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The Law And Nanotechnology
YIAAL writes: "An article in Smalltimes raises the issue of legal implications of nanotechnology in all sorts of areas. Would nanoweapons be treated as chemical or biological weapons, or do they need a new treaty? If you can use nanotechnology to copy anything and then share the "plans" with friends who can use nanotechnology to make copies of their own, is it like Napster for the material world?" The gray goo problem - accidentally releasing a self-replicating device that turns the entire world into copies of itself - is going to be a huge spur for close regulation of nano-devices.
Great! So instead of worrying about Code Red shutting down the Internet, we'll have to worry about Code Green turning the whole planet into a giant puddle of mud...
For example, the US Supreme Court held that any human creation under the sun is patentable as long as it meets the statutory requirements of novelty, usefulness, and unobviousness. Thus, the creations of nanotechnology, like biotech and computer software are patentable. (Believe it or not, there was a serious question as to whether software was patentable until recently - it still is not in most countries).
As for the specific uses of nanotech-created devices, I think that people will find that new devices fit nicely into the old legal boxes. This is not to say there will not be argument over which box it should go in, but it will most assuredly be fit into some box.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
To build anything small enough yet powerful enough to self-replicate as well as do something (non)useful, it would necessarily have to cross the threshold of life, or at least straddle it in the same way viruses do.
Wouldn't it be nice to actually have demonstrations of this nanotech that everyone's so worried about?
an interesting thought about nanotechnology is being able to use it to feed everyone from suplies as simple as seawater. One thing that would prevent Grey-Goo is the massive amounts of energy required to produce nanotech machines and the fact that no-one has developed a self-replicating machine outside of theory. Neal Stephenson did a good book on nanotechnology called The Diamond Age.
"It has always been this way and it won't change, god bless the fucked up USA" The Briefs
The problem with this solution is not that it reduces their effectiveness 'somewhat', it removes their effectiveness all together. We currently find it very difficult to manufacture things at that level. These nanomachines will have to be built, basically, atom by atom. The whole point to nanomachines is to do the work for us at that level. Given that, they are the perfect solution for our problem of building machines that small.
It seems to me that the best solution is to build and test these things in rooms that either have very hot walls and floors, or create them in an environment that is magnetically sealed. When we've figured out how to make constructors, the next thing we figure out how to make is 'killers'. Much like our immune system, these 'killers' would make sure that rogue machines were destroyed before any harm was caused. Like our bodies, there is the possibility of 'cancer'...an out of control growth that can't be handled by simple 'killers'. However, at that level, chemical (acids?) and radiation (EMP) therapies would be quite effective.
If you haven't already, read 'The Diamond Age', by Neal Stephenson. He doesn't go into any great detail, but you sort of get the idea that the world has coped with nanoweapons and such merely by escalating the level of nanotechnology until there is some sort of balance. What we appear to be trying to create is a whole new ecology, and as such, we'll need to try to build in the natural checks and balances that any properly functioning ecology has.
As the old Cliche goes, fight Fire with Fire.
These nanobots would be unique, so you could make nanobots (A) that seek out and destroy the gone-wrong nanobots (B). Granted, the nanobots (B) would likely be able to protect themselves, and could probably even modify themselves to appear like the other nanobots (A).
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Insert Witty Sig Here
But, we are talking about nanobots here, they would most likely have the ability to replicate themselves, and why replicate an inherit design flaw, like a dependance on something?
Easy - because they're too dumb to modify their own designs.
Designing a system that can design or improve the design of systems as complicated as itself is another task that's comparable to solving the Strong AI Problem.
You could argue that mutations might let them evolve, eventually, but nanomachines would be much less suceptible to mutation than biological replicators (by design - you don't want a cosmic ray to cause future generations of nanobots build houses without foundations, for instance).
You'd probably give nanobots the hard-coded pattern for replicating themselves, and the ability to download large structure designs from your database when building things. That way you don't have to give your nanobots the designs for every structure you could conceivably want to build, and they wouldn't have to do any design work at *all*.
Now, someone could deliberately build nanobots that would try to replicate ad infinitum, but that's for another thread.
As has been noted, solar cells become a lot more economical. Similar logic applies to wind, wave, and hydroelectric power. It also becomes a lot more economical to dig for power, and extract it more completely - say, from oil and natural gas pockets (no more "flares" wasting some of the gas you dig up), or drill your own geothermal well. And that's not even considering what happens when you get nano into space, where it can manufacture solar cells (Dyson sphere, anyone?) or rockets to hunt down and bring back comets and asteroids (though presumably ones which contain more power than the rockets use). And then there's other planets (a heat engine between Venus's atmosphere and the cold void of space, for instance).
BTW, this also removes land as a scarce resource. Physical proximity to pre-existing populations remains a problem, though, but it is reduced in scope.
Intellect...yeah, I'd have to agree nano doesn't give us a major supply of that. It may allow us to make better use of what little we have, but that's about it.
http://www.foresight.org/NanoRev/Ecophagy.html
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Why not adopt the three laws of Robotics?
Because making the nanomachines understand the Three Laws requires a solution to the Strong AI Problem. This will not be a cakewalk, and will be overkill for the vast majority of applications of nanomachines.
Building in an "off" switch or a dependence on a specific environmental factor would work at least as well and would be far easier.
Sounds like people to me. Well, other than the accidnetly part, we were "released" quite intentionally.
What, me worry?
For those of you unfamiliar with Asimov and the Three Laws of Robotics it goes something like this.
:) Another way of controlling these pesky little automotons is through the use of food, if you make them dependant on something they cannot make themselves. This is the tricky part, as in theory they could probably make everything they ever need, or redesign themselves to no longer need the item.
1) A robot shall not through action or inaction allow a human come to harm.
2) A robot shall always obey the orders of a human unless it violates the first law.
3) A robot shall attempt to save itself, unless this violates the first and second laws.
Now, this was developed for robots with positronic brains, much more advanced than your average nano bot is likely to be. But when you take into consideration the complexity of what a nanobot has to do, there must be something controlling them, right? Well, I'm not sure a computer of today could really comprehend the idea of human life, or how its action could affect it.
Going completely offtopic now
But, if a hoarde of nanobots gets out of control, we do have a way of stopping them, an Electro Magnet Pulse wreaks havoc with pretty much every electronic device, and to shield the little buggers would be an act of utter stupidity.
Basically, if a destructive force of nanobots gets released, that can duplicate themselves, is immune to EMP, and is self sufficient. Well, we are quite screwed, you have to rely on the fact that no one in their right mind would design such a doomsday device.
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Insert Witty Sig Here
Myself I plan to hack an assembler into my body along with some kind of computer and Net connection and then I'll be able to fabricate anything anywhere anytime just by absorbing the needed molecules and downloading the plans into my head from Nano Napster.
:)
People who fail to grasp how dangerous IP laws are will suffer their shortsighted approach when nanotech becomes common.It may take 5 years or it may take 50 but nano is coming and it will change everything.
The economy will go nuts worldwide as suddenly anyone can make anything for themselves.. but will it matter as nobody will be starving or in need of shelter. You'll have weird things like opensource toasters, opensource pizza, opensource sport cars, etc. We'll eventually move towards some sort of trust economy I'd imagine to help balance out non-material economic needs like services and R&D.
It should be highly interesting to see how they try to govern such changes. Once someone invents something then everyone will have total access to it. Groovy eh?
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
No, my little minions of evil don't have to have any intelligence at all, they merely have to be able to make random changes in themselves and be able to evaluate those changes in regards to a given set of hostile conditions.
...And this feeds back to the whole Gray Goo question: _can_ nanobots be built that could turn most matter into copies of themselves?
I personally think that this is very unlikely to be a problem. Special-purpose nanobots - e.g. ones optimized for construction given external power and matter supplies - can be very efficient. General-purpose nanobots would be less so. If you try to adapt a nanobot to the task of replicating as much as possible using ambient sources of matter and energy, you'll get something with performance characteristics much like existing replicators with similar design goals - bacteria.
I have yet to see a convincing argument that general-purpose nanomachines could be more efficient than bacteria at spreading and transforming the world about them. Both have abundant supplies of raw material, but both are limited by energy and by competition with other life forms.
We can all see that the world would be much better, at least in some ways, if we all could cooperate. That's not the problem. The problem is that we do not in fact cooperate in that way. A very different thing. Think about it.
The manufacturing part of technological development may take a pretty bad hit, but there'll still be demand for the design side of things.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Maybe so, but there are arguments to be made against the gray goo scenario based on energy availability, such as this one
I think it's most likely that this will degenerate into the kind of global warming he-said she-said which lets lawmakers do whatever the hell they want, and justify it with the science they prefer.
What about power? Sure, nano machines could make gasoline for you, if you had wads of power to make it with.
In other words, the laws of Thermodynamics haven't been repealed. You'll still have to plug into something to make it all go...
Nano-magic doesn't get you away from scarce resources, just moves a lot of things out of the scarce column.
The things that will stay in the scarce column:
Energy.
Land.
Intellect.
There are probably others, but I can't think of them right now.
--Fire up the clue combine and harvest a clue!
--Intrope
That kind of technology is SO far in the future that we may as well be discussing what kind of treaties we'll sign with the Klingons.
I love science as much as the next geek. Loved it enough to almost finish my MS.
When humans shifted from neolithic hunters to agricultural settlers about 10K years ago, civilization had to change, as did laws about land use: Modern notions of property were invented.
When humans shifted from simple agriculture to larger, more complicated cultures that required administration and trade, civilization changed. That's why things like writing, math, governments, and money were invented.
When humans shifted from those cultures to ones we would recognize as 'modern', civilization changed. Something like IP, or Copyright would have made no sense at all in the era before the printing press. And something like modern capitalism would not be able to exist without things we take for granted, like effective transportation and communications systems.
And if (and that's a big 'if' since the 'grey goo' is still science fiction) ever comes to be, guess what? Civilization will radically change to accomodate that shift. Inevitably.
Imagine a world where you could, quite literally, make something out of nothing. A lot of the basic assumptions driving modern capitalism would be violated: No more scarce resources to allocate, since nothing is scarce anymore. Much less power over individuals since (to be brutally honest) the only thing keeping the masses in check under our system is that pesky need for 2000 calories a day.
Honestly, how could IP law be applied? I've copied the gasoline you patented... now what? Will you tell my employer to fire me? Fine, I'll make food from dung. Will you put me in jail? Well, I have 10^6 nanobots in my pocket that will dig me a tunnel in seconds. You'd have to make IP violations a capital offence. Good luck building a stable society on THAT principle, my friend.
My point is that wondering how IP law would deal with the advent of nanotech is roughly like a caveman pondering how the Internet will effect the comings and goings of the herds he follows for hunting: The old way of looking at the world just wont 'stretch' to fit the new technology. This has happened many times before, and it will happen again for as long as we survive.
In some ways you can already see the current paradigm starting to burst at the seams: DMCA, Congress passing laws against cloning (with amusing discussions about souls and cheek cells worthy of medieval thelogians), etc.
It's all going to change. Period.
:Michael
Wouldn't the main legal effect of nano-tech be really, really fine print ?
We don't have anything that can reliably self-replicate in a controlled laboratory setting, and the technology to do so is still 8-10 years off. We don't need to even think about nano-tech replicating in the 'wild' for another decade or two beyond that. While the legal implications need to be worked out, we are still so far away that we should probably focus on legal implications for problems closer to home, like the balancing of copyright against fair use.
-Adam
Remember: If you want to get your story posted to slashdot mention nano-tech and law in your blurb. Submit early, submit often.
Isn't it tragic that legislation and treaties are needed to control stuff like this? I find it very depressing that "common sense" and "good of the community" are such hard concepts to follow. I know all about the "tragedy of the commons" and understand that it is a reality, but it just seems absurd that an intelligent (maybe that's my mistake?) species can't see that we would make much more progress and be much more comfortable (albeit as a species) if we could cooperate.
What you're asking for is exactly what laws are supposed to be: Cooperation. Agreements about how to behave regarding things that affect the "good of the community."
And it's often good to decide such agreements up front, since different individuals can have very different ideas about what's "good for the community."
- - - -
The real Tetsujin 28 is a giant robot.
In all dead seriousness, I'm not 100% sure it would be, even _with_ nanotechnology. First off, how are you going to gain access to say, iron or oil(for plastics) or carbon? Sure, you can just steal it from someone else by destroying something they own, but I doubt any modern property-owning society is going to let you get away with that. Refine it from the trash you own? Ok, now you have a limited supply of materials from which you must construct _everything_. Sure, you may have one of every atom... But you're still limited by the amount of matter in those. 5 pounds of aluminum cans won't build you a starship, after all. Seawater? Try finding minute traces of gold (or whatever element you desire) in your local seawater when 500 other people have the same idea and have gotten there first. The ground? What happens when you move, and the guys who lived in the house before you 'mined' everything. Plus, what are you going to do with the scrap? Sure, you've just ground down enough mass to extract the material you need to say, build your house using nano-tech. What are you going to do with the excess material (politely referred to as 'slag' in the refining industry)? It's probably poisonous, or carcinogenic, or posesses undesirable qualities of some sort. Anyhow, to get off my negative stint and suggest my own (rather tepid) predictions, I can see conventional notions of property (real and portable) as remaining the same, and heck, even intellectual property remaining in a slightly altered form. I think it's likely that when nano-technological manufacturing is integrated on a personal level, trading information will become more prevalent. Oh, you want a microwave? Well, just download the plans for one from Maytag.com and upload it to your Nano-constructor module. In exchange, Maytag will require a certain amount of refined materials (iron, say) or perhaps some labour on your part (programming, designing ad campaigns, shuffling paper, running the office). Jobs would be more mutable, and you'd work in them until your accumulated salary equaled the cost of the product you purchased. That's not to say the above system doesn't have problems, merely that it's a guesstimate on my part about what _might_ happen. Anyhow, before people blab on about nano-technology instituting some sort of communism and the destruction of property, it pays to look at the problems involved. -Seraph
Maybe you and I could cooperate, but how about grumpy Mr. X who thinks our very existence, and especially the fact that we discuss ideas he disagrees with, is proof that we are minions of [insert evil religious entity here] and thus must be destroyed? Or how about the hypocrit who believes that any new technology must be bad (usually "because it disrupts the (natural, or business, or political) environment"), to the extent that its developers must be harassed mercilessly and/or assassinated, but freely uses existing technologies (including the new one, once it gets deployed)? Et cetera.
Against such threats, laws are of limited use (zero, in many cases). I'll take my own shield of nanites designed to intercept and destroy gray goo nanites instead, thank you very much.
That's an excellent point that illustrates the difficulty of actually turning everything into gray goo.
However, it doesn't remove the possibility: it just says that one design methodology (which we'll assume is undirected evolution) has failed to produce the gray gooifier.
Human directed design has been able to produce lots of things that didn't occur naturally: nuclear weapons and the back street boys, for example (and if gray goo were music, you know what it'd be...).
Plus, even turning a large portion of Utah into gray goo would be mighty inconvenient. Or having a dark-colored goo plague that spread over Europe and only turned 90% of people into goo (not unlike Ebola). That goal seems much more attainable....
In short, the obstacles you mentioned to destroying the world are present, but the basic danger is still real and requires some serious vigilance.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
Was anyone else reminded of the Dr Seuss book Bartholomew and the Oobleck by the mention of grey goo?
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
I'll get worried about nano-replicators after they build the first self-replicating machine factory even with human workers. It's hard.
But then, the certain Lexx episode made a nice demonstration what could happen with enough self-replicating robot arms... ;-)
doh... now I remember where I read about this first...
-Kraft
Live and let live
Darwinian evolution is based on survival of the fittest, driven by a variation in population characteristics generated by mutation. Replication errors are for the most part fatal to an organism, but there's a chance that an error accidentally makes something useful, which gives that organism an advantage, and so it begins to propagate across the population.
The two big advantages that a nanotech devices would have to gain by mutation are:
- The ability to use anything in the surrounding environment for construction rather than specific materials
- Removal of any in-built 'off switch' mechanism.
Both radically increase the fitness of the organism and so are likely to be propagated rapidly.Given that nanotech devices would have to be deployed in large populations to be useful, such effects have to be very carefully considered; the principles of evolution apply to even very simple mathematical representations of living populations.
The obvious quick fix (although still not guaranteed) is not to make the nanotech devices SELF-replicating; only have a 'constructor' build the nanotech devices, without them having autonomous replication. This reduces their effectiveness somewhat, but makes them a little more safe. (Although random faults can still give rise to a self-replicating device, and it only takes a few of them to start an exponential growth).
Stop for a moment, and think it over; why hasn't any organism yet managed to turn the entire world into copies of itself? Cause they've sure been trying - for a long time now. This makes me think that even if we tried our best, we would no be able to create a nanomachine that did this. It would face the same challenges that natural organisms do - e.g. competing organisms (that may well evolve into nanomachine-eating organisms or at least thrive on their by-products), local resource depletion, maybe even mutation.
Huh? Nowhere in the US Constitution nor Declaration of Independence (as examples) which are the BASIS to US government in any way mention money as the keystone to government. Government is about shared ideals and mores among a group of people. The people who form that government agree on some basic foundations upon which the society is to be run.
Nanotech doesn't destroy this. You can have all the nanotech you want and it wont eliminate the need for housing (and the property upon which it sits). It wont eliminate any of the social/interactional problems that are NOT based on scarcity. Scarcity is merely the basis of our present ECONOMY, not our government or many (not all) of our social structures. They will remain.
Having nanotech wont make it suddenly "cool" to pave thousands of acres for new buildings. It wont magically make more space available for living on without totally dicking up the ecosystem and biosphere around us. Government will still remain necessary to fight against nano-attacks, regulate land use, and so forth. Just because you might have plenty of food because of a nano replicator system doesn't make ALL problems, social or environmental, suddenly vanish. You will need government and some of its machinery to handle/regulate/mediate that.
All Bill Gates' wealth would become crap, however, as would his empire, and this would make him cry like a little girl - which is reason enough to have nanotech tools abound.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
This is already an issue. Digital fabbers (3d copy machines) are being produced by companies like Ennex. Check their faq for info, like fabbing in full color (pictures) and discussions on fabbing food 8-)
-Kraft
Live and let live
It's tough being an idealist.
Besides, they would all be destroyed when they ate through the crust. Everything would be drowned by liquid hot magma
When do I get my Microfibral Muscle and Cloak augmentations?
Neurotic
If nanotechnology were real and we could actually copy things, it would be an apocolypse. There would be no need for any kind of work any more. You want food, say "Let there be food," and there's food.
This if fundamentaly different from Napster, because it reverses the the curse placed on Adam and Eve. With Napster, artists who need the money to buy food don't get it. With nanocopying, there's no need to have money.
But, then again, I'm sure we can all count on corporate greed to obfuscate that obviousness, and we'll all get horribly entangled in weird copypatent laws.
Join the Slashcott! Stay away entirely Feb 10 thru Feb 17! Close all tabs to prevent autorefresh!
Imagine a DNCA (N for nano), anti-nano-copying... this car is nano-righted 2092. Any attempt to duplicate it is a violation of our nanorights...
Of course, this is exactly how it was in Diamond Age. Matter compilers could make anything, but the instructions necessary to actually produce something were incredibly complicated. A team of designers would have to work months to write to instructions so something as simple as a chair could be produced. In a world like this, intellectual property is everything and physical property is near worthless.
Of course, it's also important to note the limitations to compilers had in Diamond Age as well. The products they produced were limited in what materials could be used, they couldn't produce a wood chair for example, they could only produce a chair that felt like wood. Hence they couldn't really produce food.
I personally think Diamond Age is the best thought out book I've read on the subject of nanotechnology and it's uses, I recommend it to everyone who might be interested in such a subject. Neil Stephenson made reasonable assumptions about the first stages of nanotechnology (they won't be self replicating) and avoided the whole "nanomachines are magic" concept. He paints a world that is very similiar to our own, with it's own problems and own solutions.
Nanotechnology is going to literally destroy everything that humans have valued for the past 10,000 years, whether it be money, status, or religion; All of these things will literally be destroyed overnight.
I find it ironic that people want to place laws and regulations on this technology, even though there is no way that this technology can be controlled once it unleashed to the world. All forms of government will cease to exist because of (self-replicating) Nanotechnology, and this is due to the fact that all governments exist on the foundation of monetary gain; if this variable is taken away, the bulk sitting on what used to be a solid foundation will come crashing down. Of course, there will always be power hungry individuals out there who will try and rebuild the monetary foundation and all the crap that sat upon it, but they will fail miserabley.
Nanotechnology is the next step in Mankind's evolutionary process...but if people aren't willing to change and stop acting like a bunch of Neandarthals, then they deserve to be destroyed by the gray goo.
Would nanoweapons be treated as chemical or biological weapons, or do they need a new treaty?
/. to figure it out? This is just like: If I use this new pen I designed and built myself, is it still copyright infringement if I use it to copy your book? Etc...
Who cares? They are weapons and that's it.
If you can use nanotechnology to copy anything and then share the "plans" with friends who can use nanotechnology to make copies of their own, is it like Napster for the material world?
Well yes. Do you really need to ask
Internet isn't above any law, nanomachines won't either.
Nobox: Only simple products.
All this talk about about IP and scarcity of resources is great, but what about privacy? That scares the hell out of me. Just as they can currently run "random" drug tests, DUI checkpoints, etc, what's going to stop the sniffer and snooper nanites from randomly searching your home/car/body/desk at work?
Won't it be in the best shareholder interest to have little nano-trackers keeping tabs on ALL the company's resources, including human? How would The Law stop this? Why would they really want to if they're using the same tech. to ferret out law-breakers?
Operator, give me the number for 911!
I think I know where the AC adapter would have to be plugged in. Gimme betteries to eat any day.
Cloning research is necessary to let us figure out how to grow a "heart in a jar." Imagine: you get sick, they take a blood sample, 3 weeks later they have a new heart for you. If we can nail that, then there won't be any need to clone whole bodies, and most of the moral opposition to cloning vanishes.
This would be a Good Thing. Give science a chance to figure it out. Someone you know will need a new organ someday.
Much comment has been made about the boring characters of ST:TNG, and about how they talk their enemies to death. But there's something fundamental here:
Presently, we are not fit to play with the toys we have, let alone the ones we are developing.
It's by the skin of our teeth that we survived the 50's and 60' without nuclear holocaust. Not to mention the times around the KAL007 incident, when according to some reports, Cherynenko (sp?) was within 15 seconds of pushing the Big Red Button. We haven't really gotten into more dangerous toys yet, like biologicals and nanotech.
I argue that we have to improve as a species, or give up our more dangerous toys. (or 'damage' ourselves out of that capability, or go extinct.) From another perspective, giving up some Power because you acknowledge that you lack the Wisdom to properly wield it, is another step on the road to attaining the Wisdom needed.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
With freely copied software, you gain status for having released really cool or seriously functional product into the net. With nano-tech, the same social structures will invade the world of hardware. Mindshare will become important in more than just operating systems. Instead of having to buy our shoes from an established vendor, we'll have OpenSneakers with downloadable skins, and people will be running themeable screensavers on the smart paint in their bathrooms. (Which is cool until your bathroom crashes right before your next big party, and instead of your favorite theme, they get the blue screen of death.)
What this means is that style will continue to increase in importance. Lots of people can make music, but most folks would rather download the music of a professional. If you do it without paying them, the people who make money of the professional music get all cranky. As ease of copying invades the physical realm, there will be an attempt to extend copyright to the design of everything, in order to keep the money flowing to the companies that figured out, say watches or ballpoint pens.
Ultimately, we'll come up with some secure way to do micropayments to the people that generate cool designs, probably right before the old way of doing things collapses completely. And we'll probably have standard libraries full of the designs of everyday things and we'll pay people to make them look different and cool, just like we do today. Fashion will always make money.
Information wants to be $1.98/lb.