noticeable.
A final advantage of conceptualizing the means of production as a human-scale
box is that it helps to separate the production system from the product. In the
pre-nanofactory days of molecular manufacturing discussion, when tiny assemblers
were the presumed manufacturing system, a lot of people came to assume that
every product would include assemblers—and thus be prone to a variety of risks,
such as making more of itself without limit. The nanofactory concept makes it
much clearer that products of molecular manufacturing will not have any spooky
self-replicating attributes, and the manufacturing apparatus itself—the
nanofactory—may be about as dangerous as a printer.
C-R-Newsletter #41 May 30, 2006
Second Collection of CRN
Task Force Essays Published
CTF Essays Overview
Honoring Jane Jacobs
Live-blogging the Singularity
Summit
Feature Science Essay: Types of
Nanotechnology
Every month is full of activity for CRN. To follow the latest happenings on a
daily basis, be
sure to check our
Responsible Nanotechnology weblog.
=========
Second Collection of CRN Task Force
Essays Published
We are pleased to announce that all 22 essays written by members of our
Global Task Force on Implications and Policy have now been
published. The essays cover topics from commerce to criminology, from ethics to
economics, and from our remote past to our distant future. Together, they
illustrate the profound transformation that molecular manufacturing will have on
every aspect of human society.
The essays were published in two issues of
Nanotechnology
Perceptions, and also are available online for free. They are posted at
the CRN-hosted
Wise-Nano.org
and also at
KurzweilAI.net. The first set of essays was published in March and described
in C-R-Newsletter #39. As you will see below, this second set
is just as interesting and diverse — which goes to show, there's a lot more to
be written. CRN will continue to explore these vital issues.
- Nanoethics and Technological Revolutions: A Précis - by
Nick Bostrom
- From The Enlightenment to N-Lightenment - by Michael Buerger
- What Price Freedom? - by Robert A. Freitas Jr.
- The (Needed) New Economics of Abundance - by Steve Burgess
- Economic Impact of the Personal Nanofactory - by Robert A.
Freitas Jr.
- Corporate Cornucopia - by Michael Vassar
- Molecular Manufacturing and the Developing World: Looking
to Nanotechnology For Answers - by Don Maclurcan
- Considering Military Implications of Nanofactory-level
Nanotechnology - by Brian Wang
- Molecular Manufacturing and the Need for Crime Science - by
Deborah Osborne
- Safer Molecular Manufacturing Through Nanoblocks - by Tom
Craver
- Are We Enlightened Guardians, Or Are We Apes Designing
Humans? - by Douglas Mulhall
CTF Essays Overview
1. Nanoethics and Technological Revolutions: A Précis - by
Nick Bostrom
Humanity has lived through several technological revolutions, and we would do
well to compare molecular manufacturing to them and learn what we can from the
comparison—which may not be as much as we'd like.
Nick
Bostrom writes: But if we believe that nanotechnology will eventually
amount to a technological revolution, and if we are going to attempt
nanoethics, then we might do well to consider some of the earlier
technological revolutions that humanity has undergone. .... If such a
comparison were made, we might for example become more modest about our
ability to predict or anticipate the long-term consequences of what we were
about to do.
2. From The Enlightenment to N-Lightenment - by Michael E. Buerger
Nanotechnology will be transformative, but its effects will be bound by
existing patterns: power and control, criminal potentials, social pressures,
and sources of authority. These will likely cause its effects to be less
positive than they could have been.
Michael E.
Buerger writes: Like contemporary Internet defenses, and the laws
passed to outlaw new designer drugs, defensive maneuvers almost always
stimulate new offensive attacks. Any combination of zeros and ones, in any
transportation medium, can be hijacked and compromised: the track record of
Internet security does not bode well for the free and easy commercial transfer
of assembly codes for the molecules-up creation of products.
3. What Price Freedom? - by Robert A. Freitas Jr.
There is an uncomfortably fine line between terrorism and freedom fighting, in
the context of advanced weapons that may require, or at least inspire,
democratic governments as well as dictatorships to remove people's ability to
fight.
Robert
A. Freitas Jr. writes: If the technology allows it—and it does—then
eventually some tyrant will seek to close his iron fist around the throat of
humankind. We need to decide what, if anything, we ought to do about this.
4. The (Needed) New Economics of Abundance - by Steve Burgess
Today's applied economic theory does not encompass the possibility of
abundance, which personal nanofactories will bring. We need a new economic
theory.
Steve
Burgess writes: We are on the cusp of a new era that has the potential
to be an era of abundance. In the coming decades, molecular manufacturing will
be a reality.
5. Economic Impact of the Personal Nanofactory - by Robert A. Freitas Jr.
The cost of manufactured goods need not suffer more than modest inflation or
deflation as nanofactories are introduced. A number of small costs will add up
to a non-disruptive price on most goods.
Robert
A. Freitas Jr. writes: In light of the above considerations, a
conservative assumption is that the introduction of personal nanofactories
over a time period lasting, say, two decades will result in the average prices
of consumer nondurables falling perhaps 5-fold from today’s prices, and the
average prices of consumer durables falling perhaps 100-fold. How will this
affect the overall inflation rate? Perhaps surprisingly, not much.
6. Corporate Cornucopia: Examining the Special Implications of Commercial MNT
Development - by Michael Vassar
Corporations may have trouble extracting profit from nanofactories, but there
are a variety of strategies they can follow to maintain a competitive
advantage.
Michael
Vassar writes: Unfortunately, the very size of the opportunity—combined
with its extreme suddenness, military significance, potential for disruption
of existing institutions, and ease of duplication—creates certain severe
complications that lead to difficulties in capturing the value created.
7. Molecular Manufacturing and the Developing World: Looking to Nanotechnology
for Answers - by Don Maclurcan
Many of the interactions of developing nations with molecular manufacturing
issues can be previewed by studying issues raised by nearer-term nanoscale
technologies.
Don
Maclurcan writes: While many of the issues MM faces may be similar to
those presently developing with nanotechnology, MM offers a revolution of a
starkly different magnitude. However, MM still faces an ‘identity crisis’ in
the developed world, and an ‘identity absence’ in the developing world.
8. Considering Military and Ethical Implications of Nanofactory-Level
Nanotechnology - by Brian Wang
Although current and planned military technology is impressive compared with
that available only a few decades ago, nanofactory-level nanotechnology will
be far more powerful.
Brian Wang
writes: The improved sensing ability of nanotechnology-enabled smart
dust and nanotechnology-enabled UAVs will revolutionize the military ability
to identify and locate valuable opposing assets in real time. An arms race to
make stealthy smart dust, smart dust detectors, and smart dust hunter-killers
may be inevitable.
9. Molecular Manufacturing and the Need for Crime Science - by Deborah Osborne
Molecular manufacturing will create new opportunities for both criminals and
police; crime science will have to change in order to deal with this.
Deborah
Osborne writes: The third premise is that existing criminal justice
systems will never be good enough to deal with modern crime opportunities—and
MM will certainly prove this premise correct.
10. Safer Molecular Manufacturing Through Nanoblocks - by Tom Craver
Devices (fabbers) that merely assemble pre-manufactured “nanoblock” building
blocks may be faster, more convenient, and less prone to uncontrolled
proliferation than nanofactories that build products from the molecules up.
Tom Craver
writes: Making nanoblock-limited fabbers available to everyone promises
to provide most of the easily imaginable benefits of unrestricted atom precise
MM, with significantly fewer risks. Fabbers can provide useful advantages of
speed, efficiency, and safety.
11. Are We Enlightened Guardians, or Are We Apes Designing Humans? - by
Douglas Mulhall
The non-humanitarian character of many human choices positions us poorly to
argue that a superintelligence—which will appear, one way or another, in the
next few decades—should refrain from destroying us.
Douglas
Mulhall writes: Many experts argue that each of these forms of
super-intelligence will enhance humans, not replace them, and although they
might seem alien to unenhanced humans, they will still be an extension of us
because we are the ones who designed them. The thought behind this is that we
will go on as a species. Critics, however, point to a fly in that ointment.
Honoring Jane Jacobs
One of CRN's founding ideas is that different problems need different kinds of
solutions. For example, very bad things can happen if a forceful solution is
systemically applied to a market-type problem. And organizations to deal with
complex problems (such as molecular manufacturing) will have to be very careful
not to overstep their bounds and apply their internal style to the wrong kind of
problem.
This idea is not original to us. Its originator was Jane Jacobs, who is perhaps
better known for her work on architecture and urban planning. Jacobs identified
two main “ethical systems,” Guardian and Commercial, and warned about what can
happen if the systems are mixed or misapplied (Communism, Nazism, and the Mafia
are three of her examples). Building on work by Pat Gratton, Chris Phoenix added
a third Informational system to reflect the growing influence of “unlimited sum”
copying of digital information, and then showed that
all these systems must be considered in dealing with general-purpose molecular
manufacturing.
After making major contributions in multiple areas, Jacobs died a month ago. Her
New York Times
obituary said: “in at least five distinct fields of inquiry, she thought
deeply and innovatively: urban design, urban history, regional economics, the
morality of the economy and the nature of economic growth.” Despite her
age—nearly 90—we have to wonder whether advanced nanomedicine could have saved
her life and given the world many more years of her keen and valuable insights.
Live-blogging the Singularity Summit
CRN's Mike Treder attended the
Singularity Summit at Stanford University on May 13. He
live-blogged it, producing five moment-by-moment reviews plus an
intro and
summary. Although some of the talks were off-topic, it was an interesting
conference full of provocative ideas.
Feature Science Essay: Types of Nanotechnology
Chris Phoenix, Director of Research, Center for Responsible Nanotechnology
Now that nanotechnology has been in the public eye for twenty years, and
well-funded for half a decade, it's worth a quick look at just what it is—and
how it got that way.
When the word “nanotechnology” was introduced to the public by Eric Drexler's
1986 book Engines of Creation, it meant something very specific: small
precise machines built out of molecules, which could build more molecular
machines and products—large, high-performance products. This goal or aspect of
nanotechnology now goes by several names, including molecular nanotechnology,
molecular manufacturing, and productive nanosystems. The reason for this
renaming is that “nanotechnology” has become a broad and inclusive term, but
it's still important to distinguish molecular manufacturing from all the other
types. I'll talk about molecular manufacturing, and why it is unique and
important, after surveying some of the other types of nanotechnology.
With the funding of the U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI), there has
been a strong financial incentive to define nanotechnology so that one's own
research counts—but not so broadly that everyone's research counts. There has
been a less focused, but still real, incentive to define the goals of
nanotechnology aggressively, to justify major funding, but not too aggressively,
lest it sound scary or implausible.
With all the different research fields applying the above rules to a wide
variety of research, it is not surprising that there's no single hard-edged
definition of nanotechnology that everyone can agree on. Perhaps the most
commonly quoted definition of nanotechnology is the one
used by the
NNI: “Nanotechnology is the understanding and control of matter at
dimensions of roughly 1 to 100 nanometers, where unique phenomena enable novel
applications.” I don't know how they decided on the size scale; thinking
cynically, it might have had something to do with the fact that computer chips
were just about to gain features smaller than 100 nanometers, so they were
guaranteed at least one early success.
Nanotechnology can be even broader than that. A rough rule of thumb is: if it's
too small to see with an ordinary light microscope, it's likely to be considered
nanotechnology. Without using special physics
tricks, light can't be used to see anything smaller than half a wavelength
of light, which is a few hundred nanometers (I can't be more precise because
light comes in different colors with different wavelengths). Because some optics
technology uses structures smaller than light (such as photonic crystals) to
manipulate light, you will sometimes see optics researchers describe their work
as nanotechnology. However, because these structures tend to be larger than the
official 100-nm cutoff, many nanotechnologists will reject this usage.
Another point of contention is how unique the “unique phenomena enabl[ing] novel
applications” have to be. For example, some nanotechnology simply uses
ordinary materials like clay, in smaller chunks, in fairly ordinary ways.
They can get new material properties; they are using nanoscale materials; they
are studying them with new techniques; but is it really nanotechnology, or is it
just materials science? It might as well be called nanotech, seems to be the
consensus. It's providing early successes for the field and it’s putting “nano”
into consumers' hands in a beneficial, non-threatening way.
Another kind of nanotechnology involves building increasingly large and
intricate molecules. Some of these molecules can be very useful: for example, it
appears possible to combine a cancer-cell-recognizer, a toxic drug, and a
component that shows up in MRI scans, into a single molecule that kills cancer
cells while showing you where they were and leaving the rest of the body
untouched. This is a little bit different from traditional chemistry in that the
chemist isn't trying to create a new molecule with a single function, but rather
to join together several different functions into one connected package.
Some new nanomaterials have genuinely new properties. For example, small mineral
particles can be transparent to visible light, which makes them useful in
sunscreen. Even smaller particles can glow in useful colors, forming more-stable
markers for biomedical research. For related reasons, small particles can be
useful additions to computer circuits, lending their quantum effects to make
smaller and better transistors.
We should talk about semiconductors (computer chips), a major application of
nanotechnology. Feature sizes on mainstream silicon chips are well below 100
nanometers now. This obviously is a great success for nanotechnology (as defined
by the NNI). From one point of view, semiconductor makers are continuing to do
what they have always done: make chips smaller and faster using silicon-based
transistors. From another point of view, as sizes shrink, their task is rapidly
getting harder, and they are inventing new technology every day just to keep up
with expectations. There are more unusual computer-chip designs underway as
well, most of which use nanotechnology of one form or another, from quantum-dot
transistors to sub-wavelength optics (plasmonics) to holographic storage to
buckytube-based mechanical switches.
Which brings us to buckytubes. Buckytubes are remarkable molecules that were
discovered not long ago. They are tiny strips of graphite, rolled up with the
sides fastened together to form a seamless tube. They are very strong, very
stiff, and can be quite long in proportion to their width;
four-centimeter long buckytubes have been reported, which is more than ten
million times the width of the tube. Some buckytubes are world-class conductors
and electron emitters. They may be useful in a wide variety of applications.
And what about those quantum effects? According to the NNI, “At the nanoscale,
the physical, chemical, and biological properties of materials differ in
fundamental and valuable ways from the properties of individual atoms and
molecules or bulk matter.” Materials are of course made up of atoms, which
contain electrons, and it is the interaction of electrons that gives materials
most of their properties. In very small chunks of material, the electrons
interact differently, which can create new material properties. Nanoparticles
can be more chemically active; as mentioned above, they can fluoresce; they can
even participate in weird physics such as quantum computers. But, as the above
overview should make clear, a lot of “nanotechnology” does not make use of these
quantum effects.
Molecular manufacturing (MM) is a fairly mundane branch of nanotech, or it would
be if not for the political controversy that has swirled around it. The idea is
simple: Use nanoscale machines as construction tools, joining molecular
fragments into more machines. Every biological cell contains molecular machines
that do exactly that. There are, however, a few reasons why molecular
manufacturing has been highly controversial.
Much of the controversy stems from the fact that MM proposes to use engineered
devices to build duplicate devices. Although biology can do this, intuition
suggests that such self-duplication requires some special spark of complexity or
something even more numinous: surely a simple engineered machine can't be so
lifelike! This ultimate spark of vitalism is fading as we learn how machinelike
cellular molecules actually are, and as increasingly detailed plans make it
clear that hardware does not have to be very complex in order to make duplicate
hardware. (Even the software doesn't have to be very complex, just intricate and
well-designed. This has been known by computer scientists for many decades, but
the paradigm has taken a while to shift in the wider world.)
There is another problem with self-replication: in some forms, it may be
dangerous. In 1986, Eric Drexler warned that tiny engineered self-replicators
could outcompete natural life, turning the biosphere into boring copies of
themselves: “grey goo.” This formed a cornerstone of Bill Joy's essay “Why The
Future Doesn't Need Us,” which hit just as the NNI was ramping up. No
nanoscientist wanted to be associated with a poorly-understood technology that
might destroy the world, and the easiest thing was to assert that MM was simply
impossible. (Modern MM designs do not use small self-replicators; in fact, they
have been obsolete since Drexler's 1992 technical book Nanosystems.)
A third source of controversy is that MM plans to use diamond as its major
building material, not bio-based polymers like protein and DNA. (Some pathways
to this capability, including the pathway favored by Drexler, go through a
biopolymer stage.) Although there is a wide variety of reactions that can form
diamond and graphite, living organisms do not build with these materials, so
there is no existence proof that such structures can be built using
point-by-point computer-controlled molecular deposition.
If diamond-like structures can be built by molecular manufacturing techniques,
they should have
astonishingly high performance characteristics. To those who study MM, its
projected high performance indicates that researchers should work toward this
goal with a focused intensity not seen since the Manhattan Project. To those who
have not studied MM, talk of motors a million times more powerful than today's
merely seems fanciful, a reason (or an excuse) to discount the entire field.
At least as problematic as the extreme technical claims are the concerns about
the extreme implications of molecular manufacturing. It is rare that a
technology comes along which revolutionizes society in a decade or so, and even
more rare that such things are correctly predicted in advance. It is very
tempting to dismiss claims of unstable arms races,
wholesale destruction of existing jobs, and widespread personal capacity for
mass destruction, as improbable.
However, all the skepticism in the world won't change the laws of physics. In
more than two decades (almost five, if you count from
Richard
Feynman's visionary speech), no one has found a reason why MM, even
diamond-based MM, shouldn't work. In fact, the more work that's done, the less
complex it appears. Predicting social responses to technology is even more
difficult than predicting technology itself, but it seems beyond plausibility
that such a powerful capability won't have at least some disruptive
effects—perhaps fatally disruptive, unless we can understand the potential and
find ways to bypass the worst pitfalls.
In the near future, nanotechnology in the broad sense will continue to develop
dozens of interesting technologies and capabilities, leading to hundreds of
improved capabilities and applications. Meanwhile, molecular manufacturing will
continue to move closer, despite the (rapidly fading) opposition to the idea.
Sometime in the next few years, someone will have the vision to fund a targeted
study of molecular manufacturing's potential; less than a decade after that,
general-purpose nanoscale manufacturing will be a reality that the world will
have to deal with. Molecular manufacturing will build virtually unlimited
quantities of new products as rapidly as the software can be designed—and it
should be noted that most of today's physical products are far less complex than
today's software. Molecular manufacturing will both enable and eclipse large
areas of nanotechnology, further accelerating the achievements of the field. We
are in for some interesting times.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
FUNDRAISING ALERT!
Significant progress in efforts to
roadmap the technical steps toward molecular manufacturing make the work of
CRN more important than ever. It is critical that we examine the global
implications of this rapidly emerging technology, and begin creating wise and
effective solutions. That's why we have formed the
CRN Global Task Force.
But it won't be easy. We need to grow, and rapidly, to meet the expanding
challenge. You can help!
Your tax-deductible
donation to CRN will enable us to achieve that growth. We rely largely on
individual donations and small grants for our survival. This is important work
and we welcome your participation.
Thank you!
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
C-R-Newsletter #40 April 29, 2006
CRN Task Force Essays
State of Global Emergency
France is Paying Attention
Phoenix in New Jersey
Prix Ars Electronica!
New Diamond Mechanosynthesis
Paper
Drexler on Physics and
Computation
CRN Goes to Vanderbilt
Talking Nanotech in New
Zealand
Feature Science Essay:
Bottom-up Design
Every month is full of activity for CRN. To follow the latest happenings on a
daily basis, be
sure to check our
Responsible Nanotechnology weblog.
=========
CRN Task Force Essays
In last month’s C-R-Newsletter, we were very pleased to
introduce the first 11 essays written by members of our Global
Task Force on Implications and Policy. Now we’re getting close to
publication of our second set of 11 essays:
- Nanoethics and Technological Revolutions: A Précis - by
Nick Bostrom
- From The Enlightenment to N-Lightenment - by Michael Buerger
- What Price Freedom? - by Robert A. Freitas Jr.
- The (Needed) New Economics of Abundance - by Steve Burgess
- Economic Impact of the Personal Nanofactory - by Robert A.
Freitas Jr.
- Corporate Cornucopia - by Michael Vassar
- Molecular Manufacturing and the Developing World: Looking
to Nanotechnology For Answers - by Don Maclurcan
- Considering Military Implications of Nanofactory-level
Nanotechnology - by Brian Wang
- Molecular Manufacturing and the Need for Crime Science - by
Deborah Osborne
- Safer Molecular Manufacturing Through Nanoblocks - by Tom
Craver
- Are We Enlightened Guardians, Or Are We Apes Designing
Humans? - by Douglas Mulhall
Covering topics from commerce to criminology, from ethics to
economics, and from our remote past to our distant future, this new collection
illustrates the profound transformation that nanotechnology will have on every
aspect of human society.
It's been a great experience for us to work closely with and learn from such knowledgeable authors. We’re excited about the opportunity of presenting
these essays in the next issue of
Nanotechnology
Perceptions. That issue is due on May 8, and, as before, we also will
post the essays online at
KurzweilAI.net and at
Wise-Nano.org.
State of Global Emergency
Earlier this month, CRN executive director Mike Treder received an invitation
from the
Foundation For the Future to take part in a special meeting in Bellevue,
Washington (USA) called "Crossroads for Planet Earth." Topics included human
population, extreme and widespread poverty, biodiversity, energy and
environment, public health, world economies, and global priorities.
Nine participants, described as "experts in these fields...plus additional
voices from the USA and abroad," made presentations and were joined in
discussion by
principals from the foundation.
Based on what was shared, it's clear that we are in a state of global emergency
regarding the potential for rapid and disastrous climate change. This may not be
news for most of our readers, but the statistical evidence presented at this
event was highly alarming. CRN’s presentation on "Nanotechnology: Driving Toward
a Crisis" emphasized the opportunity for exponential general-purpose molecular
manufacturing to enable intervention in the rapid deterioration of global
climate stability. Of course, the same technology that will provide many
potential benefits also can be misused and cause great harm.
France is Paying Attention
Jean-Marc Manach has written two excellent, in-depth pieces on
ethical issues
of nanotechnology, or “Problèmes éthiques des nanotechnologies,” at the
French language blog, InternetActu. His articles were stimulated by the
publication of the first group of essays from the
CRN Global Task Force. We're pleased to see that lecteurs de Français are
gaining the opportunity to
learn more
about these important matters.
Phoenix in New Jersey
Chris Phoenix, CRN's Director of Research, was invited by the
New Jersey Institute of
Technology (NJIT) to conduct a two-hour public seminar on "Nanotechnology:
Its Promises and Perils." The event took place on April 5 and was well attended.
The following day, Chris was able to have several informal group discussions
with physics students and professors from NJIT about both technical matters and
ethical implications of advanced nanotechnology.
Prix Ars Electronica!
We’re proud to report that CRN’s
Responsible Nanotechnology weblog has been nominated
for Prix Ars
Electronica, the annual "International Competition for CyberArts." Our
category is Digital Communities, which covers “political, social, and cultural
projects, initiatives, groups, and scenes from all over the world utilizing
digital technology to better society and assume social responsibility.” Just to
be nominated is quite an honor, and it is both gratifying and humbling.
New Diamond Mechanosynthesis Paper
An important
new research paper on the simulation of tooltip designs for molecular
manufacturing is now available online. The paper was published in February 2006
in the peer-reviewed Journal of Computational and Theoretical Nanoscience.
Through detailed computer simulations, researchers are learning a great deal
about the performance properties of different tips at different temperatures.
Basically, this says that a germanium (DBC6Ge) tooltip should work reliably at
room temperature, which is a significant finding.
Drexler on Physics and Computation
Eric Drexler's website, e-drexler.com,
has been updated with two new papers written by Drexler and published in
scientific journals. The papers are: “Productive nanosystems: the physics of
molecular fabrication” and “Toward Integrated Nanosystems: Fundamental issues in
design and modeling.” Fuller descriptions are
available here.
CRN Goes to Vanderbilt
CRN has accepted the invitation to participate in a symposium on "Nanotechnology
Governance: Environmental Management from a Global Perspective" scheduled for
May 19, 2006 at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. It will be
co-hosted by the
Environmental Law Institute and the
Vanderbilt
Center for Environmental Management Studies.
The symposium, which will include approximately 40 invited participants from
both the public and private sectors, is intended to: 1) Focus on the development
of environmental, health, and safety governance structures for nanotechnology
from an international perspective; 2) Examine how nanotechnology governance
structures, including traditional regulation, voluntary programs, industry
standards, disclosure, and other approaches, are developing in the U.S., Europe,
and Asia; and 3) Consider the implications for corporate environmental
management of the development of disparate governance approaches.
Talking Nanotech in New Zealand
The Institution of
Professional Engineers New Zealand has graciously invited CRN Executive
Director Mike Treder to visit their beautiful country for a speaking tour of
nine cities over two weeks, from September 4-14, 2006. Cities on the itinerary
include Dunedin, Timaru, Christchurch, Nelson, Wellington, New Plymouth,
Wanganui, Palmerston North, and Auckland. If you're a New Zealander who is
interested in the relationship between science and society—especially in the
transformative potential of nanotechnology—perhaps you
can meet Mike in September.
Feature Essay: Bottom-up Design
Chris Phoenix, Director of Research, Center for Responsible Nanotechnology
At first encounter, the idea of designing products with
100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms, each in an engineered position, and each
one placed without error, may seem ridiculous. But the goal is not as
implausible as it sounds. Today's personal computers do that number of
transistor operations every few weeks. The operations are done without error,
and each one was engineered—though not directly. There are two reasons why
computers can do this: digital operations and
levels of abstraction. I've talked about both
of these in previous essays, but it bears repeating: at the lowest level of
operations, personal computers do a mole of engineered, reliable transistor
operations every few weeks, and the techniques used to accomplish this can be
applied to molecular manufacturing.
Computers can be so precise and reliable because they are based on digital
operations. A digital operation uses discrete values: either a 1 or a 0. A value
of 0.95 will be corrected to 1, and a value of 0.05 will be corrected to 0. This
correction happens naturally with every transistor operation. Transistors can do
this correction because they are nonlinear: there is a large region of input
where the output is very close to 1, and another large region of input where the
output is very close to 0. A little bit of energy is used to overcome entropy at
each step. Rather than letting inaccuracies accumulate into errors, they are
fixed immediately. Thermal noise and quantum effects are corrected before they
compound into errors.
Forces between atoms are nonlinear. As atoms approach each other, they feel a
weak attractive force. Then, at a certain distance, the force becomes repulsive.
If they are pushed together even more closely, the force becomes more strongly
attractive than before; finally, it becomes sharply repulsive. Chemists and
physicists know the region of weak distant attraction as “surface forces”; the
closer, stronger attraction is “covalent bonds”; and the intervening zone of
repulsion is responsible for the “activation energy” that is required to make
reactions happen. Of course, this picture is over-simplified; covalent bonds are
not the only type of bond. But for many types of atoms, especially carbon, this
is a pretty good description.
Several types of errors must be considered in fabricating and using a mechanical
component. A fabrication operation may fail, causing the component to be damaged
during manufacture. The operations may be correct but imprecise, causing small
variances in the manufactured part. During use, the part may wear, causing
further variance. As we will see, the nonlinear nature of molecular bonds can be
used (with good design) to virtually eliminate all three classes of error.
Nonlinear forces between atoms can be used to correct inaccuracies in
fabrication operations before they turn into errors. If the atom is placed in
slightly the wrong location, it will be pulled to the correct location by
inter-atomic forces. The correction happens naturally. If the placement tool is
inaccurate, then energy will be lost as the atom moves into place; as with
transistors, entropy isn't overcome for free. But, as with transistors,
reliability can be maintained over virtually unlimited numbers of operations by
spending a little bit of energy at each step.
In practice, there are several different kinds of errors that must be considered
when a moiety—an atom or a molecular fragment—is added to a part under
construction. It may fail to transfer from the “tool” molecule to the
“workpiece” molecule. This kind of error can be detected and the operation can
be retried. The moiety may bond to the wrong atom on the workpiece. Or it may
exert a force on the workpiece that causes other atoms, already in the
workpiece, to rearrange their bonds. This is called “reconstruction,” and
avoiding it imposes additional requirements for precise placement of the moiety,
but it is also a non-linear phenomenon: if the moiety is positioned within a
certain range of the ideal location, reconstruction won't happen, at least in
well-chosen structures.
Errors of dimensional tolerance, which in traditional manufacturing are caused
by imprecise operations or wear during operation, need not be a factor in
molecular manufactured components. If an atom is pulled slightly out of place,
either during manufacture or during operation, it will be pulled back into place
by its bonds. In engineering terms, there is no plastic deformation, only
elastic deformation. Of course, if a strong enough force is applied, the bonds
can be broken, but preventing this is a matter of engineering the product
properly. It requires a lot of force to break a bond. If a component must be
either perfectly fastened or broken, then it will remain perfect for a long,
long time under normal usage.
Traditional mechanical engineering and manufacturing involve a lot of operations
to deal with errors of dimensional tolerance—including measuring, finishing, and
sensing during operation—that will not be required with molecular manufactured
components. This will make molecular manufacturing systems significantly easier
to automate. As long as low-level operations are reliable and repeatable, then
higher-level operations built on them also will be reliable. Knowing precisely
how the system works at the lowest level will allow confident engineering at
higher levels. This design principle is called levels of abstraction.
A computer programmer can write an instruction such as, “Draw a black rectangle
in the middle of the screen,” in just a few characters of computer code. These
few characters, however, may invoke thousands of low-level instructions carried
out by billions of transistor operations. The programmer has implicit confidence
that each transistor will work correctly. Actually, programmers don't think
about transistors at all, any more than you think about each spark in your car's
engine when you step on the gas. Transistors are combined into registers, which
are used by CPU microcode, which is controlled by assembly language, which is
machine-generated from high-level languages, which are used to write several
layers of operating system functions and libraries, and this is what the
programmers actually use. Because transistors are, in effect, completely
reliable and predictable, each level built on top of them also is completely
reliable and predictable (with the exception of design errors).
Molecular manufacturing will involve massive numbers of simple mechanosynthetic
operations done under fully automated control. A nanofactory building a product
would not be much different, at several important levels of function, from a
computer-driven printer printing a page. The nanofactory product designer would
not see each atom, any more than a graphic artist sees each ink droplet. Graphic
artists usually work in abstractions such as splines, rather than individual
pixels. The user does not even see each spline. The user just hits "Print" and
the picture comes out of the printer with each ink droplet in its proper place.
A molecular manufactured product could include a microscopic component
containing a billion atoms—which could be placed with complete reliability by a
single instruction written by a designer. An array of a billion identical
components, each containing a billion atoms, could be specified without any
additional difficulty. Each component could reliably work for many years without
a single broken bond. Thus, just as a computer programmer can write a simple
program that does an almost unlimited number of reliable calculations, a product
designer could write a simple specification that placed an almost unlimited
number of atoms—reliably and predictably—making exactly the product that was
desired. (Background radiation is beyond the scope of this essay; it will
introduce failures and require redundancy at scales larger than about a micron,
but this should not require much additional
complexity.)
Operation of the manufactured product can be similarly planned from the bottom
up. If the smallest operations happen in a predictable way at a predictable
time, then higher-level operations can be built on top of the low-level
functionality. This is not the only way to implement high-level functionality,
of course. Biology uses statistical processes and analog feedback loops to
implement its actions. Although this is more elegant and efficient in some ways,
it would be difficult to design systems that worked along these lines, and it is
not necessary. Digital operations can be made to happen in lockstep, and
aggregates of digital operations can be treated as reliable primitives for
higher levels. The more predictable a system is, the less sensing is required to
make it work as desired. Nanoscale sensing often is cited as a weak point in
nanomachine design, but in principle, nanomachines designed on digital
principles would not need any sensing in order to work reliably. In practice,
only a small amount of internal feedback would be required, which could be
provided by relatively crude sensors.
It is important to realize that digital design using levels of abstraction does
not imply increased complexity at higher levels. An assembly language
instruction that causes a billion transistor operations may be specified
completely with a paragraph of description. Its results may be very
intricate—may invoke a lot of diverse activity—but there is a crucial
distinction between intricacy and complexity.
Similarly, a high-level language instruction that invokes a billion assembly
language instructions may be understood completely at a glance. And so it goes,
through as many levels as are useful to the programmer/designer. As long as the
lower levels are reliable, the upper levels can be reliable, intricate (useful),
and simple (easy to use).
One of the most important features of molecular manufacturing is that its very
lowest level—the formation of molecules from precisely positioned building
blocks—is precise and reliable due to digital operations. Every level of
abstraction above the foundation of molecular fabrication can thus be equally
precise and reliable. Google, the World Wide Web, and modern video games all
have been engineered from molar numbers of transistor operations. In the same
way, masses of diverse, highly functional products will be engineered from
molecular fabrication operations.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
FUNDRAISING ALERT!
Significant progress in efforts to
roadmap the technical steps toward molecular manufacturing make the work of
CRN more important than ever. It is critical that we examine the global
implications of this rapidly emerging technology, and begin creating wise and
effective solutions. That's why we have formed the
CRN Global Task Force.
But it won't be easy. We need to grow, and rapidly, to meet the expanding
challenge. You can help!
Your tax-deductible
donation to CRN will enable us to achieve that growth. We rely largely on
individual donations and small grants for our survival. This is important work
and we welcome your participation.
Thank you!
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
C-R-Newsletter #39 March 30, 2006
SPECIAL EDITION: CRN Task Force Essays
In August 2005, the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology
announced the formation of a Global Task Force
convened to study the societal implications of this rapidly emerging technology.
Bringing together a diverse group of world-class experts from multiple
disciplines, we are spearheading an historic, collaborative effort to develop
comprehensive recommendations for the safe and responsible use of
nanotechnology.
For their first major project, members of the CRN Task Force
chose to generate a range of independent essays identifying and defining
specific concerns about the possibilities of advanced nanotechnology. The first
11 of those essays were published in the March 2006 issue of
Nanotechnology
Perceptions, a peer-reviewed academic journal of the Collegium Basilea
in Basel, Switzerland.
In this special edition of the C-R-Newsletter, we bring you a sampling of the
essays as well as what some Global Task Force members are saying about them.
CTF Essays Overview
Singularities And Nightmares: The Range Of Our Futures
Is AI Near a Takeoff Point?
Nano-Guns, Nano-Germs, and Nano-Steel
Molecular Manufacturing:
Too Dangerous to Allow?
Cultural Dominants and Differential MNT Uptake
Globalization and Open Source Nano Economy
The Need For Limits
Nanotechnology Dangers and Defenses
Nanoethics and Human Enhancement
Molecular Manufacturing and 21st Century Policing
Strategic Sustainable Brain
Coming Soon!
Feature Science Essay: Trends
in Medicine
Reminder: Every month this newsletter gets you up to date on recent events, but
to follow the latest happenings on a daily basis, be
sure to check our
Responsible Nanotechnology weblog.
=========
CTF Essays Overview
Nanotechnology -- the precise engineering of tiny but powerful machines -- is
advancing quickly, leaping from the pages of science fiction into world-class
research laboratories, and coming soon to a desktop near you.
Like electricity or computers before it, nanotechnology will bring greatly
improved efficiency and productivity in many areas of human endeavor. In its
mature form, known as molecular nanotechnology (MNT) or molecular manufacturing
(MM), it will have significant impact on almost all industries and all parts of
society. Personal nanofactories may offer better built, longer lasting, cleaner,
safer, and smarter products for the home, for communications, for medicine, for
transportation, for agriculture, and for industry in general.
However, as a general-purpose technology, MM will be dual-use, meaning that in
addition to its civilian applications, it will have military uses as well --
making far more powerful weapons and tools of surveillance. Thus, it represents
not only wonderful benefits for humanity, but also grave risks.
Progress toward developing the technical requirements for desktop molecular
manufacturing is moving forward rapidly. Many of the profound implications of
molecular manufacturing are explored in our initial
collection of 11 new essays written by members of the CRN Task
Force. From military and security issues to human enhancement, artificial
intelligence, and more, these articles take a look under the lid of Pandora's
box to see what the future might hold.
"Our plan from the beginning was to concentrate first on defining the challenges
posed by nanotechnology," said Mike Treder, executive director of CRN and
chairman of the Global Task Force. "What risks do we really face? How do they
relate to each other? What is most important to know in order to cope wisely and
effectively with molecular manufacturing?"
"We jumped at the chance to publish the CRN Task Force essays," said Jeremy
Ramsden, editor-in-chief of the Nanotechnology Perceptions journal. "To us,
these papers represent world-class thinking about some of the most important
challenges that human society will ever face."
Ray Kurzweil, renowned inventor, entrepreneur, and best-selling author, said,
"As the pace of technological advancement rapidly accelerates, it becomes
increasingly important to promote knowledgeable and insightful discussion of
both promise and peril. I'm very pleased to take part in this CRN Task Force
effort by including my own essay, and by hosting discussion of the essays on the
'MindX' discussion board at KurzweilAI.net."
What follows is a brief description of each essay and a sample of the author's
ideas. We encourage you to read the full essays online and to participate in
discussing them. All essays are posted at KurzweilAI.net, and most are also
available for comment at Wise-Nano.org.
Singularities And Nightmares: The Range Of Our Futures
By David Brin
Options for a coming singularity include self-destruction of civilization, a
positive singularity, a negative singularity (machines take over), and retreat
into tradition. Our urgent goal: find (and avoid) failure modes, using
anticipation (thought experiments) and resiliency -- establishing robust systems
that can deal with almost any problem as it arises.
David Brin writes: In times to come, the worst dangers to civilization may
not come from clearly identifiable and accountable adversaries as much as from a
general democratization of the means to do harm. New technologies, distributed
by the Internet and effectuated by cheaply affordable tools, will offer
increasing numbers of people access to modalities of destructive power—means
that will be used because of justified grievances, avarice, indignant anger, or
simply because they are there.
Is AI Near a Takeoff Point?
By J. Storrs Hall
Computers built by nanofactories may be millions of times more powerful than
anything we have today, capable of creating world-changing AI in the coming
decades. But to avoid a dystopia, the nature (and particularly intelligence) of
government (a giant computer program -- with guns) will have to change.
J. Storrs Hall writes: The most likely place for artificial intelligence (AI)
to appear first is in corporate management; corporations have the necessary
resources and clearly could benefit from the most intelligent management.
Initial corporate development could be a problem, however, because such AI's are
very likely to be programmed to be competitive first, and worry about minor
details like ethics, the economy, and the environment later, if at all.
Nano-Guns, Nano-Germs, and Nano-Steel
By Mike Treder
Within our lifetimes, we are likely to witness battles on a scale never before
seen. Powered by molecular manufacturing, near-future wars may threaten our
freedom, our way of life, and even our survival. Superior military technology
allowed the Spanish to conquer the Incan empire in 1532. Could today's most
powerful civilization, the United States, be just as easily conquered by a
nano-enabled attacker?
Mike Treder writes:
It is not certain, of course, that large-scale war will occur within the next
few decades. But if it does, and if both (or all) sides are nano-enabled, that
event could last a relatively long time, and casualties could be in the
billions. If, on the other hand, only one combatant possesses the awesome
capabilities of nano-built weapons, computers, and infrastructure, that war
might be over very quickly, and could leave the victor in total command of the
world.
Molecular Manufacturing: Too Dangerous to Allow?
By Robert A. Freitas Jr.
Despite the risks of molecular manufacturing, such as global ecophagy,
replication is not new. Engineered self-replication technologies are already in
wide commercial use and can be made inherently safe. And defenses we've already
developed against harmful biological replicators all have analogs in the
mechanical world that should provide equally effective, or even superior,
defenses.
Robert A. Freitas Jr. writes: Perhaps the earliest-recognized and
best-known danger of molecular manufacturing is the risk that self-replicating
nanorobots capable of functioning autonomously in the natural environment could
quickly convert that natural environment into replicas of themselves on a global
basis, a scenario often referred to as the ‘grey goo problem’ but more
accurately termed ‘global ecophagy’ Such self-replicating systems, if not
countered, could make the earth largely uninhabitable.
Cultural Dominants and Differential MNT Uptake
By Damien Broderick
The impacts of radical and disruptive technologies such as molecular
nanotechnology on societies deserve serious study by economists, sociologists
and anthropologists. Would civil societies degenerate almost instantly into
Hobbesian micro states, where the principal currency is direct power over other
humans, expressed at best as involuntary personal service and, at the worst, as
sadistic or careless infliction of pain and consequent brutalization of spirit
in slaves and masters alike?
Damien Broderick writes: Are we, indeed, doomed to this outcome through
frailties in our evolved nature or perhaps to the rapacity of the current global
economy? Even if we assume that rich consumerist and individualist First World
cultures like the USA could be prone to such collapse, is that true of all
extant societies? Might more rigid or authoritarian societies have an advantage?
Globalization and Open Source Nano Economy
By Giulio Prisco
Some of the problems of today's globalized world could be eliminated or reduced
by developing operational worldwide molecular design and manufacturing
capabilities. Instead of shipping physical objects, their detailed design
specification in a "Molecular Description Language" will be transmitted over a
global data grid evolved from today's Internet and then physically "printed" by
nano printers at remote sites. This would allow communities wishing to remain
independent to retain their autonomy.
Giulio Prisco writes: What happens if the Molecular Description Language
descriptions of basic goods that a local community needs are priced beyond their
reach? And what happens if these licenses are withdrawn for political reasons,
perhaps to force a community to submit to an aggressor community or to an
overreaching central authority?
The Need For Limits
By Chris Phoenix
Molecular manufacturing will give its wielders extreme power and has the
potential to remove or bypass many of today's limits, including laws. That could
lead to a planet-wide dictatorship, or to any of several forms of irreversible
destruction. Perhaps the biggest problem of all will be how to develop a system
of near-absolute power that will not become corrupt.
Chris Phoenix writes: Molecular manufacturing has the potential to remove or
bypass many of today's limits. It is not far wrong to say that the most
significant remaining limits will be human, and that we will be trying our
hardest to bypass even those. To people with faith in humanity's good nature and
high potential, this will come as welcome news. For many who have studied
history, it will be rather frightening. A near-total lack of limits could lead
straight to a planet-wide dictatorship, or to any of several forms of
irreversible destruction.
Nanotechnology Dangers and Defenses
By Ray Kurzweil
To avoid dangers such as unrestrained nanobot replication, we need
relinquishment at the right level and to place our highest priority on the
continuing advance of defensive technologies, staying ahead of destructive
technologies. An overall strategy should include a streamlined regulatory
process, a global program of monitoring for unknown or evolving biological
pathogens, temporary moratoriums, raising public awareness, international
cooperation, software reconnaissance, and fostering values of liberty,
tolerance, and respect for knowledge and diversity.
Ray Kurzweil writes: We are becoming increasingly reliant on mission-critical
software systems, and the sophistication and potential destructiveness of
self-replicating software weapons will continue to escalate. When we have
software running in our brains and bodies and controlling the world's nanobot
immune system, the stakes will be immeasurably greater.
Nanoethics and Human Enhancement
By Patrick Lin and Fritz Allhoff
Human enhancement—our ability to use technology to enhance our bodies and minds,
as opposed to its application for therapeutic purposes—is a critical issue
facing nanotechnology. It will be involved in some of the near-term applications
of nanotechnology, with such research labs as MIT's Institute for Soldier
Technologies working on exoskeletons and other innovations that increase human
strength and capabilities. It is also a core issue related to far-term
predictions in nanotechnology, such as longevity, nanomedicine, artificial
intelligence, and other issues.
Lin and
Allhoff write: The implications of nanotechnology as
related to human enhancement are perhaps some of the most personal and therefore
passionate issues in the emerging field of nanoethics, forcing us to rethink
what it means to be human or, essentially, our own identity. For some,
nanotechnology holds the promise of making us superhuman; for others, it offers
a darker path toward becoming Frankenstein’s monster. This will not be in the
distant future, but rather sooner than many of us might have expected.
Molecular Manufacturing and 21st Century Policing
By Thomas J. Cowper
Will nanofactories foster global anarchy? Will nations devolve into a
technologically-driven arms race, the winner dominating or destroying the planet
with powerful molecular-manufacturing-enabled weapons? Or will the world's Big
Brothers grow larger and more tyrannical, using advanced nanotechnology to
"protect" their law abiding masses through increasing surveillance, control and
internal subjugation? A law-enforcement executive asks the tough questions.
Thomas J. Cowper writes: What capabilities do we want police to have and
which do we want to restrict? How much do they need in order to provide for
public order and safety in an age of advanced nanotechnology? Are they capable
of wielding the power afforded them through augmented reality, unmanned aerial
vehicles, robots, surveillance, data-mining, and biometrics—technologies that
will be greatly enhanced and widely distributed by personal nanofactories? Can
we afford to place such power in the hands of government? And if not, what is
the alternative for ensuring peace and social stability for the world’s
billions?
Strategic Sustainable Brain
By Natasha Vita-More
Markets point to an expected increase in neurosurgery, neuroinformatics,
neuromarketing, biotechnologies, and human performance enhancements with an
explicit focus on nanotechnology. But the consequential inclination is that of
machine intelligence challenging human intelligence. Lurking in the foreground
of the future is whether or not the human brain will be able to keep pace with
new technologies that will otherwise outperform it.
Natasha Vita-More writes: The brain is too fragile. It is far too vulnerable
in its current state to continue providing the necessary cognitive processes for
society's increasing life span. The brain needs resources to ensure that its
components are not depleted or permanently damaged. In order to properly sustain
the brain, we need to know what it likes, the challenges it craves, the rest it
requires, and the protection it deserves. In short, the brain must have a
strategy for its future.
Coming Soon!
Part two of this important collection of essays will appear on May 8, 2006, in
the next issue of Nanotechnology Perceptions. We will present articles
from many more leading thinkers, including Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom,
security expert Deborah Osborne, and Douglas Mulhall, author of Our Molecular
Future.
As editors of the Global Task Force essays, we will be pleased
if you are entertained and informed. But we will be further gratified if you are
inspired to learn more. We hope you'll want to get involved in the vital work of
raising awareness and finding effective solutions to the challenges presented to
the world by advanced nanotechnology.
Mike Treder, CRN
Executive Director
Chris Phoenix, CRN Director of Research
Note: The opinions expressed in these essays are those of the
individual authors and do not necessarily represent the opinions of the Center
for Responsible Nanotechnology, nor of its parent organization,
World Care.
Feature Science Essay: Trends in Medicine
Chris Phoenix, Director of Research, Center for Responsible Nanotechnology
I just returned from a
Future Medical Forum conference where I spoke on the
nanotechnology panel. Other speakers covered topics such as device design,
regulation, setting prices for products, future trends in medical research, and
more. Much of what I heard confirmed ideas I've had about where medicine could
go once it was enabled by molecular manufacturing—but
it seems that some things are happening already. A number of these trends will
disrupt the medical industry. Thus, molecular manufacturing should reinforce the
direction medicine is going—but that direction will not always be comfortable
for medical companies.
I had some interesting conversations with speakers on the Design panel. They
confirmed that rapid prototyping of complete products would speed their work
significantly. They did not seem upset at the prospect of learning to use such a
powerful capability. At one point, I asked one of them: "Let me spin you a
science fiction story. Sometime in the future, people are coming to you for body
modifications to make their lives easier. Things like extensible fingers—sort of
a lightweight Inspector Gadget. Your job is to figure out how to design these
things." His response: "That would be totally cool!"
Norbert Reidel of Baxter spoke about trends in medical research and treatment.
His talk confirmed what I have been expecting: as we gain the ability to gather
increasing amounts of information about a person's biological state, we will be
able to make research and treatment more personal. Today, clinical trials with
placebos are used to tell statistically what works on a broad population. In the
future, we'll be able to move away from clinical trials as a way to tell what
works statistically, and toward individually designed treatment protocols based
on individual genetic makeup and other personal data. His talk was full of
phrases like "in-life research" and "adaptive trials" and "personal medicine." I
asked him whether the ability to gather lots of medical data would make it
possible to research the effects of daily life, such as diet and activities. He
said yes, but the bigger problem would be getting people to act on the results;
he mentioned a doctor who frequently prescribed "a pair of sneakers" but found
that the prescription usually was not filled.
I was most struck by a talk on globalization. The speaker, Brian Firth, is
Cordis's vice president for Medical Affairs and Health Economics Worldwide.
Brian structured his talk around a book by Shell (yes, the oil company):
Shell Global Scenarios to 2025 [PDF]. The scenarios are built around three
major forces: security, market efficiency, and social cohesion. Readers who are
familiar with CRN's Three Systems theory will be
noticing that the first two forces are very similar to the Guardian and
Commercial systems that we, following Jane Jacobs, have identified as major
systems of action in today's world. The third force, social cohesion, appears to
be almost unrelated to our Informational system. But Firth's talk mainly focused
on the first two, so it covered familiar ground.
I find it significant that Firth discussed a lot of what would seem to be Market
issues under Security. He spoke extensively about factors affecting the price of
medical devices. For example, buyers are starting to notice that devices can
cost four times as much in one country as in another. Devices are sometimes
bought in inexpensive regions and then shipped to areas where they are
expensive. These factors would seem to indicate the Market at work—but Firth
listed them all under Security. Apparently, the reasoning is: companies that
control a market don't have to work at being efficient; instead, they have to
defend their territory. Monopolies tend to be more Guardian. Several other
things in Firth's talk, such as his emphasis on (development) risk justifying
luxurious returns, sounded more Guardian than Commercial.
Firth's talk was one of the first, so it influenced my thinking throughout the
rest of the conference. Medicine today is essentially a fight to maintain a
reasonably healthy status quo. Stasis is a good thing; any change from health is
disease, which is to be combated. This is a very Guardian worldview. In the
Guardian system, those who are best at fighting the enemy deserve high praise,
luxuries, and a valuable "territory" that they can own. Efficiency is not a
Guardian value. In fact, Guardians traditionally try to avoid commercial and
market transactions. Firth's discussion of market forces was purely pessimistic,
focusing on the bad things would happen if the market made medical device
companies unprofitable—including less luxurious conferences.
Is there a connection between the Guardian approach to disease, and the Guardian
approach to the business side of medicine? I strongly suspect that there is.
People get used to thinking in a certain style. In addition to their natural
approach to disease, the reverence—and suspicion—that doctors receive from the
public could help to set the tone for a Guardian mindset. Then, any change in
doctors' ability to treat patients could threaten their ability to maintain the
more-or-less healthy status quo. Medical companies could easily become
comfortable with a regulatory environment that makes it easy to maintain
monopolies.
So, what will molecular manufacturing do to the
status quo? It will certainly challenge it. The first challenge may be a wave of
broad-spectrum diagnostic devices that would provide enough information to allow
computer-equipped researchers to know the state of the body, moment to moment
and in detail. The ability to diagnose disease is one of the primary medical
mysteries. Broad-spectrum molecular detectors already are being developed in the
form of DNA chips. As they become less expensive and more widely available, and
as a database relating DNA measurements to physiological conditions is created,
diagnosis will become less of a medical skill and more automated.
With real-time diagnosis comes the ability to treat more aggressively and even
experimentally without increasing risk, and to identify effective treatments
more rapidly. Instead of waiting weeks or even years to see whether secondary
disease symptoms appear, a treatment's direct effects could be detected almost
as soon as the treatment is delivered. Discovering unsuspected impacts on health
will be a lot easier, leading to increased ability to avoid unhealthy situations
and an increased rate of discovery (or rediscovery) of "folk" remedies.
If doctors traditionally fight a zero-sum battle to prevent disease as long as
possible, this implies that a new ability to increase health beyond nominal
might turn the whole medical profession on its head. I discussed this
observation with a conference attendee; the next day, he gave me a copy of
Spontaneous Healing by Dr. Andrew Weil. Weil begins with the observation
that in ancient Greece, there were two health-related professions: doctors,
whose patron was the god of medicine, and healers, whose patron was the goddess
of health. Doctors combated disease; healers advised people on how to support
their body's natural health status. This seems to confirm my observation about
medicine's focus on combating disease, but the ancient Greek healers still
stopped at the goal of maintaining health.
What would happen if science developed the ability to make people healthier than
healthy? What if medicine could change from fighting disease to actually
improving the lives of healthy people? The first question is whether the
existing medical infrastructure would be able to adjust. Doctors have opposed
advances in the past, including, for example,
anesthesia for childbirth. Perhaps doctors will continue to focus on
fighting disease. Unfortunately, they may also fight the advances that
researchers outside the medical system will make with increasing frequency.
If not doctors, then what group could implement the new hyper-health
technologies? In the Middle Ages, medical duties were divided between doctors
and barber-surgeons. Barbers were used to using their sharp blades in close
proximity to people's bodies, and most likely it was a natural progression to
progress to minor surgery like lancing boils. Meanwhile, the original
Hippocratic Oath actually forbade doctors from cutting people. I'm told that
tension between surgeons and other medical doctors remains to this day. So, what
might be the modern equivalent of barber-surgeons?
There is a business that already does voluntary body modification. They are used
to working on, and in, the human body with small tools. They are frequented by
people who are accustomed to ignoring authority. I'm speaking, of course, of
tattoo parlors. When a complete surgical robot can be squeezed into something
the size of a tattoo needle or even an acupuncture needle, perhaps tattoo
parlors will be among the first to adopt it. There may be a natural progression
from decorating the surface of the body to improving other aspects. This is not
quite a prediction—tattoo parlors may not be interested in practicing medicine;
the medical industry may successfully ban such attempts; and others, notably
alternative medicine practitioners, also have experience with needles. But it is
a scenario that's worth thinking about. It could happen.
Trends already developing in medicine will be strengthened by molecular
manufacturing. Studying molecular manufacturing and
its implications may provide useful insights into technological drivers of
medical change. Although not all the change will come from molecular
manufacturing, it does present a package of technological capabilities that will
be obvious drivers of change, and can be used to understand more subtle changes
coming from other sources.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
FUNDRAISING ALERT!
Significant progress in efforts to
roadmap the technical steps toward molecular manufacturing make the work of
CRN more important than ever. It is critical that we examine the global
implications of this rapidly emerging technology, and begin creating wise and
effective solutions. That's why we have formed the
CRN Global Task Force.
But it won't be easy. We need to grow, and rapidly, to meet the expanding
challenge. You can help!
Your tax-deductible
donation to CRN will enable us to achieve that growth. We rely largely on
individual donations and small grants for our survival. This is important work
and we welcome your participation.
Thank you!
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
C-R-Newsletter #38 February 28, 2006
WorldChanging Interview
CRN Goes to Switzerland
From Heaven to Doomsday
The Future And You
CRN Task Force Essays
Developing Countries and Nano Law
Nanotech Basics for Students
A New Definition of
Nanotechnology
Sander Olson’s Interviews
CRN Goes to Spain
Nanomanufacturing
Conference
Feature Essay: Who remembers
analog computers?
As you can see, the month of February has been full of activity for CRN. To
follow the latest happenings on a daily basis, be
sure to check our
Responsible Nanotechnology weblog.
=========
WorldChanging Interview
"Revolution in a Box" is the title of a
long interview about CRN's work posted by Jamais Cascio at the popular
WorldChanging web site. Here is the introduction:
Founded in December 2002, the Center for Responsible
Nanotechnology has a modest goal: to ensure that the planet navigates the
emerging nanotech era safely. That's a lot for a couple of volunteers to
shoulder, but Mike Treder and Chris Phoenix have carried their burden well, and
done much to raise awareness of the potential risks and benefits of molecular
manufacturing, including a major presentation at the US Environmental Protection
Agency on the impacts of nanotechnology. We first linked to CRN back in October
of 2003, and have long considered them a real WorldChanging ally.
CRN Goes to Switzerland
In early February, CRN executive director Mike Treder traveled to Zurich,
Switzerland, to participate in a "Risk Governance for Nanotechnology" workshop
organized by the
International Risk Governance Council. Among the 30 attendees were
representatives from the European Commission, the Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development (OECD), the World Economic Forum, Environmental
Defense, CBEN at Rice University, Swiss RE, Pfizer, and the NanoBusiness
Alliance.
The event was coordinated by Ortwinn Renn from the University of Stuttgart and
Mike Roco from the U.S. National Science and Technology Council, and moderated
by Tim Mealey of the Meridian Institute. CRN was pleased overall with the
direction taken and with the content of the workshop. It was refreshing to see
that some international leaders are willing to consider longer-term risks and
more serious implications than nanoparticle toxicity. If all goes well, we may
be developing a framework within which
productive nanosystems can effectively be evaluated in terms of economic,
environmental, geopolitical, and societal impacts.
From Heaven to Doomsday
The Hungarian scientist and author Dennis Gabor wrote, "The future cannot be
predicted, but it can be invented." As humans, we will invent (or create) our
future; there’s little doubt about that. But will it be the future we want? If
we're not careful, tomorrow may happen accidentally, without forethought or
planning. And it may not be a pleasant place to live.
Although the future cannot be accurately predicted, we do have the power to
imagine several different possible tomorrows. By doing that, we could choose the
future we like best, and then try to make it come about. In his latest essay for
Future Brief, Mike Treder suggests
seven possible futures that we may inherit.
The Future And You
Two installments of an extensive conversation about nanotechnology between
science fiction author Stephen Euin Cobb and CRN’s Mike Treder have been posted
online. "The
Future And You" is a semi-weekly podcast about, well, the future and you.
Have a listen and
tell us what you think.
CRN Task Force Essays
Due to the number and the depth of essays written by members of the
CRN Task Force, we have
decided to publish our 22 submitted pieces in two separate issues of the
Nanotechnology Perceptions journal. This is so readers won't feel daunted by
too much material in a single issue. We think our actual readership will be
higher this way.
The first half, to be published in mid-to-late March, will include:
1. "Nanotechnology Dangers and Defenses" by Ray Kurzweil
2. "Molecular Manufacturing: Too Dangerous to Allow?" by Robert A. Freitas, Jr.
3. "Nano-Guns, Nano-Germs, and Nano-Steel" by Mike Treder
4. "Molecular Manufacturing and 21st Century Policing" by Tom Cowper
5. "The Need For Limits" by Chris Phoenix
6. "Globalization and Open Source Nano Economy" by Giulio Prisco
7. "Cultural Dominants and Differential MNT Uptake" by Damien Broderick
8. "Nanoethics and Human Enhancement" by Patrick Lin and Fritz Allhoff
9. "Strategic Sustainable Brain" by Natasha Vita-More
10. "Is AI Near a Takeoff Point?" by J. Storrs Hall
11. "Singularities and Nightmares: The Range of Our Futures" by David Brin
The second half will follow five or six weeks later, at the
beginning of May.
Developing Countries and Nano Law
In a cogent and stimulating
essay published recently in the Jakarta Post, Mohamad Mova Al
'Afghani (a member of the CRN
Task Force) describes why "Developing countries must be ready for
nanotechnology." Al 'Afghani is an Indonesian attorney working in corporate law
and intellectual property. His legal background, his involvement in
international business affairs, and his perspective as a citizen of a developing
country give him a unique perspective.
Nanotech Basics for Students
A new page called "Nanotechnology
Basics: For Students and Other Learners" has been added to CRN's website. In
addition to providing answers to common questions about nanotech, the page also
features links to other student resources. If you're a teacher, a student, or a
parent of a student, make sure to direct these eager learners to our new page on
the basics of nanotechnology.
A New Definition of Nanotechnology
The word nanotechnology has two meanings. One is
molecular
manufacturing, which CRN studies. The other is a growing collection of
diverse fields. We have seen a lot of questionable, inaccurate, or overly broad
definitions to cover the latter. As an alternative to those,
we suggest the following: nanotechnology is the engineering of functional
systems at the molecular scale.
We like this definition because it points the way toward molecular manufacturing
while excluding technologies that are only peripherally related and including
technologies that specifically involve design and control at the nanoscale.
Sander Olson's Interviews
An in-depth
interview with inventor, entrepreneur, and best-selling author Ray Kurzweil
has been posted in a
special new section
on CRN's main website. Sander Olson, one of the original developers of the
NanoApex and NanoMagazine web sites, conducted the interview. Since
the acquisition of those sites in 2005 by the International Small Technology
Network, many of Sander's previous interviews have not been available on the
web. To correct this, CRN has begun publishing several of them on our site.
CRN Goes to Spain
Madrid, Spain, will be the location for the "Segundas Jornadas Convergencia
Ciencia-Tecnología," which means Second Annual Converging Science-Technology.
It's a
salon/symposium taking place March 6-10 in the assembly hall of the Escuela
Politécnica Superior de la Universidad de Alcalá (Polytechnical School of the
University of Alcala). CRN executive director Mike Treder will make a
presentation on ethical use of advanced nanotechnology on Thursday, March 9.
Nanomanufacturing Conference
Molecular nanotechnology and manufacturing, or using matter to build complex
products and structures atom-by-atom like pieces of Legos, will soon lead us
into the sixth industrial revolution. Like steam engines, electricity and
transistors, nanotechnology is primed to completely disrupt markets, industries
and business models worldwide. Similarly, it will replace our entire
manufacturing base with a new, radically precise, less expensive, and more
flexible way of making products. These pervasive changes in manufacturing will
leave virtually no product, process or industry untouched.
That is the description of nanotechnology in the brochure for a
Nanomanufacturing Conference, coming March 29-30 to the Los Angeles
Convention Center.
They have a great lineup of speakers, including:
