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Nanotech Assembly One Step Closer
perrin5 writes "according to Science Daily researchers at University at Buffalo have managed to assemble 3D structures of carbon,silicon, and latex by using "non uniform AC electric fields" as the shaping impetus. I've never really understood exactly what purpose nano-machines were going to fufill, especially in their early stages. Any one care to fill me in?"
[insert obvious RMS reference here]
Don't you mean "Insert obvious Bill Joy reference here"? Anyone who wishes to discuss nanotech has to take into account this essay. I'm not completely convinced, but it's a chilling cautionary exposition. Nanotech can be our salvation or our doom. Pessimist that I am, I'm expecting the latter but hoping for the former.
Below, a review I wrote back in '96 of a pretty good book on the subject.
It was originally written for a rigorously nontechnical audience and I decided, what the hell, paste it in here with no modifications for the dashslot crew.
Apologies if you think it overly long or drifts off topic, or just sucks in general.
Should nanotech really catch fire and turn out to be somehow actually workable, the LONG term implications are weird, to say the least.
Potentially very creepy stuff.
BOOK REVIEW: Nano, Ed Regis, Little Brown & Co., 1995
There's a monster living under the bed. And I've got the proof. It's called Nano, the emerging science of nanotechnology: remaking the world - molecule by molecule. And it concerns itself with exactly that.
It's a scary motherfucker.
Scary as hell, in fact.
Ed regis takes us on a guided tour of hell. And it's one of those extra creepy hells that you'd find in an old Twilight Zone episode. One where all the damned had fervently hoped, wished, and dreamed for exactly what they wound up with.
My guess is that this fucker is coming and there's not a thing in the world any of us can do to stop it.
Our tour of the coming nightmare is told somewhat as a biographical sketch of a certain K. Eric Drexler. It follows him around from the time when he first really glommed on to the realization that this incredibly outre shit just might work (read: there's really nothing to stop it) down to the near present, wherein he shouts of riches and evils beyond the ken of imagination to a world filled with people who are mostly deaf. Like one of those unpleasant recurring dreams you have. Like hell.
Along the way, ER takes time to explain the scenery in a way that allows us to more completely understand the chilling implications of it all.
I'm sure that you are a lot like me. That is, you probably know more about the lyrics to Dead Kennedy's music than you know about goofy shit like molecular bonding, enzymatic reactions, and other wooly boogers of similar esoteric boredom inducement. ER, bless his heart, explains crap like this only when it's really necessary and in a style that could mislead you into thinking shit like this might actually be fun to muck around with.
No small achievement, that.
After finishing this pecker, I feel like I actually know what's going on.
I'd rather not.
It's brutal.
Allow me to digress for a bit, if you please. Years ago, when it finally dawned on me as to the full ramifications of genetic engineering, I was seized by a vision most bizarre that I occasionally would twit my son with. The "Steak Tree". Which is exactly what it is. A tree upon which would grow delicious sirloins, rib eyes, or whatever you wanted. With real hemoglobin, cholesterol, muscle tissue, the works. Anything producible by our good friend, DNA. Anything. And all that that implies.
Turns out that I was a piker.
By quite a bit, too.
Drexler envisions a "meat machine".
I quote: "The machine might be about the size and shape of a microwave oven, for example, and it would work the way a microwave oven did, too, more or less. You'd open the door, shovel in a quantity of grass clippings or tree leaves or old bicycle tires or whatever, and then you'd close the door, fiddle with the controls, and sit back to await results. Two hours later, out rolled a wad of fresh beef."
Unlike my "tree", Drexler's "machine" isn't limited to things that ultimately come from DNA. Artifacts produced via nanotechnology are limited only to what the laws of physics impose on them. If you've ever peeked at a physics text or maybe read The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav, you'll immediately realize that the restrictions on Drexler's "meat machine" are hideously loose and permissive.
It's all allowed. Manufactured items, diamonds for free, living/nonliving hybrids, duplicates of yourself complete with the fucking thoughts preprogrammed into you head, horrible new virus things that aren't really viruses but are instead maybe little mechanical sherman tank doodads no bigger than a pneumococci that are programmed to maybe place nasties like thallium atoms in very specific locales, reproducible people that not only can't be killed (they'll just make more of themselves) but that could conceivably self replicate and take over the whole fucking world. Half man half cyclotron crosses....all of it. And a whole lot more.
Disposable humans.
Disposable SELVES for fucking sakes.
All dwelling in a world where the business of producing goods and services via the efforts of people or "traditional" manufacturing processes has been abolished.
Throw some crap into the box, stand back a while, and pull out...whatever the hell you can imagine.
Including more boxes. It's endless.
Where do humans fit in a world like that?
Yes yes, I know I know, you've about by now decided that I've lost my fucking mind. Can't really blame you. In truth, I hope I have lost my mind. Along with K. Eric Drexler, Ed Regis, and an ever growing list of others.
Yes indeed. Here's to hoping we've all lost our minds.
Is it fascism yet?
And I can't wait until we can manipulate atomic strucutres using the strong and weak forces directly, instead of these large, clumsy electrical fields. Geez, it's like doing brain surgery wearing oven mitts.
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
Nanotech can be our salvation or our doom. Pessimist that I am, I'm expecting the latter but hoping for the former.
You're joking right?
It will take so long to get nanotech assemblers to work and they are likely to be so fragile and unstable that when they break they'll probably simply NOT work anymore. I swearall this doom and gloom or utopian talk about nano tech is making me sick. Nanotech is still tech. Nanotech will not destroy humanity.
You expect too friggin' much.