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Nanotechnology: Lessig, Sherman and Drexler Speak
An anonymous reader writes "Reporting from The Foresight Institute's "Vision Weekend", Glenn Reynolds (aka Instapundit) discusses the future of nanotechnology and the politics behind it. Also featuring a video interview of Lessig, Sherman and nanotech pioneer Eric Drexler."
However, I believe they may be putting the cart ahead of the donkey, considering the need of resources for the bots. That is, unless you don't mind nanobots eating your kids and reconstituting them into Nanobot Green. ;)
Glenn is obviously a smart guy, but he's there as a futurism enthusiast, not an expert. I get the feeling he's been taken in by people using the real accomplishments of others to justify their own unrealistic hype.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Exactly. We must tackle more pressing issues -- such as splitting the atom and putting a man on the moon -- first. Once that is accomplished, 200 years from now say, we can start talking about nanotechnology.
Is it just me or did that article have very little information that I didn't know or that I didn't already suspect. Venture capitalist are looking for shorter turnaround on their investment? Wasn't that news like a year or two ago? Potential military application? Political and legislation problems? Appreciate if the other attendants could provide some more focused details about the topics and perhaps your own insights and conclusions you have drawn from the discussions and presentations.
I found the links from the replies more informative. Thanks fellas.
"Last one in is a rotten goblin!" - Kepp
There's no presupposition there. Strong AI is not a prerequisite for nanotechnology in any way.
Of course, the existence of mature nanotechnology may enable strong AI, allowing at least the ability to brute-force AI by copying the human brain molecule for molecule and perhaps modify it to allow machine interaction and who-knows-what.
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
Keep your expectations in check folks. A lot of the basic science still has to get nailed down and funding this research is going to be a sunk cost. The only agencies willing to forward a huge sunk cost will be giant corporate research labs, universities, and government labs.
It seems to me that the availability of nanotech would actually completely outmode the current definition of military mastery.
Nuclear weapons accomplished (or are accomplishing) this to a very limited extent, but they're really hard to build and require exotic and hard-to-find elements and impressive amounts of infrastructure.
Nanotech, OTOH, seems like just an advance in manufacturing techniques. Given a properly advanced state of the art, it seems like it would be fairly impossible to limit access it the tech once things got rolling.
So, what we'll have is yet another dramatic inflation of the 9-11 effect, where once again the idea of how many people can be killed by a single determined person rises dramatically. It's been a historical trend over the last few hundred years, but I foresee an increase by a level of magnitude in our near future...
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
I'm afraid that so often have "scientists" stood up and said that their emloyer's activities (I'm thinking PCBs here) are safe and clean, that I just don't believe them any more. A scientist in the employ of a multinational conglomerate is more likely to be lying than telling the truth, IMO. Same with journalists, I'm afraid, they're all looking at their future employment prospects with the big networks.
Self-replicating nanotechnology is not impossible. It exists today. It's called "bacteria."
It doesn't work especially well, though. Due to the fundamental nature of biochemical (i.e., nanotechnological) reactions, errors in transcription are commonplace. This is good for life, but bad for technology. If you engineered a nanobot (i.e., bacteria) to do a specific task, that nanobot would soon mutate into something less useful. It's simply unavoidable. It's like entropy.
For Instance, take any sort of nanomachine that affects a human body.
Okay. I choose a virus.
Nanomachines are very small and very hard to make.
Viruses are very small but relatively easy to make. And by "easy" I mean 'it's possible with current technology."
To kill, or change, or even repair a signifigant number of those cells, you need an obscene number of nanomachines.
Since viruses are self-replicating, that's not a problem. And they're here today.
I find it amusing that people--usually futurists and Slashdotters--look to nanotechnology for blue-sky solutions to problems that can best be solved biologically, and yet ignore the complications that arise from the inherent nature of the molecular-scale realm.
It's not a question of believe versus not believe -- it's a question of consider versus declare a thought crime.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
John Gilmore published an essay a while back that also tied together concerns about nanotech and DRM. Gilmore of course is a long-time champion of online freedom and free software. In his essay he writes about how nanotech could bring an era of plenty to all, but only if there are free designs that people can feed into their nanotech assemblers.
Gilmore argues that the problems we are facing now with information goods - music, movies, games, software - are just the beginning. In a few decades, all products will be in the same situation. Whatever solutions we find now will be the way we handle physical products in the future.
If we can build a world where information goods are plentiful and cheap, that is a good sign that nanotech will bring us a similar bounty of physical goods. On the other hand if we end up with an information market built on scarcity and high prices, nanotech won't bring the world the riches that it could potentially provide.
The ongoing content wars are even more important than they seem. They are putting us on the path that will determine the future economy of the 21st century.
My problem with the whole concept of reassembling matter is that we still don't have a definite understanding of what fundamentally ties things like ferrari and ice cream together on a quantum level, let alone the skills to observe these tiniest of structures without using some sort of particle acceleration technique. I'm not saying it's impossible to ever be able to manipulate matter to such a simple degree as described by many science popularizations, I'm simply saying that it might take a bit longer than some futurists like to admit. Saying it would be impossible would truly go against my love of science-fiction...and where would I be without that, however seeing that there are some problems yet to be solved goes with my engineering schooling view of the world. We are what we can do.
Actually, it would be worse for the car industry than file sharing is for the music industry, because you only want one or two cars, but hundreds of songs.
Re: "without self-replicating nanomachines, most of the other really big nano-dangers (and many of the nanodreams) become nigh on imnpossible". My only suggestion would be that you tell that to the SARS virus. (And a virus is not inherently self-replicating -- it steals self-replication machinery from the host it infects.)
The SARS virus seems perfectly capable of producing the "obscene number of nanomachines" required to both kill the host entity and expand out into the world.
Biotech is *not* very different from nanotech. Biotech *is* nanotech. And until people understand that we are all at risk.
As I pointed out at the Foresight conference -- I have the genome sequence for the SARS virus -- I have access to the machines and materials necessary to recreate its genome. There is little that would prevent me from infecting all of the attendees of the conference next year with SARS. People are living in a fantasy world that seems to be preventing them from taking bioterrorism (and eventually nanoterrorism) seriously. There are solutions to these problems -- but they are not being dealt with seriously by current government or regulatory organization activities.