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Open Source Nanotechnology
dschl writes "There is a draft article linked from NanoTechnology Magazine about Open Sourcing Nanotechnology Research and Development. It is written by a sociologist, and covers some interesting issues including patent pooling, open source licensing for intelluctual property in Nanotech, and increased safety by using an open source model. "
Nanotech is all just fine and dandy until our co-workers get their skull-guns installed...
These comments and opinions are mine and mine alone, although they shouldn't be.
Imagine what could happen if one group got way ahead of everybody else in nanotech... They might get cocky and accidentally cause the grey-goo problem (world reduced to goo by accidentally escaped nanomachines), or intentionally unleash destructive nanomachines on the world.
Perhaps this "open source" nanotechnology policy should be enforced. The only way to ensure nobody grabs for power using nanotech is to make sure everyone has it...
hmm...maybe next we'll get "RIAA sues nanotech firm for distrubuting music for free using nanobots"
Bruce
Bruce
You are the real Bruce Perens.
Jonathan Desp, an early open source nanotech pioneer, might have some insightful comments on this.
Will the nanites that take over the world be legally obligated to share their secrets of world dominion back to the developers?
"An American Voting for Bush is like a Chicken voting for Col.Sanders"
Imagine biological warfare, etc. Engineering viruses using tiny particles.
The reason that Open Source workse so well for Linux and Apache is that you cannot hurt anyone with Linux and Apache, so even if some militant terrorist organization sets up a Linux box and strats serving up pages, the dangers are few and indirect.
Having nano go open source might be a bigger problem. I think the chances of a corporation turning it to "evil" uses are much slimmer than terrorists doing so given unrestricted access.
Ñ'
It seems to me that Open Source has finally taken off because the tools to contribute to the movement are readily available. there are free compilers and you don' thave to have any special hardware to lend a hand to projects. Because of this, hobbyists can join a greater culture and make a contribution.
I don't see this happening with nanotech for a while. Not only are there very few pieces of machinery that can be used to construct things on a nano scale, but they're already booked with other projects.
Sure some of these projects could be distributed under open source, but there's a fundamental difference between releasing something under GPL and having a culture that can actually make use of it. Otherwise, it's not much different than public-betaware only an elite can use...
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
Whatever your personal views, we all can agree on one thing: nanotechnology is going to do to human civilization what the invention of the steam engine and limited liability corporation did in previous centuries. That's why it's important for us to get the perspectives of all areas of academia and intellectual disciplines and why I'm happy that sociologists like Bryan Bruns are starting to examine nanotech and its implications and methods: are we doing what we should? Are we using the best methods available? What social and structural changes ought to be made?
Sure, the scientists developing nanotech are qualified to make the technical decisions necessary to achieve their goals: building better technology -- it's what they do, and it's what they get paid for. But as we've learned from the atomic revolution of the mid 20th century, we can't leave these important decisions to scientists alone. They may not intend to produce monsters, but their focus on development without regard to consequences makes them often ill-suited to decide how to go about doing so. It's why managers and ethics boards exist, and it's good to see some fresh academic blood here.
-- Anne Marie
The links seem to be broken for me.
Here are the correct ones:
NanoTechnology Magazine
Open Sourcing Nanotechnology Research and Development
HTH.
arnald
Nanotech isn't going to be Gray Goo material for a long, long time. I'm tempted to refer to the version in Wil McCarthy's "Murder in the Solid State"... biotech, with a handful of pioneers going back into custom fabrication of molecules. I'm also tempted to point to Neil Stephenson's rather more realistic that I expected it to be "The Diamond Age" (Can't be sure I buy the book, or the island, but, given that they were supposed to be the work of a genius in the field...) where household nanotech took the form of assembly - from raw molecule feeds - of molecularly uncomplicated objects with a lot of air/vaccum in them. Both are reasonable scenarios. In the first, Open Source falls back to the older Academic Publication (combined with Patents, which is why I brought this up) ... In the second, we have nanotech that bears more resemblance to programming than science. (Bear with me, I'm both programmer and physicist) In the former case, we have (undeniably) open source... with a certain not-unlike-Carnivore "nanotech" device called a Sniffer that had gained its "inventor" a certain unjust-but-politically-backed broad patent being the major exception... but with actual use and distribution limited to industrial cases, and patents being (rightfully, at least for a reasonable period) protected. In the latter, even with laws, we'd be talking about distribution akin to software. I don't have a problem with that, as a programmer, if I get paid for anything beyond a simple matress in some manner. The situation in Diamond Age was closed source software... forcing Open Source paradigms on Nanotech would cripple it, just as making Closed Source software illigal would bring our industry to a screeching halt. Face it, capitalism works, and without either A) some sort of knowledge control, B) some sort of police enforced ownership/revenue rights, C) some means of service charges (A totally user friendly Linux would only leave the server market profitable... and whither consumer-oriented enhancements by non-students/hobbyists?), or D) Some other means (say taxes and government funding, I.E. Socialism) of paying the techs... which is what universities provide, mostly.
-- Still waiting for the Nike endorsement
OTOH, it also seems to me that the roots of open source had been around for quite some time (in the form of a somewhat less formalized hacker ethic), even when the tools of the trade were only available to a few. Then came minis, and micros, and open-architecture PC's, and BSD...
I'll bet that we'll probably see something similar happen with nanotech - at first, it'll be corporations and universities, but the knowledge will spread (mainly from the universities), the technology will get cheaper (maybe something like the 3D ice-printer mentioned in yesterday's article working on nanoscale and in polymers), and as more people can afford the gear, more people will start tinkering.
Thinking about applying open source principles now, though, is probably a Good Thing: It might get the early nanotech hackers thinking in that direction, and accelerate the growth of an open nanodesign culture far faster than it took for the open software culture to gestate.
Of course, cheap nanotech construction could be a bad thing - the lessons of ARMM loom large here. I suppose we'll see...
OK,
- B
http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
Does anyone even bother reading the article? This is to use open source to develop further molecular modelling software. Of course, such software would be useful for nanotech, but that's not the point. This type of technology already exists, see for example the Catalogue of Molecular Biology Programs, some of which are open source, like Garlic, and MMTK. The actual creation of nanotech can't be open sourced, since the requirement to create it can not be bought off the shelf. (Well, if you have a few million, you probably could buy it.) The primary prerequisite for open source research is that the materials are relatively cheaply and easily available to the general public. Thalia
"Whatever your personal views, we all can agree on one thing: nanotechnology is going to do to human civilization what the invention of the steam engine and limited liability corporation did in previous centuries."
Yeah, only steam engines aren't small enough to sneak up on your, slip into your bloodstream, and hack your cells to death. This technology scares me simply because we are moving far too fast without considering the risks.
Why should we not be open-sourcing this? Because you are only accellerating the time it takes some rogue with cash to either grey-goo the planet or take out everyone with a certain eye color just for fun. This is no trivial matter. It WILL happen in this century.
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Let me give you the lowdown
Destruction by nanotech is yet another reason (besides stuff like asteroid strike, plague, world war, etc.) to get enough samples of our life forms off planet to make sure we survive.
The best way to do this is to make them self-reproducing. The one slight problem with this is that when you have a microscobic devive that will reproduce, it is possible to lose control of it. If this happens, they reproduce like bacteria, except there isn't penicillin.
The ultimate conclusion is that they are numbered in the trillions, and the earth is overcome with Grey Goo.
Beware of nanotechnology.
Prepare for it.
Pessimists see optimists' minds as three-quarters empty.
how would you construct a closed-source nanotech device? could you do so by making it self-destruct upon contact with the atmosphere (not very useful)? but wouldn't any copy-protection built into your nanotech devices suffer from the problem of being able to be disassembled by other nanotech devices, or by the same machinery that built them?
GAIN EVERLASTING LIFE
Nanotechnology, as it is currently designed (and in very few cases, implemented), is incapable of self-replication. The von Neumann "Universal Constructor" is sufficiently distant from present technology as to remain essentially fictitious. Additionally, the von Neumann model relies on both an independant instruction-control system (microcumputer or otherwise), and a supply of prefabricated components. Want to stop a von Neumann? Stop making parts.
The Drexler architecture, using chemical rather than mechanical manipulators, is closer to modern theory, as it mimics the effects of current biotechnology and organic chemical manufacturing, but still relies on an independant instruction-control system.
In both cases, the instruction-control system (referred to in the link above as a "universal computer") must be capable of infinitely variable tasks for the device to be useful. It must have the instruction set necessary to create another example of itself, and any instructions required by its target manufacturing process. It only requires sufficient memory to replicate, as any manufacturing process can be broken down sufficiently to use subprocesses infinitely simpler than self-replication
Regardless, the "universal computer" is unnecessary to the end goal of nanorobotics. A localized instruction-broadcast system can direct the nanorobots in any tasks relevant to their location, and would prevent any manufacturing, self-replicative or otherwise, while out of range of this signal.
"Don't worry, be nano." :)
-c.
--
Casey
More scratches on the cave wall, thanks be to anonymity.
i'll bet them li'l guys are real itchy
One of the many things I hate. thingsihate.org
The "Open Source" concept is common in science for several centuries now.
I was about to submit a story about nanofabrication labs, but instead i submitted a story about shooting pumpkins 1000's of yards...:)
back on topic...about 2 weeks ago, some of my peers went on a field trip to the nanofabrication and nanotechnology labs at Penn State University, and from all the stuff they saw and showed me, it was pretty darned cool. They did all sorts of things there...but I thought the coolest thing was the way they would coat metals and such by shooting streams of electrons at a chunk of metal...such as gold....and the microbits of gold would then cover the object in like...1/100000 of an inch layers...this nanotechnology and fabrication stuff is neato.
The anti-salmon
The actual creation of nanotech can't be open sourced, since the requirement to create it can not be bought off the shelf. (Well, if you have a few million, you probably could buy it.)
:-)
You're way off the mark. You can buy a posh commercial SPM for 50K dollars, and you can build a poor-man's equivalent for 2-5K.
Nanotech is basically kitchen-table technology, and it's only got a "K" after its price at all because we're still in the research phase and so calibrated instrumentation is needed. That's the reason for the "high" prices, which are of course actually peanuts in commercial terms and easily affordable by Ferrari-owning hobbiests.
You, me, and potatoes are full of nanomachines. Cost is not going to be a problem.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
On a related note, patent-related lawsuits between major players nearly destroyed the scanning probe microscope industry a few years ago and is probably holding back advances. Digital Instruments has a patent on "digital feedback SPM" and went around suing SPM companies that had an A/D card somewhere in their feedback loop.
Scanning probe microscopes are important in some nanotech research, so patent fights are already hurting nanotech.
I've seen patents on nanotech dating to 1989, and I didn't look very hard. The irony is that much nanotech research is government-funded, but the Universities will then sell the patents to companies and thus deprive the taxpayer of the benefits of research that the taxpayer paid for. I think it's an outrage!
Funny!
You read the Jargon File? I am reminded of the blue goo versus gray goo.
For those of you who aren't aware of the two, the Gray Goo is evil stuff, skews the world to pollution and toxic waste... while Blue Goo is anti-gray, restoring the Natural Order of Things. It produces oxygen, replants the rainforest, scrubs sulfur oxides out of the atmosphere, recreates extinct species, cleans the oceans...
I think that OS Hardware and Nano in particular is the best way of making sure that there IS a Blue Goo which can overcome closed, corporate Gray.
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
The baddies ... would have to [acquire] nano tech through complex intelligence networks if the technology is held by companies and governments. Any entity large enough to posess such resources would unavoidably have more responsibility and caution with application of such technology.
You're KIDDING, right?
Bill Clinton.
Mummar Kqudhafi.
Joe Stalin.
Adolph Hitler.
I could go on, and on, and on...
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Imagine biological warfare, etc. Engineering viruses using tiny particles.
Brings a whole new meaning to "writing a virus", doesn't it?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I've been shooting off my mouth about this for several years... What we need is a "Free Matter Foundation", to prevent corporations from patenting simple combinations of atoms in various uses. Stallman's manifesto should be applied directly to nanotech itself. The key issue here will be access rights to assemblers; if every household has an assembler and a matter feed, then the only thing of value associated with any consumer good will be the information required to produce it. At that point, we will truly enter the age of information. If however we don't let ordinary people have assemblers, then the whole social benefit of nanotech will be lost to the scourge of commercialization. blah blah blah...
BLUE GOO: Nanomachines used as protection against grey goo and other destructive nanomachines, possibly even used for law-enforcement (nanarchy). According to the entry in the Jargon File, it is sometimes used to denote any form of benign nanotechnology in the environment.
RED GOO: Deliberately designed and released destructive nanotechnology, as opposed to accidentally created grey goo.
KHAKI GOO: Military nanotechnology; see grey goo.
GREEN GOO: Nanomachines or bio-engineered organisms used for population control of humans, either by governments or eco-terrorist groups. Would most probably work by sterilizing people through otherwise harmless infections. See Nick Szabo's essay Green Goo -- Life in the Era of Humane Genocide.
GOLDEN GOO: Another member of the grey goo family of nanotechnology disaster scenarios. The idea is to use nanomachines to filter gold from seawater. If this process got out of control we would get piles of golden goo (the "Wizard's Apprentice Problem"). This scenario demonstrates the need of keeping populations of self-replicating machines under control; it is much more likely than grey goo, but also more manageable. [Originated on sci.nanotech 1996]
PINK GOO (humorous) Humans (in analogy with grey goo). "Pink Goo to refer to Old Testament apes who see their purpose as being fruitful and multiplying, filling up of the cosmos with lots more such apes, unmodified." [Eric Watt Forste August 1997]
http://www.transhumanism.com/lexicon/
--
The shareholder is always right.
...nanotech-toting script kidd3z? That'll give "port scanning" a new meaning!
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If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, forget 'em, because man, they're gone. -- Jack
Considering the implications of molecular engineering tek, I think open source projects for molecular engineering research are great ideas. I think everyone can agree with me that it would be BAD for only the rich people to have wannabe-replicators at their disposal. Let's face it: grey goo is not an issue here. If research into molecular engineering allows the creation of nano-weapons, who cares? Every scientific advance in the past... er... 9 thousand years has had some sort of violent application. And, interestingly enough, Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker's father. Making sure the projects are open source will increase efficiency, and as long as people are interested in programming Atoma-CADish apps (the great power of dirty-dirty capitalism being that people often work on very un-interesting things) we can make sure in the future that a glitch in AtCAD 4.6 doesn't make your insulin with a bunch of faulty hydrogen bonds, or whatever. Um, yeah, open source is good. Oh, by the way, did I mention this was my first Slashdot post? *grin* _An American voting for Dubya is like an American voting for someone really stupid._ _Jay
Thanks for the comments. Here is a direct link to my article: Open Sourcing Nanotechnology
I am glad to see this issue brought into Slashdot...notice that this article is drafted for presentation at the next Foresight Institute Conference, to be held November 3-5 in Bethesda, Maryland. This is significant for several reasons--Foresight is based in California it has been a while since Erik Drexler last ventured onto the East Coast. His early attempts to bring nanotech to the attention of various government entities, corporations and universities was met with indifferent and outright hostility. Over the past few years, however, every major university on the East Coast has established at least a nanotechnology interdisciplinary studies group, if not an outright laboratory. Additional funding for research into nanotech is working its way through Congress. It won't be long before a working group appears at NIH to address the medical applications, which are sure to be the earliest and most exciting applications for nano. There is still time for everyone to have an affect on this developing technology, and it is vital for everyone to become informed about it, and make your voice heard about responsible use of it. The farfetched goo scenarios get thrown about very quickly, and can produce a sense of futility on the part of those just learning about it. That in itself becomes a sort of control over who takes on this knowledge and uses it to transform their own lives. Let's become part of the empowerment of this technology, and focus on what can really be done with it. Sincerely, Kathryn Aegis