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Social/Technological Implications Of Nanotech?
Morficflux asks: "I am a high school student currently working on my 18-plus-page College Prep paper. Currently, I am trying to write something that is not only interesting to me, but pertains to the all-important issue of the progression of technology. I really want to take the bull on by the horns so I am tackling the issue of the social and technological implications that will occur with the invention and mainstream use of Nanotechnology. What is going to happen when we must deal with these issues? Where might I find more information on this so I may proceed? What will be the scope of change, and how will it affect us all?"
You are about to get flamed.
By college professors.
Telling you to do your own fscking resarch.
Meanwhile, I will follow the occasional link listed in this article, and hopefully learn something new.
That is all.
Is this post not nifty? Sluggy Freelance. Worshi
It isn't going to happen. Not for A VERY LONG TIME. We might as well discuss how Vulcans will be more fun to play chess with.
I demand a million helicopters and a DOLLAR!
This would force Al Gore et al to either just come out and admit that their environmentalist hysterics are simply an attempt to force everyone in America to have the same dismal life as a Beltway insider, or to "roll with it" and remove a hundred years of ineffective Federal law.
Oh yeah... I bet we'd have a better handle on eugenics as well, and that would lead to the genetic perfection of the human race. I can't wait!
Carefree highway, let me slip away on you.
Of course, Eric Drexler's book Engines of Creation started it all. Unbounding the Future , by Drexler, Chris Peterson, and Gayle Pergamit, is a less technical popularization of the ideas put forth in Engines. Drexler's Nanosystems is the authoritative technical book on the subject.
Zyvex researcherRalph Merkle is acknowledged worldwide as one of foremost authorities on nanotechnology; his nanotech website is the definitive starting place for locating nanotech resources on the web.
Simpletoneity, n. -- The phenomenon of many people all doing the same stupid thing at the same time.
http://nanotech.rutgers.edu/nanotech/
http://www.lucifer.com/~sean/Nano.html
http://www.itri.loyola.edu/nanobase/
http://www.dvtech.com/pages/pages/Tec NANO.htm
Nanotechnology is very intersting. Hope you enjoy writing the paper. :-)
------- What exactly is real?
Do you mean MEMS (Micro-ElectroMechanical Systems), or the stuff of science fiction where small machines get injected into our bodies to do things? Do you mean the advances in electronics?
At work we're looking into MEMS to build "low-cost" RF and microwave components-- phase shifters, specifically.
You're posting to /., so you know about the advance in electronics.
Both of these have little social consequences.
As far as the ethical and social ramifications of other nanotechnology uses, what worries do you have? fortunately, we're shielded from many of them by scale-- there's a limit at which mechanical devices can't be made any smaller due to molecular effects. Things that are smooth at our sensory scale are unimagineably rough on microscopic scales. We have to deal with surface roughness in microwave electronics, as it can significantly change design parameters from what the classical (read: simple) analysis says they should be.
Don't want to sound too negative, but I don't see it as exciting as many people.
There are none.
Nanotechnology is a cool ploy implemented by college professors and researchers to keep their jobs. You see, it works like this. Some dumb old college provost goes down into academia and asks what the profs are up to. They respond, "We're researching stuff that will change the world...and oh yeah, it will make your college famous and filthy rich from all the patented technologies that are developed....but of course, the technologies will be developed over the course of decades, which will require serious dollars from the college to buy lab equipment, assistants and such"
The end result is the profs go out and buy shit loads of Dreamcasts and PSX2's and generally have a rip roaring time. They fly in cute showgirls from Las Vegas and Cuban cigars. After 10 or 15 years, they transfer to another college...of course taking all the best assistants and researches, forcing the colleges to start all over again.
So there you have it. Nanotechnology won't ever bother you because it isn't real....sort of like the internet, but that's another story.
Nanotech can to anything , just like atomic power could in the 1950s.
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I moderate at +3, Highest Scores, and I always mod down.
If you don't like it, vote me off the island.
Maybe what we need is the "Slashdot Guide to Finding Information Online" -- we could email it to teachers...
As I posted on GeekPress: According to a BBC article, researchers at the University of Massachusetts have made two major advances towards creating nanomachines from matter: a glue to group particles into highly ordered clusters and the capacity to move single atoms at room temperature. Looks like it's going to be a while before DNA rewriters replace colored contact lenses, though.
-- Diana Hsieh
-- Diana Hsieh
GeekPress: The Weirder Side of Tech News
And slashdot? Yeah, that's the forum for people with well-thought out views about political and social issues. After all, spending all your time programming computers gives you a well-balanced view of the world, an appreciation for the difficult and complex nuances of human social relations, plus it gives you a load of spare time to think about things. And of course, slashdot readers are an incredibly representative sample of the population -- black, female, old, there's one of each, maybe more. Sure there are a few nutty knee-jerk libertarians out there, but in general they're swamped by the tide of reasonable, well thought-out debate.
Prepare to be swamped by a thousand links on the technological feasibility of nanotechnology, two thousand links to Bill Joy's speech, and precisely nothing of use to you in your essay. When you get an 'F' for failing to tackle any important issues whatsoever, do feel free to post to slashdot once more, and I will help to sue your school for causing emotional distress. Before long, your teacher will be strutting round the exercise yard, dealing crack, having knife-fights with other inmates, smoking blunts and pimping out his stable of bitches to the warders. And since he would almost certainly be sent to a minimum-security, white-collar prison, that kind of behaviour is going to stand out.
streetlawyer, abusing the privilege of posting at +2 since last week.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
The first nanotech prize winner, a really small motor, is still on display at Caltech's phsyics building.
"one treats others with courtesy not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are" --G. Henrichs
I don't think there's any rational way for a human being to answer your questions, but here's a place to start: www.transhumanist.org. I believe that creating true nanotechnology will be a singular event - no one can predict what will happen as a result of the event; predictions published before the event will seem silly to those who are around after the event has had its effect. Nanotech certainly has the potential for revolutionizing everything, but there's no way to predict the effects.
Don't forget to include slashdot in your citations page...
That said, you can find some nanotech links here:
* The Open Directory Project has a number of great links here, including a link to the important Foresight Institute.
* And, of course, there is Ralph Merkle's page.
Good luck. I wish /. had some rule that we would only offer assistance to students who let us read their finished products.
A. Keiper
Washington, D.C.
...try saying it's interesting, but not necessarily a big deal.
I'm a nanosceptic. As interesting as this sort of technology is, I don't think it is quite the miracle cure for everything or a source of world-ending destruction. Too many things have billed themselves that way in the past and haven't lived up to their promises.
First of all, read Bill Joy's article on Wired, and some of the follow up articles, like the ones at Salon.com. I heard him speak at a symposium at Stanford a couple weeks ago. If a transcript is on the web read it too. You look a lot better on these essays if you at least read the public press on the subject.
Right now, the public press is all there is. Very little research in nanotechnology as such makes it into the journals. The field is awfully young.
Now, doomsayers and optimists alike see nanotech as way of handling large problems by using self-replicating machines to, for example, convert chemicals into more useful or less toxic ones, or to cure diseases like cancer by simply attacking the cancer directly and non-invasively. The doomsayers also warn of nano-infections killing millions and turning ecosystems into sludge.
However, nature hes been throwing the worst it has to offer in self-replicating nanotechnology at living organisms for billions of years, and most of the time we live through it. I am sceptical that humans will build machines as resilient as those nature provides anytime soon.
This doesn't eliminate medical potential - we might flood a body with short-lived machines designed to hunt down a cancer to do some other specific work, and let them run until the immune system kills them. I just don't think we'll see artificial diseases killing people off - human immune systems are much too good for that and the real world is a very caustic, destructive place for tiny machines. I suspect the average toxic waste dump is also going to be a poor place to deploy nanotech.
Biotech is much more useful and dangerous in that respect, since nature has already done most of the work of constructing self-replicating machines that can survive in nature.
I'm not convinced that any of the recent advances in nanotech lead to self-replication at all. Remember, we can't even build reliably self-replicating machines at any scale. Why miniaturisation should make this easier is something I don't understand.
Nanotech has a lot of potential for manufacturing, no doubt about that, but household replicators strike me as a bit far-fetched, although perhaps not impossible. The most immediate benefit I expect to see is the construction of largely unspecialised factories that are able to retool to a new product or new specifications in a matter of days or even hours. This is a trend already underway, but I think nanotech could make it a lot easier.
The result might be a manufactuing process not unlike the software design process. Someone makes a design, tests it in a computer, weeds out the bugs, and distant factories are able to assemble the product from nothing but the plans. Perhaps it's time to discuss open source industrial design? GNU four-slice toaster v6.2? Weirder things have happened.
Another major area for realistic progress is brain research. At present, a lot of neurological research depends on a small number of patients with a form of epilepsy that can only be cured by opening the skull and operating directly on the brain while the patient is awake. With nanotechnology, we could do even more direct and small scale research on the brain without ever having to open the skull at all.
But, I'm sceptical of claims of doom and claims that nanotech can solve all our problems. There are no ultimate solutions.
If you are going to attack this problem, you need to distinguish between different levels of technology that could all properly be called "nanotech".
/.); small nanoparticles that can be used to carry drugs to particular parts of the body and release them where it is appropriate (don't have the reference, sorry). Most of these technologies fall under the heading of self-assembling nanotech. I.e. You figure out that a certain set of compounds under the proper conditions will spontaneously arrange themselves in some useful fashion. This is legitimately nanotech, but is a far cry from autonomous, self-replicating nanobots.
There are technolgies under development now, which will be commercial in 3-10 years, which could easily be considered "nanotech". For example: nanosized magnetic core memory (recently on
Another level of development will be marked by the use of nanomachines to assemble bulk materials. At the simplest level, such a machine would act as a filter: pour in slurried ore, and it spits out streams of refined metal. At greater levels of complexity, you can produce things like wood, meat, cloth, etc. This requires a high degree of fine control, but it is relatively simple because you're just building the same "cell" over and over and over.
Moving beyond that, you enter the age of the general assember, and the nanite robot. This is the sort of nanotech people write SF about, and that gives Bill Joy the screaming heebie-jeebies. There are several stages within this level of development.
Initially, probably, general assemblers will be huge, not very efficient, hard to build, and limitted in capability (i.e. they can't build something as complex as another one of themselves). They will only be available to corporations and governments. At this point, you have the potential to produce product very cheaply and sell it for whatever the market will bear. Which means that it may be quite a while before we move beyond this step, because in this phase, big business holds all the cards and the consumers just have to line up and take what they get. Fortunately, there are avenues for research that aren't focussed on profit, and there are profit-oriented research centers that will continue to push the envelope for the sake of getting an edge on the competition. But I suspect there will be a very strong push to keep things more or less at this level, and keep the assemblers under the control of a monied elite. Yes, this worries me.
The resistance is because, in the next phase, general assemblers are smaller, cheaper, more available, and more capable (and capable of reproducing themselves, probably). At this point, there is the potential to develop a pure information economy, because you can make anything you want using just raw materials, electricity (and probably not much of that), an assembler, and a design. You could even have a totally open-source economy. The economics of scarcity and profit go to hell in a handbasket. But you also introduce the very real possibility that any reasonably bright and deranged person can design a nanoplauge to wipe out humanity (the grey goo and the Unabomber problems).
There is also a shift that will occur when it is possible to build self-reproducing nanites. This is somewhat, though not completely, decoupled from assembler technology, so it's hard to say when it occurs. This level of technology is what really heralds the danger that Bill Joy was freaking out over. Without self-reproducing nanites, nanotech is still dangerous, but it's not world-breaking.
Each of these technologies is going to have a whole set of reprocussions and ramifications. You may find that it is hard to survey the entire future history of the development of this technology without winding up writing a book. So you may want to focus on a particular level of development. Also, trying to predict what's going to happen once general assemblers are available, even primitive ones, is basically prophesy and therefore probably bullshit. (Everything I've said that could be construed as a prediction should be read as if it was prefaced with a huge honking disclaimer. I don't pretend to be a seer; these are just my guesses.)
"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." -- Wernher von Braun
Im a sociology major and I graduate in May. I've been working on a novella covering this topic exactly. (although recently ive been quite lazy in those regards)
First and foremost you must realize that social change is gradual. The ultimate ends to nanotechnology is the ability for anyone to have anything they want at the push of a button. But that wont happen for a long.. long time. Using today as an example, it should already be possible to access any song with a click of a mouse (or a few clicks) but basic marxist theory states that the people in power want to stay in power and will fight for that power to the bitter end. They actually reconstruct society in order for the people not in power to think they have opportunities to advance, but the opportunities for these people to excel are next to nothing. (spare me the story of your great grandfather working in a coal mine, those are outliers usually based on luck.)
So when nanotechnology comes into play, look for billions of dollars being spent to -fight- the introduction of this technology to the general public (similar to the RIAA's spending now). Once the ability to reconstruct matter efficiently and effectivly gets in the hands of the people, there is no -need- for a true power structure anymore, and that scares alot of people.
There would be no need for a governmental system beyond regulating abuse of nanotech (but then again, who cares about that when i can make a cheeseburger out of a rock? Or have natalie portman walk out of my wall for a quick shag.) Puritan morals would be, well, crushed. With everyone being able to recieve instant gratification, we must look towards the other human abilities.
I imagine you would see the division of society into a few categories.. Artists, Explorers, Scientists and Nanobums.
Artists figure out new things to create with nanotech. Explorers travel the universe, as humans are now immortal. Scientists continue thier pursuit. And nanobums live in utter physical extacy or just have fun.
I think there would be alot more nanobums then any other group
I want to again stress that to reach this form of society will take centuries, even after efficient nanotech is invented.
Keep in mind the above are merely the opinion of a sociology student, and are based on my applications of basic sociological theory with a few assumptions on what super-advanced nanotech will be able to do. I dont consider myself an expert in either field, I just find them fascinating.. I wish you the best of luck and feel free to plagerize my ideas.
no
He was asking about the social implications of nanotech. Any social implications are theoretical at this point, or in other words, fiction.
In science fiction there is a long standing tradition of speculative extrapolation of the implications (including social implications) of various scenarios, mostly technological.
In any case, my post clearly stated that my reading suggestions were a suplement to 'serious' books, not a replacement.
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The real Webmaven is user ID 27463. I don't rate an imposter, because my ID is such a lame-ass high number.
Your paper should be your own work, and yes, that includes searching libraries and internet for papers that are relevant for the topic. The ability to read books and research journals, and to utilize the important and interesting ones is one of the factors colleges look for when reading your paper. Leveraging hundreds or thousands of people to do your research for you is ridiculous and immoral.
Look back to the invention of flight. Back at the time that they were theorizing about whether heavier-than-air craft were feasible, I am quite certain that they were not successfully predicting today's "hub and spoke" airline economy. And they wouldn't have predicted the "cramming of passengers into microscopic seats" nor the most recent trend towards expanding legroom.
In short, any theories at this point are likely to be as fictional as the predictions back in the 1950s that everyone would be flying "jet cars" and helicopters to work.
This has the attractive result that you can be quite creative about the results you look for, with no one to gainsay your claims.
You could bias towards the "cyberpunk" approach that Neal Stephenson's "Diamond Age" suggests, or to the "artistic" approach of Greg Bear's "Blood Music."
These, and other, works can represent useful inspiration for your own Science Fiction story, which is effectively what any theorizing about the effects of nanotech represent.
I'd suggest considering several sides to it, in terms of actions and reactions in:
A useful exercise would be to take each of the areas of society that you plan to examine, and apply McLuhan's Laws of Media to generate some relevant Tetrads.
That is, look at how nanotech affects the given system component in four ways:
Play the "Tetrad Game" a dozen times, and render those tetrads into a systematic "story," and you should get an interesting result.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Of course any time you deal with such a powerful technology it will change everything and because of that any predictions we make will not be anywhere close to covering all the possibilites and of course no matter how correct or not we might be everyone will tend to see it as sci fi. As us geeks know, anything that we can imagine can eventually be. Some people ask why, we ask why not. Okay.. on to my opinion.. I think The Diamond Age is a great book that covers the second and third stages of nanotech. We are of course in the first stage now, a stage you might call the rock axe stage where we do everything the hard way and haven't really figured it all out yet. The next major stage I would agree will be the feed stage where nanotech will be tightly controlled by those in power and we'll see a painful transition period as we adjust as a species to having the power of god in our hands. The seed stage will be a large leap forward as it will decentralize nanotech and again this will very likely cause large social changes although I don't believe it'll be nearly as painful as the change to the feed stage. Unlike Stephenson I think the seed stage will follow shortly after the feed stage and that for a large part the two will overlap. You'll have the average person that will probably use the feed.. the M$ and AOL type people.. then you'll have the garage hackers like many of us that will be using seed technology to change the world. I expect to see the open source movement take a huge leap in this area as physical matter is reduced to software. How this will effect property laws might make our current fighting over IP laws seem like a tiny warning shot. Then as time passes we'll slowly evolve into a post-human era. It is only a matter of time before it is done. As people get sick or hurt they will want nanotech medicines and nanotech replacement organs. Combine that with our desire to always be wired and the extra computing power and exact research tools we have at our disposal and eventually we'll even have replacement brains and brain add-on's (Slashdot direct to your brain!) and that will essentially make us immortal and no longer forced to be human. This will probably go several ways as people try to come to grips with the fact they are no longer human and experiment with it. I expect eventually you'll have two sides, those who want to reject the post-human experience and those who want to make use of it. Those who reject it will most likely remain human and possibly revert to a somewhat less advanced culture. Those who accept it I think will eventually form bodies that are not very connected with what we consider the real world and that are almost impervious to damage. Possibly you could imagine us reducing out bodies to a utility cloud of smart processors that could form our brain and when called upon to do so could take on most given physical forms. That makes us shapeshifters, or better as we don't need to take on any form at all. Also take the human trend to want to communicate more. I suspect we'll form a sort of dynamic virtual world that we can paint as we want either alone or in groups. For an example try renting What Dreams May Come w/ Robin Williams. We'll probably evolve this reality to be at least as important to us as our own physical reality. Most likely by this point many of us hacker types will have been intergrating more and more with our tools and we'll have new brain centers added that'll give us an intuitive grasp over nano-engineering and we'll have some sort of matter compiler built into our bodies so that we can create physical objects by will alone. Myself I'd expect to see something along the lines of being oble to absorb raw materials into our body and converting them into small utility cloud type pieces that we'll be able to order to take whatever form we want and if we so desire to keep that form after we are done with them. So if you wanted to create a table you might absorb some already existing object and then think about the table you wanted and it'd simply take form. Of course this stage will utterly destroy any concept we can have of property ownership as property will be reduced down to being nothing more than dreams. For the most part I imagine the post-humans will be a non-violent race as we'll have such tight control over our own minds that we'll be able to easily tune out negative emotions as desired. Also since property will have so little meaning to us we'll have little greed and as we have almost no way of being seriously hurt or killed we'll have no major fears which as everyone who watches Star Wars knows is the root of all evil. Animal instincts and all that will no longer play a large part in our society. To the mortals post-humans will probably seem like spirits, gods, or plants. Well there is my slightly odd but hopefulyl interesting guess at the future w/ nanotech. :)
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
However, I certainly agree that the tendancy for students to try to get "the Internet" to do their research for them is extremely annoying.
- The newsgroup comp.lang.lisp tends to get hit hard by this; there's an almost-weekly attempt for students to get answers to what are obviously homework assignments that they have put off.
- I get a few emails a month that show that students are trying to satisfy research requirements by reading my web page on relational databases, and then figure that I am the obvious "consulting resource" to answer their assignments for them.
- There was one entertaining occasion when a considerable chunk of a class of accounting students asked my opinion on what Linux-based software package Corel should adopt, and why.
My reaction to many of these things is to tell the would-be non-researcher that their mission, if they choose to accept it, is to Go To The Library.I learned my research skills, which have mapped not too badly onto new media such as the web, by virtue of spending many hours in university libraries tenaciously searching for books and papers and references between them.
If I use "my powers of research" to help the new students too very much, they won't bother learning those sorts of skills, and the next time media changes, they may not develop the tenaciousness to be able to fight their way through to grasping the next new thing.
I'm happy to suggest some references, particularly those that are a little unusual so as to promote a wider array of insights. Thus, Marshall and Eric McLuhan's "Laws of Media" represent a probably-unexpected useful way of grappling with analyzing effects of changing technology, and I'm happy to cite that as an approach.
But to write peoples' research reports for them is quite another thing. It is not merely immoral for them, as students.
It is also immoral for those that do the writing, as they discourage students from becoming competent researchers. And in an increasingly information-oriented economy, that is a horrible way to handicap them.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
People often call our current level of technology, and our current time period, the "Information Age". I think they're a little premature. The information age will come about when information is the only thing worth money (or whatever is used for trade). Right now, information is quickly gaining on the material world in terms of worth, but it still lags. Material goods generally require very expensive production means and fabrication plants that require that thousands and millions of units be sold in order for you, the consumer, to be able to buy it relatively cheaply.
When the information age comes, this will change because it will allow anything to be created as long as you have 1)Some matter (like dirt) 2)Some energy and 3)The information on how to make it. Since 1) and 2) will be essentially free, only 3) has any real value. And it's pure labor - no "resources" are involved.*
How will this happen? Nanotechnology. Once you can arrange matter, on the molecular scale, you can create anything you want from the ground up. And making one is no more expensive than making 1,000,000, so therefore, people will have the ability to make things as they need them.
Once that happens, we will truly be in the Information Age, and frankly, I have no idea what will happen. It could be Utopia. More likely, it will mean the death of the individual, and individual rights, because any individual with this power could easily, and accidentally, destroy the entire world. Bill Joy wasn't overblown, he just concentrated on the wrong technologies - AI and Bio-science aren't nearly as scary as self-replicating nanites with absolutely no natural, or unnatural, "predators". So, to prevent such accidents, individuals will have to give up all privacy to the public.
*I say dirt and energy are free because, while I can imagine a dirt-utility bill, I just don't find it likely, and energy would almost certainly come from solar power from tiny machines that live in the upper atmosphere and deliver energy into our network constantly. Or some such solution.
First, make it work, then make it right, then make it fast, then, make it bloated!
Well, you talk about being afraid of the elite being in charge. Good point, but two counterpoints:
1. If the elite so badly want to crush the populace, they can probably do so right now. Of course it's one more way for them to wreak havoc on society if they so choose. Paranoia isn't such a huge deterrent to technology, though. Because it hasn't been since the Industrial revolution.
2. Perhaps the elite SHOULD have control over everything, to prevent that lone deranged person from ever getting his hands on the controls. Open source nanotechnology sounds like an Open source nuclear warhead to me.
Aluminum foil will shape itself to the contours of my head when I play "space man". My money says that Roswell was the crash of a Japanese baloon. The government would have been terrified to tell people that the Japanese were crash landing in the states. Also, some hilljacks catch a glimpse of a mangled Japanese body and say "Hey, ma, them people are from outer space."
-B
If you want to read about some real-world research, check this out.
(I don't work there, just listened to a lecture from someone who does)
Stanford Nanofabrication Facility
William Gibson co opted this phrase from Vernor Vinge - a technological singularity - to use in his recent trilogy. It's a point where some form of technology is so transformative that we cannot imagine beyond it - literally like falling into a black hole.
There was some complaint about the way Gibson ends his recent trilogy, but it's spot on. It's an admission - faced with this technology - there can be no more imagining, only intuition.
Because if the technology ever becomes viable to produce any substance or product endlessly, it changes every rule and boundary our society and culture is based on today. Stephenson had to cheat and force societal constraints on his world in order to discuss nanotech in The Diamond Age.
The truth is, the basic governing element of our species has been the procurement and transformation of resources, since we rose out of a lake in Africa. Remove that, and what do we become?
The implications are that there can be no accurate speculation. Those who live post nanotech live in a different universe than we do.
** http://www.nkhumanrights.or.kr/ ** Human rights in North Korea. 1 million estimated dead from starvation.
The problem comes when the corporations use the profits from their endeauvors to lobby the government into passing laws that help them control their product, despite a lack of actual scarcity in the product. By limiting our rights under the law, they can ensure good profits for the foreseeable future. See Mass Media Companies : 20th Century, for details on how to proceed.
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