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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?"
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.
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.
Maybe what we need is the "Slashdot Guide to Finding Information Online" -- we could email it to teachers...
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.
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
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.