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Don't Stymie Nanotech
Anonymous Coward writes "A new paper released by the Pacific Research Institute says that nanotechnology holds benefits for society if not blocked by misguided regulation or outright bans. Already, some prominent individuals (like Bill Joy) have questioned the rationale of continuing nanotech research - PRI's paper explains that nanotech has more benefits than drawbacks, and that bans and heavy regulation are not in society's best interests"
1) Only if in responsible hands.
2) Only if the infamous 'grey goo' problem doesn't become reality. Then we're ALL fucked.
It's like nuclear bombs. We're stepping into unknown territory here, and there is lots of potential for evil. Hell, at first, they weren't even sure if an a-bomb detonation would IGNITE THE ATMOSPHERE, killing us all. Luckily, it didn't-- we dodged a bullet. We may not be so lucky next time.
On the other hand, if you ban it, then (not to be trite or anything, but...) "only criminals will have nanotech." So the terrorists will have nanotech, and the Mafia, but not the legitimate scientists.
Really, it's a lose-lose situation any time you open such a Pandora's box. Either way, you have to worry.
On the bright side, a lot of good can come out of new developments like this too.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
Perhaps he's just upset because they didn't call it Janotechnology.
The oft-mentioned "grey goo" scenario is fundamentally flawed, because at the base level, this is how all organisms work: we feed and feed as much as our environs let us, and then breed and multiply to fill out our population to as far as our ecosystem supports. Without natural selection, climate changes, predators, or other natural population barriers, any organism (including humans) would become its own "grey goo". The fact that none of God's pantheon of creatures have managed to completely subvert nature and consume the planet should show anyone fearful of nanotech that it's absurd to think a human-created microdevice could do the same.
Why would anyone block nano-tech research, to me it holds a promise for the future. If we ever get it fine enough, we can mess with basic atoms, which leads to endless possibilites. Also the medical aplications are amazing, little bots swimming around in my arteries scraping off gunk, zapping cancerous cells and foreign bits and such. The only negative use that immediately comes to mind is some sorta micro assasin thing, like in that crappy movie a while ago, Balistic X vs 7 or whatever.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
The main reason I agree with the report, is that the alternative (such as Bill Joys) would be a totaltarian police state with omni-surveillance everywhere to prevent rouge nanotech development.
And since that would be virtually impossible, this would mean that only outlaws would develop nanotech, and rather than stop it we get mostly malign nanotechnologies. The better alternative is to keep it entirely Open Source, which ensures quality control, transparency, accountability, and safety.
Planet P - Liberation With Technology.
www.enthea.org
Most of these bans etc. would probably happen in the US sooner than anywhere else, where there seems to be an abundance of religious fundamentalists that more often than not misunderstand new scientific innovations, such as cloning. You have no idea how many Christians I know that believe cloning is wrong because their interpretation of cloning is comparable to that of what a photocopier does (think Multiplicity).
Of course, not all religious folks are this way, but I presume a large percentage of them are. Furthermore, there are other groups that play an equal role in the problem, such as the human rights activists who are so against stem cell research.
Not that anyone really pays much attention to science in America, but as long as the information about what is going on in Nano-tech is out there I am 100% behind the research. Really the only reason to keep it secret is if you are doing weapons research, and do we really need any more ways to kill each other, I mean nukes already do a damn good job. Science will always go on, leagal or not, because it has to, it is part of human nature, but it's not worth it if it does not benifit mankind.
Most all technologies hold great potential to do good. The reason they're banned is because of paranoid religious zealots. "Its playing god," "It's dangerous," "It'll be misused," wah wah wah.
We should be embracing the future and figuring out how to use new technologies to our advantage. Not avoiding the inevitable (i.e., human cloning, gene therapy, nanotech, biotech, etc). New technologies will come and be used whether we like it or not. Cloning will occur whether we ban it or not. The only question is if we're going to be left in the dark -- in a relative middle ages -- because of our own irrational fear and paranoia.
Some jelly bottles now say "free of genetically modified organisms". That's nice, considering genetically modified organisms aren't necessarily any worse or better than natural ones -- just different. Also, nice to know there might be millions of natural deadly bacteria in it. Sort of like the "all natural" bullshit -- shit is natural, but I wouldn't want to eat it.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
PRI is a fairly libertarian group. Their position papers whould be read with an eye towards their agenda; I'd be curious what might be influencing their analysis. These think tanks should have to pick names that say something about themselves -- if something salls itself the "Justice League" or "PeaceLoveHarmony Council" it tells you nothing about their actually being a front for the veal industry. Truth in advertising?
... and hasn't been quite the same since leaving. We haven't spoken for several years. :(
Disclosure: My half-sister worked for them
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Proliferation to the point of ubiquity of cheap, reliable (read: self-replicating & autonomous) nanotech will have a dramatic effect on life on Earth the likes of which we haven't seen since early protists began excreting oxygen. It is impossible to fully realize the ramifications such a change would have, and it is certainly foolish to try to brand it as good or bad.
I would recomend Neil Stephonson's book Diamond Age. It is a fictionalized story about a world with nanotechnology. The ideas and social concepts it presents are very relevent to todays discusion. Perticularly the fact that Nanotech could very easly be used to create weapons and defensive shields to small to see. The idea of abstinance (for lack of a better word) from nanotech is also presented. One should take into consideration the implications that Nanotechnology, like many other industrial processes is done without human hands. This doesn't mean that it is bad though.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Bill Joy's now (in)famous article about the terrors of unabated research into nanotech and its siblings is one of the most profound post-WWII articles written, and ranks up there with such brilliant works as Ursula Franklin's Massey Lecture series, "The Real World of Technology." [1],[2]
Unfortunately, Bill made the same mistake as Ursula. Technology cannot and will not be contained. If we all agreed to a worldwide ban on unabated nanotech research, human cloning, or whatever the topic of the day is, there would be someone willing to fund a mad scientist based on a privately owned island[3]. Unfortunately, mad scientists have a bad habit of eventually succeeding.
Curiously, Ray Kurzweil took exactly the anti-cautionary approach in his equally (in)famous article, which actually spawned Bill Joy's. Who is right? Should we proceed enthusiastically to greater and more fantastic worlds than we can imagine, or restrain ourselves from destroying humanity?
The bottom line is that it doesn't matter what we _try_ to do, because someone out there will push forward. We will have nanotech in the most futuristic sense, and we will have human clones, indistinguishable from the originals. When, where, how, and who are irrelevant. It will happen. Be it fugitive criminal scientists working for money and fame, or noble researchers working for the betterment of the race, it will happen. The only thing we can do at this point is ACCEPT, EXPECT, and PLAN. The alternative is to REACT which just doesn't work well.[4]
The very saddest part of this is that it means we should be putting forth the brightest and most creative minds as legislators and policy makers. Seems like an ignoble fate for them.
If this makes no sense to you, then maybe I should quit posting to slashdot after returning from a single malt tasting.
[1]Whew! Don't know when I've had so many capital letters in one sentence!
[2]And I'm not just saying that because he created the One True Text Editor.
[3]It's surprising in this day just how many privately owned islands there are. Just go and check!
[4]I realise this sounds like a stupid slogan on an inspirational poster. Maybe I should write for those guys, despise them as I do.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
You don't read all that much about nanotech in the mainstream press these days, of course, but it's possible that could change. Michael Crichton-- he of Jurassic Park, Timeline, etc.-- is just about to release a new book on the subject, called Prey. And I seem to recall reading something about the movie rights already being sold.
You know a science is entering the mainstream press when Crichton writes a thriller about it. In other words, you can look forward to several dozen articles in about a year's time on Slate with headlines such as "Nanotech - Is It for Real?"
In his very first book, Engines of Creation, available online, Eric Drexler laid out the possible consequences of attempts to suppress nanotech research. See chapter 12 especially.
He describes an ambitious program which will allow nanotech to be developed safely, via active shields to protect the environment and sealed assembler labs to allow safe experimentation.
Of course Drexler was far, far ahead of his time, but his analysis should be a starting point for any consideration of the prospects for nanotech development.
How much you have to pay the PRI or any other lobbying bullshit group to produce a paper cautioning the government against regulating your industry. Do you think that for $100K I could obtain from them the proof that pr0n pics should be given away for free to third graders ?
I'm a molecular biologist myself, so as a rule I'm all for nanotechnology. However, the fact that the libertarian nutjob who wrote the PRI article support unfettered research makes me think regulation must be needed. He thinks the constitution guarantees the right to overthrow the government through armed struggle.
So, okay, he (Prof. Reynolds) makes a strong case against prohibition (of course, as a ccientist, I'm easy to persuade that R&D should never be banned outright.) Military secrecy is something I dislike, again, because secrecy is not good for science. Neither of these proposals are being floated in reasonable circles anyway, so this is something of a straw man proposal.
So, why does he oppose even modest regulation? From the paper, as it is academic in nature, it can be difficult to tell what policy he advocates, but I'm pretty sure he favores the lassez-faire option. He makes some arguments about deregulation generally which I regard as pretty vaccuous. Requiring companies to use the best available technology encourages other companies to research it and then force the first company to buy.
Anyway, to answer your question - the reason we'd want to regulate nanotechnology is because it might be dangerous. The thousands and thousands of completely harmless applications of nanotechnology - basically just material science - don't need any special regulation. It is only when the nanotechnology begins to resemble a living organism that the need for regulation comes into play. The fear, and it is remote but still legitimate, is that someone would make tiny robots that would breed out of control and become a social problem.
He points to biotechnology (which is basically unregulated, except in so far as it is also medical) as a big success. It has been - SO FAR. As yet, we have had no environmental catastrophes resultant from biotech, and the medical errors have been fairly small in scope, and would have been prevented if existing laws/procedures had been followed.
However - that doesn't mean that what we're doing is safe. It means, either, that what we've been doing is safe OR that we've been lucky. Personally, I think biotech is "pretty safe," but that agro-biotech (Monsanto, in particular) has too much free reign.
In any case, until we have a better idea of what nanotechnology will actually be like, it is premature to discuss regulation to make sure it is safe. Banning nanotechnology outright would be impossible for the reasons he has mentioned. Banning specifically self replicating nanotechnology, though I think it inadvisable, WOULD be feasable. Regulating self-replicating nanotechnology is probably desirable.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
The problem with advancement in science is that it can render past advancements obsolete. That is, if a nation suddenly discovers a weapon that can a) destroy nuclear weapons as the US launches them and b) vaporize any point on the earth in a second, the big bad nuclear weapons stop being such a big bad deal. If the US, or any other contry, was silly enough to not be working on something in secret, then they're asking for trouble. It would all work out okay if everyone was completely open with their research, but at the point where one country is being secretive, then there's the chance that the one nation will suddenly have the whole world by the balls by once scientific advancement. If everyone has secrets, then deterence plays a bigger role, and nobody wants to play their trump card because nobody knows what the best trump card is! A pretty scary scenario, but deterence has worked for the past several decades and I find it more appealing than the alternative. Of course all goes to hell in a hand basket with terrorist who are willing to die and take the whole world down with them. As long as terrorists don't want their homelands to be blown to bits, that scenario is a little far off. But if people are wacked out enough to want to blow up the whole world, then we're all in trouble. Then again, there is the scenario of the lion, backed into a corner, soon to be slaughtered; despite knowing its fate, it will lash out one last time - back a country into a corner, and even if the people who run the country don't want to use their trump card, they may turn to that in their darkest hour, with nothing to lose.
F-bacher
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
This paper is good news for my WORLD DOMINATION plan to enslave the human race as borg drones! Yay for nanotech!
Repeal the DMCA!
Nanites already exist to do what they say... E. coli bacteria (the stuff that grows in your intestines and makes vitamin K for you, among other things. also a major reason why eating sh*t is bad for you :P. there are flesh eating kinds, but they're kinda rare and generally get persecuted since their hosts dont like them eating flesh) when they're happy will double every 30 minutes. Given 72 hours they'll happily chew up the entire earth... or not. Why? Well the earth really isn't very easy to break down... all that iron and not enough carbon.
Nanobots face a similar problem. Even *assuming* they could (a) distinguish between a silicon and an iron and (b) use them appropriately, they're still gonna need energy. Lots and Lots of energy. Let's see... you've got 6e24 kg of earth, that's ~1e46 atoms (give or take). If you're gonna check atomic composition spectroscopically, that's about an eV (1e-19 J) per atom. So you'll need a grand total of (drumroll...) 1e37 J! A megaton of TNT apparently is 4e15 J (check Google if you dont believe me), so you'll need... oh... 2.5e21 megatons of TNT. 2 and a half billion trillion megatons of TNT, just to know what you have in front of you, if you're gonna make the earth into a giant wad of grey goo. And that's not even counting breaking all those bonds so you can rearrange atoms (rocks aren't exactly known for being easy to break down). Where's all that energy gonna come from? The sun only delivers ~1e3 W/m^2, or about 1e17 J/s over the whole earth. It'll take... oh... 1e20 s to deliver what you'll need. A century is only about pi billion seconds, so I'm not exactly worried about being turned into grey goo.
Oh yeah, I forgot. We're in the Star Trek cartoon universe. We'll outfit them with matter transmogrifiers to make trilithium, then use a (nano!) warp core to get the energy. Uh huh. Let me go start WWIII now so Zephraim Cochran (you listening?) can invent warp drive...
I'm not blind, I can see the potential benefits to nanotech, but my main problem with nanotech, is that there is absolutely no potential defense against nanotech at this time. This is a technology whose application is limited only to the skills of the engineer. Missiles can be shot down. Bio-agents are difficult to implement because they are parts per bill/hojillion if used in water or air respectively. But nanotech gives assymetrical warfare an enormous boon. While only wealthy nations can currently implement this for any kind of task at all, this state of affairs will certainly not last.
I hope that the Technological powers of the world will move slowly with nanotech, so that by the time it is a fully functional technology, it's properties are well understood. The grey goo scenario, while disasterous, is the least of my worries. The greatest is that military applications for nanotech will fall into the hands of a country which would use it's inherent ability for covert military actions. Simply put, this technology offers enormous effect, as it is extrordinarily flexible in it's applications.
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
"Or someone could release a horrible self reproducing nanite plauge that attacks human cells."
Um... if you can do that, you can also program them to attack these malicious nanites. Stuff like that only works if you have a monopoly on the technology.
"I don't think nuclear energy really has any upsides,"
So I'm going off-topic. Bah. I have karma to burn.
1.) incredible amounts of power output per unit mass of reactor. Even including radiation shielding.
2.) no need for an oxydizer. Great for submarines and spacecraft.
3.) Properly functioning reactors don't put out toxins (while just about everything else does). At worst you have "spent" fuel to get rid of, which doesn't accumulate anywhere near as fast as spent fuel in fossil fuel power sources (see point 1), and "spent" just means we don't yet have the technology to get more oomph out of it (if it's still releasing neutrons it's still useful). Why do you think we have so much focus on the "storage" of nuclear waste instead of "disposal?"
4.) The fuel itself may be more dangerous per unit mass, but go back to point 1 again.
All in all, nuclear power is probably less deadly than fossil fuel power. Even ignoring the way fossil fuel plants fund terrorism, you'd have no more black lung, no more exploding oil refineries, no more harsh chemicals put out by refineries, no more airborne carcinogens...
"Look up Operation Plowshare, it was the government's stupid plan to use small nuclear explosions to dig canals."
Let's see... bury nukes deep enough that the explosion (and any and all radioactive fallout) is kept underground. The explosion makes a crater, you connect the dots. Viola. What's so dangerous about that? Heck, if the Indians and Pakistanis can pull off underground nuclear tests with zero released fallout, what makes you think we can't?
"Nanite paint that can remove rust and repair damage."
Screw that, you can make a tank out of nanite paint. Remember the game Total Annihilation?
I'm reminded of "Can-O-Man" from The Tick.
What would a self-replicating nano-machine do if it went out of control?
That scenario is only possible with "free-roaming" nanites. These are the most complex type, and the ones with the most restrictive parameters.
1) They need energy. Their fuel will only last so long. If they use solar energy (some super-chlorophyl), they have to face the next problem:
2) They need appropriate building materials. Most nanites are designed to build a certain thing. This is part of their physical design, and not just some program. Unless that certain thing is simple (carbon fiber) they'll need more than air and dirt to build with. But what if they're programmed to build more nanites and those nanites need only air to build with:
3) They are their own competition. At this stage they're an artificial life form. Bacteria don't overrun the planet because bacteria compete with bacteria. Why go through all the hassle of separating out your needed trace element from the environment, when you can just disassemble that nanite over there? And if these guys might actually be edible to bacteria...
In summary, a free-roaming nanite designed to reproduce indefinitely using any randomly available material is just too complex, with too little economic value, and has too many naturally occuring constraints, to be a worry. It makes cool science fiction, but then again, so did little green men living on Mars.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
"What would a self-replicating nano-machine do if it went out of control?"
You assume that there wouldn't be others around to eliminate it.
"It would eventually destroy the planet, as well as possibly the solar system and even the universe."
Two words: Fermi's Paradox.
Nanotechnology is the only way for the future. Every time someone comes out with a faster, smaller, larger[capacity-wise] anything, somebody proclaims that this leap means that Moore's law is going to break in 2 years. That is Never going to happen, and here's why:
Nanotechnology is going to redefine what we think of as a computer. People think that 128-bit encryption isnt strong enough? You havent seen "not strong enough" yet. Once nanotechnology is in full force, how long do you think any encryption is going to stand up once we have the ability to make millions of specialized computers in a matter of weeks/days/hours/minutes? Moore's law wont ever break because nanotechnology is going to change the Gigahertz race into a thing where engineers find ways of getting proccessors to work together better. Nanotechnology is going to build things smaller, build them faster, give us data about things even smaller, thus allowing us to keep going smaller/faster/cheaper forever.
Smaller may not always be true, Faster may not always, technically, be true, but once "Nanotechnology" is more than a buzzword you're going to have more proccessors in your computer than you have proccesses, and Moore's law isnt going to die until the engineers just decide not to go any further-> even if they start manipulating quantum states or some shit like that, some asshole is just going to use nanotechnology to make analog computers.
The only problem is that once consumer electronics can display graphics at resolutions which are twice as good as the human eye can theoretically distinguish, and can render those graphics in real time giving each of those vexels the full priority of their own terrahertz proccessor, eventually someone's going to notice that there is absolutely nothing gained from better hardware (at least as far as the general consumers are concerned)
Of course, all of us here who try and make money programming or designing hardware are going to be out of a job (not to mention dead by several decades), since the sloppy, shitty, buggy code all written by machines, will go unnoticed by all, since it'll all be proccessed too fast to be noticed when the system hangs before another proccess finds out about the error and corrects it.
Once the technology exists to create a computer for each possible combination in a 128-bit key, how long do you think your encryption is really going to hold up? Long enough for six million more computers to be built?
Then God will kill us all, just like he did the last time we built real computers.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Your idea is, in a word, dumb. It is simply not possible to design a nanotechnological weapon that will kill only whom you want it to kill. Can't be done. What are you envisioning, here, some kind of nanobot cloud that goes around peeking at people's driver's licenses to see if they're on the "kill" list or the "don't kill" list?
The weapon that comes closest to perfection is now the same thing that it always has been: an well-trained and well-armed infantryman. Or, even better, a couple million of them.
I write in my journal
Save that quote, it will be good fodder for a future list of short-sighted predictions about the future. And while you're at it, check out page 11 of the article, which reads:
"Nanotechnology is likely to permit... artificial "disease" agents that could hide undetected in the bodies of enemy populations or leaders until triggered by external stimuli"
Sounds plausible to me (or at least as plausible as nanotechnology in general).
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I think all of us who saw Innerspace know that no good can come of this nanotechnology fad.
This technology is much closer to fruition than nanotech. In fact, it is practically around the corner.
If electricity is produced by electrons is morality produced by morons?
1) Put a cap on how many copies of itself a bot can make.
This does nothing to prevent a "gray goo" problem. All it takes is one "mutation"-- an error in manufacturing-- to remove this cap. In biological organisms, this is called "cancer," and it's something of a problem.
2) Add some sort of mechanism to the bots to only allow duplication when there are less than some number of bots in the surrounding area.
So rather than a hard limit on reproductions, you have an environmental feedback mechanism. Again, one mutation disables this feature, or worse, inverts it. Now the assembler only reproduces when the concentration in the local environment is greater than a given value.
3) Only allow bots to reproduce when told to do so by Humans.
Great idea. At this point, they're not self-assembling any more. This is, in fact, the only solution to the problem.
Of course, if the assemblers are able to self-assemble, it's quite likely that they will be caused to self-assemble by some external factor sooner or later. So the only safe way to apply this solution is to make the assemblers physically incapable of assembling themselves.
4) provide som sort of "master kill signal" (i.e. a specific radio frequency) that will cause all bots reciving it to cease functioning.
Just as it only takes one mutation-- or manufacturing error-- to disable a reproductive limit, so too does it take only one error to disable this idea. Too dangerous.
5) Any of several other ideas I didn't just think of in the past 2 min.
I hope the ones you think of in the next 2 minutes are somewhat better that these ones. For inspiration, look at living organisms, and observe all the things that can go wrong with them. Don't suggest anything that leads to one of those states.
And how do we know the goo would be grey, anyway?
The idea of a "gray goo" is favored by people who don't realize that nanotechnology is an old, old idea. There's already goo all over the place, but it isn't gray. It's green.
I write in my journal
Put yourself in their shoes... they had just broken free from England by force. They firmly believed that English rule was tyranical and took up arms to break free. In this light, it is easy to see how the founding fathers would be weary of government. The second ammendment is not in the Constitution so that every yahoo redneck and crack dealer has the right to shoot tin cans. The second ammendment is a final check-and-balance when all others fail, granting the right of the people to bear arms such that should the need arise, a militia could be formed.... not to fend off the Indians or English mind you.. but the government.
Of course there isn't a "right" to overthrow the government,... they just wanted to make sure it was possible.
Of course, some will say that this is only my interpretation...but don't take my word for it! Lets do a google search and see what thye founding father had to say...
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
Nanotechnological diseases would behave just like biological ones. They could not discriminate. Nothing on a biological level separates the White Hats from the Black Hats, so it is simply not possible to engineer a disease-- biological or otherwise-- that gets them but not us. The only hope for such a battle plan is geographic isolation, which, like counting on the direction of the wind in the trenches of the Great War, is no plan at all.
If, on the other hand, you're talking about somehow getting a nanotechnological agent into an enemy leader directly, rather than infecting an entire population, just cut out the BS and shoot the bastard instead. You're close enough, and it's much less expensive.
I write in my journal
turn to god!
I truly believe that nanotech will bring us way better stuff in the future. I read an article about ABB a while ago (I tried to find the article again... but failed) about their efforts in this area. They're doing R&D on lowering the resistance in conductors. They believed they would have products ready in five to ten years. I searched the ABB website to see if they had a press release or something, and this is the only article in English I found. It's an interesting article since it mention other potential (besides their line of business) technological breakthroughs by using nanotech.
The exisiting nanotech, biotechnology, will force the world to deal with the perils of cheap, superdangerous weapons (and well-intentioned but misguided tools) well before built-from-scratch nanotech is advanced enough to matter. The world will not be able to afford letting people (including companies and governments!) keep activities of this kind secret much longer.
This will take some adjustment, especially for the USA since it is accustomed to depending on individual, commercial, and governmental ability to act in secrecy as the basis of freedom. (We are about the only holdout on international-inspection treaties on germs and chemical weapons, and we highly value my-home-is-my-castle and no-one-can-see-my-messages privacy.)
Solving this problem will not necessarily require a totalitarian regime, but that is what will happen if people who value freedom refuse to deal with it. We should push for a combination of openness (so everyone can watch for dangers), vigilance (because serious failures will damage both people and freedom), tolerance (so that openness still leaves people free to act unless they are clearly out of line), and widely-distributed prosperity (so that the zealots little base for support). And we should be tolerant of each other as we try to sort out how to balance these sometimes-conflicting goals.
But biotechnology (and later other nanotechnology) are going to be as much part of the solution (especially for health and prosperity) as part of the problem. It's not like everyone is in such great shape to start with.
If you know anything about bacteria, the idea of us designing machines that can outcompete bacteria at the bacterial scale is ridiculous.
If you don't know anything about bacteria, and imagine bacteria sized self assembling little armored tanks with superior memory and AI to bacteria, that can somehow extract energy from their environment faster and more efficiently than bacteria (maybe with little nuclear engines?) the idea makes alot of sense.
And the divide is rather hard to cross unless you've had at least a college level micro-bio course or done equivalent research. (though I would disagree with the 'green' part, the 'grey goo' is already here, and it is inside us, but it more white to transluscent than green:-).
I mean think about it, where are the self assemblers going to get their energy and raw materials from?
If they are made of metal, it's going to take a bunch of energy and/or time for one to make another, being "nano" doesn't get you a free pass from 2lot.
If they are made of flesh, then they are not going to be very tough, not any tougher than rats or starlings anyway.
So you have can fast replicators that aren't very tough or you can have slow replicators that are more tough. Either way, it's pretty hard to get something bad enough to cause human beings serious trouble.
I mean we have tank making factories that are pretty much automated now, if we made tanks that could make other tanks in the field, they would still need tons of steel, plastics, energy, etc. delivered to them, and (lacking things like cranes, assembly lines, forms, etc) probably would be a whole lot less efficient than making a tank in a factory anyway.
I'm not saying that the technology should be unregulated, but I am saying that the 'end is near' prophecies like Joy's are not born out by the facts & probably do more harm than good in the search for responsible and reasonable controls.
Nanotech doesn't play by the same rules as currently extant terrestrial biology.
They would probably do better if they did, after all terrestrial biology does a very good job of extracting the available energy & raw materials and turning it into new terrestrial biology.
Nanites could, in theory, do just that, by using raw materials in the air and the earth to reproduce.
Huh? What "theory" is going to free them from the need for an energy source? Are they powered by minature nuclear reactors then?
It all depends on (A) how they are programmed,
Ahh, then they will have nano-scale Pentium 8s with AI 2020 pre-installed on nano-scale terrabyte hard drives?
I mean if they are "going to be programmed" they need processors to run the programs, memory to hold the programs, and a power source and cooling system for the above. Even given quantum computing, it seems pretty unlikey you are going to pack all that into a little bit of goo that can also defend itself against a predatory nematode.
The fear, .. that someone would make tiny robots that would breed out of control and become a social problem.
The Trouble with Aibos...
Wots in the Turbo Lift? Aiieeee!
The whole idea of trying to stop the river of science seems naive. Even if we could, SPECTRE etc would continue development in secret.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
I'll just go and patent Nanotechnology, and then when the grey goo spawns continents, i'll demand control of it and rule the planet.
MUAHAHAHA
"If God created us in his own image we have more than reciprocated." - Voltaire
It already happened millions of years ago.
Darwin's menagerie of creatures actually did consume much of the planet, leaving behind waste products such as coal, chalk, and the biggie: oxygen in the air.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Once nanotechnology is in full force, how long do you think any encryption is going to stand up once we have the ability to make millions of specialized computers in a matter of weeks/days/hours/minutes?
Um. Encrypting something is easier than decrypting something by force. Therefore, no matter how much processing power is availiable to the world at large, encryption will still hold (discounting quantum computers or a solution to the NP complete set of problems).
Once the technology exists to create a computer for each possible combination in a 128-bit key, how long do you think your encryption is really going to hold up? Long enough for six million more computers to be built?
A 128 bit key has 3.4e38 possibilities. That's a lot of computers. Now, 6.022e23 hydrogen atoms make up one gram of mass (1 mole). Therefore there are at most 6.022e26 atoms in a kilogram. The Earth weights 5.972e24 kg. Therefore there is at most 3.6e51 atoms that make up the Earth.
Therefore perhaps the poster could explain to me how you could have the technology to "create a computer for each possible combination"? It might work for a 128-bit key, in theory. But a 256-bit key has 1.15e77 possibilities, which outnumbers the number of atoms in the Earth by billions to one. Even solving 128-bit encryption by having a computer per combination would require a minimum of weight of 565 million tonnes.
This reminds me of the story of the grains of rice and the chessboard, where one grain was put on the first square, two grains on the second, four on the third, and so forth. It quickly gets out of control, and you find that there isn't enough rice in the world to complete the sequence.
I don't want to think of the poster as an idiot, but he does seem like he's trying quite hard to be.
When people are worried about nanotech, they are worried about self-replicating nanotech. The cell shows that it is possible to make a self-replicating device with limited intelligence at that length scale. The fact that we are now building other things at that length scale isn't really the issue here. Until we figure out how to make something self-replicate and can fabricate it, we don't have to worry. The first things that self-replicate probably won't self-replicate in a natural environment because they need some resource not available in nature. These would still be useful for manufacturing, you would just need something analgous to a growth medium. The problem comes in when these things start evolving at the interface between the medium and the outside environment. There might be ways of designing evolution-resistant assemblers, but a terrorist might deliberately evolve them to survive in nature.
Once these things get into nature, it's anyone's guess what would happen. Since bacteria haven't evolved to compete with this form of life, it could seriously disrupt bacteria in the biosphere. Without the proper balance of bacteria and other microorganisms in the soil, the massive disruption moves up the food chain and we have big problems.
Stymie what? What has it DONE? I have heard less tangible products called "vaporware". Lots of talk, very little walk here. (...Yawn...)
I work in a lab where there is some degree of what I suppose would be called nanotech is performed - and I am continually confused by this "debate" over nanotech. So what exactly is the scale where the "evil things" happen? When I make a device that has features smaller than a micron, do the "evil nanotech" gnomes come out and start infusing it with evil spells?
If people want to debate specific techniques, that's fine, but the huge variety of techniques unfortunately clustered as "nanotech" share only one common thread: they have small, well-controlled features. Is small inherently evil? Should we fear dwarves and chihuahuas? I mean, this is honestly ridiculous. Many of these evil "nanotech" research pursuits are nothing more than attempting to make stronger materials and more efficient solar cells, for example. No one would fear this if you didn't call it nanotech.
On the other hand, if you ban it, then (not to be trite or anything, but...) "only criminals will have nanotech."
Would that be the criminals with multi-billion dollar research AND development laboratories? Right. This is exactly the view shared by the non-tech world, and it shows a lack of understanding of what nanotech IS (no offense). I can't just go to the garage, make some nanotech, and kill someone with it.
People outside (and many in) the scientific community simply have no real idea of what nanotech is. For a few years there, the best way to get a research grant approved was to make sure that the word nanotech was somewhere in there. That was just as dumb as saying "ban nanotech." Banning specific techniques perhaps makes sense, but again, why ban something because it's small? Don't throw out the solar cell with the self-sharpening bullet.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
(if only we discard the moral implications)
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
The paper doesn't actually call for a laissez-faire regime. In fact, the opening quote is from Leon Fuerth's speech (he was Al Gore's national security adviser) at the Foresight Institute last year, pointing out that people who wanted a laissez-faire regime for nanotech were living in a fantasy world. The paper actually suggests the experience with recombinant DNA as a model. This would be apparent had the poster spent some time reading the paper. Or even this excerpt.
As for overthrowing the government, well, that's actually the most common view of what the Second Amendment is about among professors of constitutional law who have written on the subject -- including people like Larry Tribe of Harvard, no libertarian. Though I don't really see what that has to do with nanotechnology.
InstaPundit! Ahead of the Curve Since 30 Minutes Ago
"Among the cognoscenti of nanotechnology, this threat has become known as the 'gray goo problem.' Though masses of uncontrolled replicators need not be gray or gooey, the term 'gray goo' emphasizes that replicators able to obliterate life might be less inspiring than a single species of crabgrass. They might be superior in an evolutionary sense, but this need not make them valueable.
The gray goo threat makes one thing perfectly clear: We cannot afford certain kinds of accidents with replicating assemblers.
The whole "gray goo" issue is more or less a red herring by those against nanotech. Why do I say that?
There's no reason to expect that anyone would even have a need to build self-replicating nanotech devices that were designed to be able to use whatever resources at hand. There are numerous incredibly-simple safeguards that could be implemented to make sure nothing like this ever happens.
For example, require specific, hand-to-find materials in the construction of self-replicating nanotech devices - so that way, any that were out in the wild would not have access to those materials to be able to replicate.
Or require there to be some sort of radio signal present to activate self-replicating - no signal, no replication.
To create gray goo, it would take designers that were both geniuses - to create a devide that can self-replicate with whatever materials are on hand - and idiots - to not include safeguards - at the same time.
Black goo, an intentionally designed device to do the above, will be more of a threat than than gray goo will ever, ever be. And that will require a nanotech defense system to be in place to prevent such a thing - meaning that development of mature nanotech needs to be done by responsible people before rogue nations and groups get to the point to create black goo.
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
Any increase in technology is empowering. Empowerment does not bring with it a greater wisdom and ability to use that newly found power to benefit all humanity. Technology will simply increase the power of those who yield it to do what they want.
:)
It is true that nanotechnology can do trememndous things to benefit us. I think it's a very good likelihood that some of these benefits will come about. At the same time, in a society driven by a lust for material wealth, power, etc, I'm going to bet that something bad will also come of it. Furthermore, with a large portion of this planet's people disenfranchised and impoverished, there's a likelihood that a few angry members of that increasing population will take the power of nanotechnolgy and do something dangerous with it.
I have no question that we will move forward on nanotechnology, hell, we already are. People always go into these things looking at the miraculous benefits, and high on their new god-like powers. Then they move a little further into the future, and realize, once again, that the god business is a difficult one, and have to deal with the total havoc they've unleashed in their blind egotism.
Will banning nanotechology work? No, and it doesn't matter, because it's not going to happen. A lot of people have serious ethical concerns about how stem cell research is done, and that's going forward in a myriad ways anyhow. With nanotech, nobody's going to make a moral stand against it until something goes horrifically wrong, and by then it may very well be too late. So, we're going to keep moving forward, we are going to screw it up, and eventually, we'll make some technology who's side effect will be our own annihilation.
In the meantime, go out and enjoy the life that you have while you've got it. Fortunately that advice works regardless of any technologically conceived apocolypse
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Wrong on both counts. Nanotechnological diseases may or may not behave just like biological ones, depending on how they are designed. And in any case, biological diseases are already capable of discrimination. For example, look at malaria, which people from equatorial regions are more resistant to than others.
Nothing on a biological level separates the White Hats from the Black Hats, so it is simply not
possible to engineer a disease-- biological or otherwise-- that gets them but not us.
That depends. If your goal is genocide, there may be plenty of differences. Different races will have different markers in their DNA (those differing phenotypes have to come from somewhere, don't they?), they may have different diets.
The only hope for such a battle plan is geographic isolation, which, like counting on the direction of the wind in the trenches of the Great War, is no plan at all
Not at all. With a properly nasty nanotech "disease", you would spread it far and wide, infecting both your people and theirs. The agents would be program to remain inert and unnoticed until they received a certain trigger message (transmitted by radio or other means), at which point they would activate, killing or disabling their host. The trick would be that only you know the trigger message. You can then go around at will, killing whole populations using nothing more than a directional radio antenna.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Dear Sadly Misinformed --
If all you are going on is Engines of Creation (or rather, your vague recolection that it wasn't very good) I'd suggest you look into some of Drexler's other work, such as Nanosystems. It's always a bad idea to judge someone by a popularization of their work, even if they wrote it.
-- MarkusQ
Get me a danish!!
While his comments are informative and reassuring, the underlying moral and legal questions remain. Can research be dangerous by releasing enormously destabilizing technologies? Obviously, yeah. Is the right approach for society to default to tolerating something until it's proven dangerous or to default to suppressing something until it's proven benign? Well, the former is much easier and much more in line with our moral and political traditions, so that's what we're almost certainly gonna do. Is it enough? I'm among those who thinks not.
Our correspondent above (MOD HIM UP, DAMMIT) says light regulation is quite adequate for nanotech in the foreseeable future. This doesn't put me at ease regarding gene hacking, AI, etc., though it reassures me about nanotech specifically.
mt
You lose it with this hyperbolic statement:
In short, you are the ideal food for nanotech.
"Nanotech" is all very small technology, things don't become "self assembling" just by being small.
In many proposals, assemblers are made largely of carbon in the form of solid crystals.
Next you've paint a hollywood sci-fi picture of little diamond monsters, but avoid the essential questions of energy source & heat dissapation (tiny diamond fans for their tiny diamond pentiums?). How much energy does it take to make these little diamond plates, and what method are the little jewells using to extract that energy? You mention "many proposals", but can't provide a link to one?
Only nanotech has teeth made of diamond crystals, it can be ultimately voracious, and our immune systems won't be able to touch it.
Ooo, I'm scared now. You go from "some proposals involve diamond crystals" to voracious knids with diamond teeth, again, typical hollywood sci-fi with a basic failure to understand physics: your little diamond monsters will cook in their own waste heat before they can move and reproduce fast enough to devour a housefly, much less a human being.
You are tasty and tender, and don't forget it.
Actually, I'm neither, and when someone uses hyperbolic FUD in an argument rather than logic backed up with facts, it's pretty clear to me that their argument is nothing but an attempt to stoke fear, uncertainty, and despair.
The idea makes, in fact, no sense at all
Which was the point I was trying to make, thanks! (I thought "little nuclear reactors" would make it pretty clear I was pointing out the "gray goo" idea ignores the basic problems of energy source and heat dissapation).
But you're right, with folks seriously going off about the dangers of molecule sized diamond tanks, they might not notice the sarcasm tags around the nano-nukes:-)
Nanotechnological diseases may or may not behave just like biological ones, depending on how they are designed.
That's kind of a cop-out. I reject your premise. Nanotechnological diseases would-- if they weren't a science-fiction fever dream-- be bounded by the same constraints that govern the capabilities and behaviors of biological diseases, and could not escape them.
And in any case, biological diseases are already capable of discrimination. For example, look at malaria, which people from equatorial regions are more resistant to than others.
You're confusing discrimination-- the ability for a disease particle, biological or otherwise, to distinguish between individuals-- with the natural feedback loop of germ resistance. Think about why vaccinations work. When you are vaccinated, a small amount of germ material is introduced into your body. Your immune system creates an antibody to the germ material, which remains in your system after the vaccine load has been eliminated. When your body comes into contact with that germ in the wild, the antibody is there to help you fight off the infection. This has nothing at all to do with some magical ability of the germ itself to tell who has received the vaccine and who hasn't. Rather, the germ just tries to do its thing indiscriminately, only to be prevented by the antibodies present in the host. Natural resistance works in basically the same way, only without the vaccine.
Different races will have different markers in their DNA (those differing phenotypes have to come from somewhere, don't they?)....
Actually, it's not really possible to distinguish between different races using gene sequencing alone. There's no "black" gene, no "white" gene. It's much more complex than that.
That said, you're proposing that a nanotechnological disease could somehow enter either the nucleus or the mitochondria of a cell directly, and manipulate the DNA in order to identify the host. Scale is against you here; it's very difficult to envision an object large enough to perform some kind of rudimentary calculations based on the sequencing of an entire genome and yet small enough to enter the nucleus or mitochondria of a cell. Furthermore, it would not be possible to perform the sort of test you propose without destroying the genome of the cell, thereby killing it. The heat generated by the device in traversing the chromosomes alone would probably be sufficient to denature the bonds holding the chromosomes together. This would have the effect of shutting down protein synthesis inside the cell completely. The result would almost certainly be immediate apoptosis. As a result, the nanotechnological disease particle would be unable to finish its job before destroying the very thing it's trying to sequence. Not terribly effective as a discrimination mechanism; you can either kill everybody, or no one.
The agents would be program to remain inert and unnoticed until they received a certain trigger message (transmitted by radio or other means)
So now we're talking about molecular-scale objects, smaller than an organelle but larger than a protein, that are equipped with radio receivers? You're kidding, right? You know that a radio antenna has physical limits on its minimum size, don't you? Nanotechnological disease particles would be far to small to even interact with radio waves, much less receive and interpret them.
The only way to communicate at that scale is chemically. You'd have to get the disease particles out there-- into everybody, presumably-- and then deliver some activating agent to just the people you want killed, and somehow get that activating agent into the cells themselves. This is, for all practical purposes, impossible. And even if a way were conceived to make it possible and practical, it would still be absurdly complex and completely-- not practically, but completely-- impossible to control.
Do you see now why this whole idea is just science fiction? And bad science fiction at that.
I write in my journal
Oh, okay. I completely and totally misinterpreted your comment. It sounded like you were advocating the idea of little molecule-sized nuclear-powered tanks. Sorry for coming down on you. ;-)
I write in my journal
Engines of Creation was a popular book and therefore intended to popularise nanotech, not to rigorously defend his technoscientific theories.
Female Prison Rape in NY
You provide a "Genetically modified foods" analogy. That analogy is flawed:
``Some jelly bottles now say "free of genetically modified organisms". That's nice, considering genetically modified organisms aren't necessarily any worse or better than natural ones -- just different.''
Obviously, you have no food allergies.
For someone with food allergies, it's hard enough to avoid dangerous proteins merely by reading product labels: manufacturers often change formulations based on market prices for various ingredients, and occasionally "forget" to change the labelling until they run out of their stock of (now) inaccurate labels.
Consider how much worse this situation is, when people are introducing foreign proteins into foods which are "known safe" from foods which are the cause of someone's allergies.
I guess it would be convenient if these people would just die, right?
Contact any professional allergist; ask them about things like soy allergies and corn allergies, and whether or not the number of patients with these allergies have increase, decreased, or stayed the same, over the past 10 years.
-- Terry
The flaw with your idea-- which is a terrifying one on its face-- is that our enemies are not all ethically related. Killing off an entire branch of the tree would be drastic, but it wouldn't wipe out the black hats. It would also have the nasty side-effect of killing a goodly fraction of the white hats as well.
If only we could tell the good guys from the bad guys so easily.
I write in my journal
This type of research would be going on with or without the hype, but because of the hype, a lot of bad research gets funded, and a lot of good research goes unfunded. To say that this man is ahead of his time is to forget that most if his ideas aren't original...
Can you give an example of someone who had previously put forth the argument that atomic scale engineering of the sort that Drexler addresses would be feasible? I know that several people (notably R. P. Feynman) had argued that it should be possible to manipulate matter at this scale, but I don't recall anyone proposing that we could build things to atomic precision. Nor am I aware of anyone who put forth detailed arguments for the advantages and disadvantages of using individual atoms as material for an extension of mechanical engineering.
As a researcher in condensed matter physics, I see Drexler's work as detrimental to the scientific community, largely because it helps popularize a trend and set of buzzwords.
I, on the other hand, don't think the quality of scientific work should be judged by the social reaction to it. (E. O. Wilson, to pick an unrelated example, fomented a great deal of popular noise with his social biology, but I still like his work. Why? Because it makes solid, testable predictions).
So, granting that there are a considerable number of people spouting nonsense and attaching Drexler's name to it (and, as an aside, I find them as annoying as you do), I'll ask you this: what is your scientific objection to nanosystems? Does it make claims that you counter-claim are false or (worse) are unfalsifiable? If so, can you tell me what they are and sketch your reasoning in objecting to them?
-- MarkusQ
It *IS* a selling point.
To a person with food allergies, "natural" and "free of genetically modified organisms" means "free of unexpected allergens, other than those normally found in ingredients listed on the label".
I know people who have ended up in the hospital over some of the proteins expressed in genetically modified soy beans (~1/3 of all soy grown in the U.S. has been modified).
Lack of such labelling means "take your chances, and keep the Benadryl, Prednisone, and Epi-Pen handy, because otherwise, you might die from eating this".
When they start doing allergy testing by protein, and start food-labelling by protein, and start enforcing a manufacture switch of label when an ingredient switch occurs (and none of that "sugar and/or corn syrup" or "corn and/or peanut oil" bullshit), I guess it will be OK to have genetically modified foods all over the place.
Until then, though, it really sucks to have genetically modified foods containing proteins not found in their unmodified counterparts, masquerading as safe for people with food allergies to consume, when they are, in fact, not safe.
The labelling and allergy testing infrastructure just isn't there to support widespread modification of foods, yet. Until it is, it's like playing Russian Roulette with your customer's lives.
-- Terry
you're trying to stir up some controversy where there isn't any.
By asking you to explain or expand on your statements? You alluded to some objections you had to Drexler and I asked you for more details. I'd hardly call this "stirring up controversy."
Saying that "Drexler isn't ahead of his time" is not the same thing as saying "everything he has ever done is rubbish". I said the former, and I'd appreciate it if you stopped acting as if I said the latter.
What you said was (and I quote):
You mention Feynman's talk, "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom"; it seems you've not actually read it though. Feynman explicitly mentions building things at that level, and created a prize for the first people to build particular nanostructures (granted, some reprints of the talk might not include the prize information).
As a matter of fact, I have read it. (There's a copy on the web for anyone who hasn't.) The talk was mostly about something like modern semiconductors and what we currently call MEMS, including the prize you mentioned.
If you read it, you see that Feynman saying things such as (and again, I quote):
Only in a few paragraphs at the end does he mention the possibility of building atomically precise structures, and then only to say that he thinks it might be done.If you fail to understand what I'm saying, you're welcome to ask for a clarification rather than assuming the worst.
That is exactly what I did. You made a number of statements and I quoted your statements verbatim, and asked you for examples, clarification, etc.
Logically, there are only a few possibilities:
- You think that Drexler is wrong, atomically precise machines are not feasible. In which case, my question is, why do you think this?
- You agree that atomically precise machines are feasible, but think that someone else came up with and elaborated the idea first. If so, who?
- You think that Drexler is correct, and original, but has mismanaged the presentation of the idea. If so, I would be tempted to agree, while laying more of the blame on Foresight than on Drexler himself. But if this is your position, it's hard to see why you said what you did about his books, originality. etc. Further, it's hard to see why you'd object so strongly to whoever said he was ahead of his time, since (on the premise that you agree that Drexler-style nanotech will someday be a reality) coming up with an idea that will someday be feasible but isn't yet is practically the definition of being "ahead of your time". Thus my assumption that you must hold one of the first two positions.
-- MarkusQ