Slashdot Mirror
The Issues of Nano-Safety
Ineffable 27 writes "Today's New York Times has an interesting article looking at some of the emerging research into the health and safety risks of nanotech and nanomaterials." Free reg. blah blah. It's a decent article, but it's the same type of questions that groups like The Foresight Institute have been thinking about for a long long time now.
To me, the most interesting part of any given technology are the cultural implications, especially as how with every advance in technology, our options become more manifest and manifold. (And if that last sentence didn't make sense, blame my cold.)
Stephenson's Diamond Age is a fascinating examination of this. Now, given that the book was written on a victorian framework (which shapes what issues are pondered) it is still an enjoyable read, and an even more enjoyable thought experiment into nanotech.
When people have the ability to build anything they want from the atom up, the only thing constraining us will be those constraints that our society dictates. (Everything else is merely requires sufficently talented engineers.) Unfortunatly, the dangerous aspects of nanotech also are only constrained by our society.
Worries about grey-goo scenarios and DNA plagues shouldn't stop us from researching nanotech -- if only for the reason that solutions to these problems can only be found through nanotechnological means.
Anyways, I digress -- for a fascinating study of nanotech, read the Diamond Age.
The surest way to stifle innovation is to demand that the innovator prove that the invention will cause no harm. As we all know, proving a negative is a daunting task and 'harm' is a nebulous concept. All articles like this do is spread FUD. Fear of the unknown, Uncertainty about the future, and doubt in the benefits of progress.
Before we start looking into the safety of nanotechhnology, I think the question of whether nanotech will ever be feasible should be addressed. Here are a few basic problems that I've yet to see any solutions for:
1. How is energy going to be supplied to the nanobots?
2. How are the nanobots going to be produced, economically?
3. How are they going to move (wheels, flying)?
I don't understand why there is so much emphasis on such a poorly-defined field of technology that has shown so little promise so far. The smaller you make things, the more difficult and expensive they are to produce. Nanotechnology seems to be just a convenient "magic" technology useful only for SF writers.
It seems a little early to worry about nano-bot safety when regular occupational workplace safety, especially with respect to smoking cigarettes and alcohol consumption issues, are still widely protested. In other words, you'll die of lung cancer before a miniature robot accidentally recombines your DNA.
stuff |
The article shows how companies look at the numbers, rather sad.
First.
No one has yet created a realistic test for the effects of inhaled nanoparticles; such a test could easily cost more than $1 million to design and carry out, toxicologists say.
Then.
the federal government's projection that sales of products based on nanotechnology will reach $1 trillion by 2015
That sounds fine and dandy, but I doubt without lots of major changes in goverance and distribution of power.
Lets just say tommorrow some researcher at [insert some amazing research facility] puts out a press release stating that they've found the key. They can assembler/disassemble on the atomic and molecular scale, the whole thing scales and they can control the whole thing reliably.
Firstly, do you think big business or government would ever let this technology get into the hands of Joe Average citizen?
The prospect that a citizen could in their home, with the proper compounds manufacture anything would scare the shit out of them.
Also, think of what it would do the economy.
What if, with my assembler and the plans I downloaded off the internet could assemble myself a Ferrari? The value of owning a Ferrari becomes nothing.
No more shipping, no more massive manufacturing.
I could download the blueprints and manufacture myself a book I wanted to read. Then when I'm done, I just throw the book back in the assembler and have it just disassemble it back into the base compounds. Download another book and use those compounds to manufature a new one.
Personally, I'd want one of these. This thing would be the ultimate recycler. Something like this would eclipse techniques like TDP for taking matter and coverting it back into its root atoms.
So, with that all said, you'd never have one of these in your home, and it's probably not for the reasons stated above. The government would be so scared that radicals of some kind would get their hands on this technology and use it to manufacture guns / explosives / etc.
So, yeah, I see this technolgy existing, I just don't ever see it in our hands. It'll be buried deeply in some manufacturing or recycling plant and it'll be licensed and heavily monitored.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
With a death penalty cap of 250K per person, a company can kill off 4 people at that price.
WHAT A BARGIN!
Actually, yes it is going to be quite some time in the future. Current "nanotechnology" relies almost entirely on processes developed for the semiconductor industry. It's great for creating objects stacked on top of each other in 2D, but when you're trying to make use of the technology to create even micro-scale mechanical devices (also known as MEMS, Micro Electro Mechanical Systems) it has some very severe limitations. For example, right now we can make great pressure sensors using MEMS, and some nifty fluidic devices, but no micro-scale "robot" of any type has yet been developed. And, without a massive paradigm shift away from Silicon, I doubt it will.
Further, all the negative hype about nanotech is in my opinion, totally undeserved. The smallest scale we could possibly create anything useful with is about on the order of a virus. And, nature has already shown us what something that size is supposed to be like (a virus). Can Electrical Engineers create something more complicated, deadly, or even useful than what Nature has had a few billion to cook up? I doubt it.
Nanotech is a buzzword in search of a technology in search of a market. Don't be concerned. (Not that it's not cool, it is what I do my research in, just ignore the hype).
You said a magic phrase there: "self-replicating"
It is unlikely that any nanobots we'll be dealing with in the forseeable future will be self-replicating. In fact, I think the opposite problem - how to keep the damn things functional long enough to do their job - will be the more prevelent one.
As such, the major issue facing nanobots is more likely to be analogous to the "space junk" problem (what do you do about large numbers of "dead" nanobots) than to be a "gray goo" or "runaway virus" problem.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Actually, you've got it backwards. It is impossible to prove something safe. In order to do so you have to prove that it has no dangerous properties whatsoever. The more useful test is to prove it dangerous. This is like our legal system, the decision is not innocent/not innocent(safe/not safe), it's guilty/not guilty (dangerous/not dangerous).
There is no product or substance that is 'safe'. Water drowns, oxygen burns (or makes other things burn), helium... that should be safe, it just makes your voice high and squeaky... unless there is too much of it and it displaces the oxygen (oops).
Everything has problems and causes risks, we have to avaluate those risks and mitigate them as best we can. We cannot ignore every advancement because it may be dangerous.