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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."
1. A list of nanotechnology companies in general
2. In Canada, alot is being spent on R&D for nanotechnology: Nanotechnology R&D Initiatives in Canada
3. And they are crazy about it in Asia (many PDF reports)
Since the topic of SPAM was recently at hand, I wonder long it will be before we start getting: "***enlarge your penis*** Rapid PENIS ENLARGEMENT through the use of amazing NANOTECHNOLOGY advances "***enlarge your penis*** "
You can't patent nanotechnology, as Robin Williams has prior art in the cult series "Mork and Mindy"! ;-)
"Nano, nano!"
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Nanotechnology -- Good or Evil?
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I attended the nanotechnology conference also, and I'll report on what I saw just as soon as I can wash off this gray goo...
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
Nano bots will be part of Palladium, your PC will not respond unless you have the correct embedded bots. Any attempt to circumvent DRM or any EULA conditions will be punished by the bots relaxing you sphlincter muscles at the most inapropiate of times and most probably in a public place. God help any geek who has a girlfriend as violations may be additionally be punished by relaxation of other muscle groups.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
many scientists ... want to undermine fears of advanced nanotechnology by simply taking the subject off the table. You'd think, though, that at least some of these people would beware of Arthur C. Clarke's observation that when a distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right, but when he says that something is impossible, he is often wrong.
Unless the scientists are advancing agendas that have nothing to do with science... for example, when a "Creation Scientist" maintains that it is "possible" the Earth is only thousands of years old, or a scientist in the pay of industry maintains that it is "possible" that emissions have no effect on global warming.
Actually, Arthur C. Clarke's axiom still holds true, because none of the above examples are "distinguished" scientists.
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. ;)
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.
As I promised last week, I attended the Foresight Institute's "vision weekend" relating to nanotechnology, and I have a report. (If you don't know much about nanotechnology, read this for some general background.)
The good news is that interest in nanotechnology doesn't seem to have suffered as much as it might have in light of the economic woe that has swept Silicon Valley. Though I saw a lot of "space available" and "for lease" signs as I drove around Palo Alto, attendance at the conference was only slightly below last year's.
There was less Extropian-style enthusiasm about the long-term prospects that nanotechnology might lead to near-immortality, and more talk about near-term developments and venture capital. And I guess that's the biggest shift in the field. When talk about nanotechnology was new, the long-term prospects dominated. They're still important, and people are still talking about them (who doesn't want to live a long time - er, besides Leon Kass, that is?) but the big buzz was over startups that are promising to deliver interesting new nanodevices within the year. Venture capitalists were talking about nanotechnology-related products that they're backing, and there was more discussion of products that can be brought to market in the near term. (One fallout of the dotcom bubble's bursting is that the venture-capital community seems very interested these days in companies that will produce customer revenue sooner rather than later)
People were also interested in the politics of nanotechnology, politics that are taking place both within the scientific community and within the greater polity. Within the scientific community, the "nanotech isn't possible" argument, which seemed dead a couple of years ago, seems to have enjoyed a modest resurgence. This isn't because any new experimental evidence has appeared; but rather, most people seem to think, because many scientists - fearful of criticism by Luddites and technophobes - want to undermine fears of advanced nanotechnology by simply taking the subject off the table. This probably won't work, for reasons that I outlined in last week's column, but it's a natural instinct, I suppose. You'd think, though, that at least some of these people would beware of Arthur C. Clarke's observation that when a distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right, but when he says that something is impossible, he is often wrong.
The larger world is taking notice, too. That's both a good thing and a bad thing. The good thing is that some - like Professor Lawrence Lessig of Stanford Law School - want to help "inoculate" nanotechnology against excessive legal interference, something that was the subject of Lessig's talk at the conference.
And some policymakers like Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA), who attended the conference in its entirety, are taking nanotechnology rather more seriously than, say, Prince Charles. Sherman has drafted legislation calling for the National Academy of Sciences to study the impact of nanotechnology and wants to see far more attention paid to issues of economic, social, and political impact.
One Sherman-offered amendment to the current nanotechnology bill, HR766, called for 5% of nanotechnology funding to be set aside for such studies. That one didn't get adopted. But another, which was unanimously adopted, calls for a National Academy of Sciences study on the possible regulation of self-replicating machines, the release of such machines in natural environments, the distribution of molecular manufacturing development, the development of defensive technologies, and the use of nanotechnology to extend the capabilities of the human brain. (Sherman solicits your advice, and says you can email him at Brad.Sherman@mail.house.gov - with the subject line "Science" - if you like.)
The military aspects of nanotechnology have gotten more attention: In a speech last week, President Bush emphasized the role of technology in American military success, and noted that we are seeing wea
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
For Instance, take any sort of nanomachine that affects a human body. Nanomachines are very small and very hard to make. Our body is made of many, many cells. To kill, or change, or even repair a signifigant number of those cells, you need an obscene number of nanomachines. Without self-replicating nanos, you're going to be using alot more resources to make the nanos than it will take to achieve the same ends through other means.
Most of the current Nanotech seems to be centered around production methods of non-nano devices, sensors of different sorts, computing, and biotechnology. (Biotech being it's own can of worms and a very different matter from nanotech, indeed.)
Nothing Dead Here.
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."
mastery of nanotechnology could lead to the kind of military supremacy that mastery of steam power and repeating firearms gave the West in the 19th Century.
Good, soon we can conquer all those pesky third world countries in a few days instead of a few weeks.
"I only speak the truth"
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Engines of Creation is a good read about the possibilities we have with nanotech. It's also pretty cool that this was published in 1986 (several years before the internet really was available to most people) and he wrote about having online forums and large reositories of books/information like exists today. (and he even published the book online in hopes more authors would do the same.)
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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.
we have run out of energy!!!
I sure hope some one comes up with a nice high effecency solar cell.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
If you can make pretty much anything at home, using nanodevices, then information becomes the key input. But how would the auto industry feel about a Napster for Ferraris?
::buries head in sand::
Not bloody likely. All a company would have to do is design their product to require registration via a serial number for activation purposes, a la Windows XP. Granted, there are cracks aplenty for something like that, so maybe it's not such a hot idea.
Perhaps the nanoassembler would need to receive permission from the company in order to manufacture a consumer device in the first place, like an RSA key or something of that sort. Of course, once the actual assemble commands are isolated by some third-party hardware, one could just copy them and distribute them freely.
Then there's the notion of including some manner of rare precious metal in the design of the product, but that can be acquired by other means, and while expensive, the money to buy it wouldn't go to the company in the first place.
Hmm. Well, there go those ideas. To be honest, I think that nanotech, when it reaches maturity, will unavoidably throw a wrench in our economic system. When people can assemble their own goods for free, it's the designers who have the primary work cut out for them. And that could even turn into an open-source style of system, since if food, clothing, and other essentials can be assembled from only basic raw materials like soil, then the need for money would diminish considerably, and people could design new goods and products as a hobby.
Of course, one person could begin distributing a super-virus that can kill us all. Then again... umm...
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"Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders what the part that isn't thinking isn't thinking of"-TMBG
The dangers are not real yet because the technology is not real yet. Will we wait until it is at our doorstep to discuss the risks and dangers? Moral and ethical questions about cloning didn't seem like more than paperback novel material a few years ago. We're now enacting laws concerning their use.
I would have to disagree that self-replicating nano is beyond our mortal grasp. We've already done it with robots of normal size (./article couple months back) as well as what IMHO is the more important development of evolutionary ones that can construct itself "mutations" or permutations of limbs and functional areas. Like any technology, what's to prevent us from replicating the method to a smaller scale?
You say "alot more resources". You have any idea how much resources it takes to construct nanos? If you do please share it. I can only give you an educated theory that if the nanos were self-replicating, then by definition that means they need only the raw materials and energy to do this. How much mass do you think a typical "installation" would be in a host? My guess is that in THEORY it would be negligible, no?
If there's anything that I can tell you with certainty is that if we've done something (self-replcation) in one place (robots) , we're are great at borrowing the methods and processes to apply it to something else (nanotech).
"Last one in is a rotten goblin!" - Kepp
The entire 'futuristic' view of nanotechnology is that nanotech will progress to the point of guided creation; e.g. input a design and they produce an item. With simple programming routines, the nanobots can be made to build more nanobots as needed. Once the processing capabilities of current processors have been utilized to allow 'fuzzy decision-making' by computers, e.g. provide an array of choices weighted against a set of inputs and allow the situation to dictate what the bot does, our ability to allow these bots to operate with less and less guidance will evolve. I cannot forsee that with the current understanding of nanotech, that this is where the world will end up. The concept promoted in Neal Stephenson's 'Diamond Age' may reflect a fairly accurate depiction; though possibly in a different manner, pure material will be supplied to the nanobots, and they will use it to construct items. I honestly can see this becoming reality within my lifetime, based on our current research progression in the fields of nanotechnology and quantum physics, the latter being necessary to develop a better understanding of the weak and strong atomic forces and how to break/establish bonds and channel the energy to good use. In this fashion, the laws of nature can be used to modify the positioning of subatomic particles which will make up the products produced.
Just some rambling thought for your consideration!
-cheezus_es_lard
I'm taking a course in nanomechanics this semester and the focus of most ongoing research is not really about nanobots or self replicating machines. In my opinion some of the most interesting outcomes of nanoscience are: -Materials with novel mechanical or electrical properties. -Cheap and small measurement instruments with more capabilities. (For exampe: A chemical or biochemical laboratory on a chip) The medical-nanobot stuff is just to get funding because people think is good to fund science if it will improve our health.
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.
Here's where I see this technology heading:
Somewhere in the next 5-10 years the Military will fund a project to use Nanotechnology to protect us from Terrorism. In fact, some of the work raytheon is already doing is just that.
15-20 years out commercial entities will be given access to this technology so that they can make a buck off of it. At this point, the media will begin to rabidly suckle at anything with the prefix "nano" attached to it.
20-25 years from now the economy will surge because everyone and their brother thinks that "the world is really about to change"
25-30 years from now people will notice that their human condition has not, in fact, changed.
30-35 years from now all nanotechnology will be produced overseas, and those involved stateside will have a hard time finding work. At this time, the military will fund a project to utilize quantum strings to defend us against time travelers.
wash, rinse, repeat
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.
Yes, I'm sure you know much more about the laws of physics than, say, someone with a PhD in Molecular Nanotechnology from MIT.
There are reputable scientists who argue against the most agressive nanotech postulates, but even they don't claim we won't build molecular systems that can produce copies of themselves in the forseeable future. They're just arguing that it will be restricted to producing a class of molecules rather than almost any possible molecule. In other words, from the consumer's point of view, they are splitting hairs.
Not quite. While the chemical properties of any atom are determined by the outer shell of electrons, those are controlled by the number of protons in the nucleus. (You're probably thinking of the recent Programmable Matter: The New Alchemy)
The only method of bulk transmutation used today is neutron bombardment. Ex: breeding Plutonium 239 from Uranium 238, or making any of the medical isotopes.
Nuclear fusion would be nice, but that hasn't reached scientific break-even yet, let alone engineering break-even.
"You've crossed my Line of Death!" "What? No! Where is it?" "Here in the fine print...."
I should have pointed out that I'm not including biotechnology as part of nanotechnology. Biotech is everything that nanotech is not: Self-Replicating, (for the most part) Easy to produce, and Extremly Dangerous. Don't get me wrong, I think we can achieve great things with Biotech and I think we should proceed with Biotech research as much as we have, if not much more. However, while Biotechnology and Nanotechnology are both suffieciently advanced technologies that deal with things primarily on a tiny scale, thier differences are enough for me to classify them as seperate things. It's arbitrary, but so am I. As for resources neccesary to produce nanomachines, quite alot are needed to produce them without self-replication, which was my point. This may change sometime in the future due to scientific progress (and I sincerely hope so) but that is how it stands as of now. While yes, we need to deal with the dangers of nanotechnology before they become actual issues, we must make sure to do so without hampering the advancement of nanotechnology as a whole. Many of the dangers which have been ascribed to nanotechnology should instead be ascribed to biotech, as well as some of the applications. Both require gentle care in the form of money and light restriction.
Nothing Dead Here.