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I, Nanobot — Bionanotechnology is Coming
Maria Williams writes "Alan H. Goldstein, inventor of the A-PRIZE, and popular science columnist,
says:
Scientists are on the verge of breaking the carbon barrier — creating artificial life and changing forever what it means to be human. And we're not ready...
Nanofabricated animats may be infinitesimally tiny, but their electrons will be exactly the same size as ours — and their effect on human reality will be as immeasurable as the universe. Like an inverted SETI program, humanity must now look inward, constantly scanning technology space for animats, or their progenitors. The first alien life may not come from the stars, but from ourselves." Yes it's an older article, but it's a fairly quiet sunday today.
Sounds like someone at the lab has a hot date lined up......
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Long article is LOOOONG
I think this guy may be taking himself a little too seriously:
"So why listen to the voice of one who is not Ishmael, not Cassandra, not even Ralph Nader? Because I can tell you something that no one else can. I can tell you the exact moment when Homo sapiens will cease to exist. And I can tell you how the end will come. I can show you the exact design of the device that will bring us down. I can reveal the blueprint, provide the precise technical specifications."
Been there, done that in a Showtime TV series cancelled three years ago.
I for one welcome our new nanobot overlords. (Heck, maybe they'll be able to give me some pointers on soldering these SOT-23 circuits...
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
I read this book in middle school. Isn't he supposed to go searching for intelligent life inside of cellular mitochindrion?
I can't believe I managed to pull that reference out of my butt. Go me.
Raging in an online forum won't do anything for the world around you. To see change, you must take action.
Yeah, I know superconductors have found a few uses in a few niche fields, but I remember very clearly how we were told that superconductivity would change all our lives... and that was almost 20 years ago.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Hmm, (Microsoft bullshit protocol)? Perhaps use %nbsp; (No bullshit protocol) instead next time.
Ever notice how all theese groups decide to look for Alien life somewhere on Earth ?
I think the movie Alien fucked up any chance we had of ever walking on an alien world.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
We broke the carbon barrier back when we discovered fermentation. We changed what it means to be human when we discovered agriculture.
Check out his "NOTES AND REFERENCES". :)
He's referencing his own work (2 of the 5 referenced), and the dates are in 2006 (with a Wired article from 2005).
This seems more like an attempt to get people to buy his newly published book than anything else. And as evidenced in your clip, there's a bit of megalomania there.
The author mentions K. Eric Drexler and his book Engines of Creation, but I'm wondering if he actually read it. TFA says "Folks like Ray Kurzweil, Bill Joy and Eric Drexler have raised some alarms, but they are too dazzled by the complexity and power of human cybersystems, devices and networks to see it coming. Well, I took Engines of Creation to be one great big warning almost from start to finish about the same kind of thing this article talks about, so what am I missing? He's invented some new words for stuff, but other than that...
Oh no... it's the future.
I wonder if this new nano-population will be debating ID on nano-dot in a billion years.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Youve got a little bionanao stuck in your what now?
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Yes it's an older article, but it's a fairly quiet sunday today.
Darth Vader: Do they have a code clearance?
Admiral Piett: It's an older code, sir, but it checks out. I was about to clear them.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
... vacations are canceled until morale improves.
A pretentious, overheated, paranoid dupe, at that. :) But since we're here:
Life will almost certainly arise from Ai (Ai=artificial intelligence), but it won't be "nano" anything. My feeling as an Ai researcher is that we're already well past the computing threshold for Ai/AL (AL=artificial life.) Ai will always equal AL, though the reverse is not implied. A typical desktop today seems to me to have more than enough power to "come to life." What we are missing is the algorithm, no more.
My reasoning for this is as follows:
The complexity of the part of the brain that we use to think is not as high as commonly supposed. Much of what is in there handles what are really (to a computer) mundane things; pattern recognition (sound, light, touch), movement, of which none of which are components of intelligence, per se (ex, a blind, deaf immobile person is still intelligent.) A computer's sensorium can simply be a text stream; and in this realm, pattern recognition, retrieval and communications are relatively natural to it, and extremely high powered in comparison to how we do the same thing. Likewise, a computer has no autonomic system to regulate, no balance to keep, no hungers to assuage. We know very well how to do associative memory, and we know how to make those associations carry associations of their own; I'm talking of the coloration of memory with any set or range of characteristics one might imagine or preconceive into being. This stuff is all relatively easy. Processing it and making sense of it, that's really the issue. We don't have that.
But: Processing isn't likely to be a hard problem. I say this because the human mind (and all the other minds we are aware of) achieve what they do with massive parallelism of very simple structures. Parallel processing is no different than serial processing, in terms of what it can and cannot do in the end. Speed-wise, yes, parallelism is very powerful, but computationally, it is no more effective than going one step at a time and accumulating results. Further, there is no parallel structure that cannot be emulated or represented with serial processing of those structures in a manner that stages results to the appropriate level of parallelism. Processing is, instead, probably an esoteric problem, in that the way it works is not obvious to our higher-level or aggregate way of considering information, memory, and reason.
Some have argued that because of the massive parallelism in the brain, creating something comparable will require a huge amount of resources that we do not yet have. There is a basic misconception at work here, and it is a critical one: If, as they argue, your desktop is not fast enough to compute serially what the brain does in parallel in the same time frame, this in no way undermines the idea that your desktop can still do the computation. In other words, If you ask me a question, and I give you an answer you deem to be intelligent within, say, 10 seconds of reflection; and you type the same question to your presumptive Ai, and it gives you essentially the same answer in say, an hour, that answer is no less intelligent for being more slowly produced. Intelligence isn't about speed - it never has been. Intelligence is about the nature of the question, the nature of the conversation, the nature of the reflection.
The day that someone comes up with an algorithm that produces answers of a nature that we can begin to argue about how well they compare - or exceed - the human capacity, will be the same day that the hardware companies begin to examine the software and build hardware optimized to make those algorithms faster, compile better, etc. Though this will in no way make anything more intelligent, it will make the intelligence easier to converse with for us, right up until the point when the computer is faster than we are. At that point, again, it will be important for us to remember that speed isn't the issue, and never was. Otherwis
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The moment I caught the word "progenitor" in the article.... I couldn't stop thinking about Star Trek.
Oddly, it would seem it was a better waste of my time.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
So, assuming I actually understood the article, it means that we will be able to create nanobiobots literally capable of mutation. I'm not sure how self-replication will work, but if it somehow does, we could potentially create a very deadly little bugger. Nevermind that as there's medical research in something cool there's *always* military research to go along with it. So making nice nanobiobots will go hand-in-hand with making mean ones. Wow I want to write a Superman comicbook right now.
I like basketball!!1!
Imagine artificial nanobiobots with insanity! They would go about and do insane things, really wicked.
Like complete random things. I tell you, you would not know what hit you.
And neither would they.
Be scared!
Ray Kurzweil has written YAB (yet another book) on a similar subject. It is quite an interesting read about how evolution in the universe is an exponential curve, and that we are just on the cusp, or knee, of it going up. In there, he has pages and pages of supporting data relating to nanotech and bionanotech. It is a good read.
We are very close to having strong AI, nanotech in our bodies, and greatly enhanced information sharing / intelligence - all the research is well under way with positive results thus far.
http://tinyurl.com/ygmtxw (amazon.com)
He dismisses rather pompously very smart people :
.
,due to multitude of specialized mechanisms and systems which allow them to get better access to resources ,better combat external treats , etc .And now this guy says just because we make one artificial new life form it will dominate instantly? -having to fight with all the existing lifeforms ,which became better adapted to current environment over the course of hundreds of millions of years?
;) ) driven by chemistry can overcome combined intelligence of super beings/creators (from this lifeform' point of view) such as the scientists which created it? Everybody remembers from school that bacteria/virus/whatever primitive organisms can potentially cover whole earth in thick layers in record time, this guys seems missed the part why it never happens - conditions around it are never favorable for that to happen , and more primitive organism is - less tools it has to change its conditions to its own liking
,and we become even more proficient at this ,not less so.
,failing to understand that this is the most powerful engine on earth. Not the microorganism , note the insects, nor reptiles, nor mammals, nor anything else out of living realms has comparable power on earth to what our civilization has. Human civilization in the sheer ability to manipulate environment far exceeds anything " natural evolution" created so far .The ultimate power of life is the power to change environment around itself ,power to manipulate matter and energy to its own liking.
,higher level you go you see organisms being able to create those necessary elements out of other elements ,and when you go even higher you start seeing more advance of its kind .Till you come to this bright flash of light ( from evolutionary scale of time point of view ) marking the time when evolution of technology started ,driven by first intelligence capable of doing so (hum
They don't realize what evolution is. They have come to the problem from artificial intelligence, or systems analysis, or mathematics, or astronomy, or aerospace engineering. Folks like Ray Kurzweil, Bill Joy and Eric Drexler have raised some alarms, but they are too dazzled by the complexity and power of human cybersystems, devices and networks to see it coming. They think the power of our tools lies in their ever-increasing complexity -- but they are wrong.
The biotech folks just don't get it either. People like Craig Venter and Leroy Hood are too enthralled with the possibilities inherent in engineering biology to get it
Failing to understand himself the very basics of evolutionary biology - little primitive nano -organisms (viruses, bacteria, single cell organisms) (even artificially created ones) are not as grave dangers as he paints precisely because they are primitive. Those primitive forms of life dominated earth and more complex organisms took over because there are inherent evolutionary benefits of being complex -if it wasn't so more complex forms of life would never evolve
Complex lifeforms such dominated all primitive lifeforms over the course of millions years, due to their inherent capability to adapt better to more varied environment and conditions
That the simple cellular automata (forgive me the pun
This was true for "blind "evolution and will be even more true for human governed one -as we have and advantage over all other lifeforms - we can change its course the way we want with our tools and technologies
He dismisses ave of prominent futurologists for complex human created systems
Primitive life forms can only manipulate what exist around them: at the level of molecular biology everything is simple chemistry -dependent on presence of particular elements:
It's true that a blind person cannot see visual patterns, but this doesn't mean a blind person cannot visualize patterns. Building a mental image of a pattern that fits one's observations is a basic element of intelligence. In that way, the visual cortex may still be used by a blind person in building a model of the world around him, even if the inputs to that model come from non-visual clues.
Of course, many of the brain's neurons may be used for tasks not related to the kind of abstract reasoning that we call intelligence, but so do many of the transistors in a CPU chip. There are caches and pipelines and what else (I'm not an expert in modern CPUs), but what matters in the end is how fast you can do calculations, where by "calculations" I mean both arithmetic and logical operations. This and how fast you can move data to and from memory is what determines how fast a CPU is.
I once did a comparison between my rather old desktop CPU, a Pentium4 2.4 GHz, and compared it to the human brain. Let's assume, just as a raw estimate, that every neuron in the brain has 1000 inputs and one output whose value is derived from a sum of each input multiplied by a weight. Let's say there are 100 billion neurons, each of which can do 100 calculations/second. Multiplying those numbers, we get that 10**16 calculations/second are needed. I have clocked my CPU using assembly language for a FIR filter (which basically does the same thing a neuron simulation needs) and the top value I got was 6 billion operations/second. This means my desktop PC is equivalent to six-tenths of a million of a human brain. The theoretical top value for a 2.4GHz P4 would be 9.6 billion operations/second, still short by a factor of a million or so.
I feel in a rather instinctive way that this value is way too small to be equivalent in any way to a human brain. If a millionth of a human brain could achieve intelligence, then we could have intelligent animals with a brain weighing 1.5 milligrams, a size that's probably smaller than the brain of any mammal, bird, or reptile.
Venture capital solicitation: just change the buzzwords.
Yeah, I know semiconductors have found a few uses in a few niche fields, but I remember very clearly how we were told that semiconductivity would change all our lives... and that was almost 60 years ago.
Nanotechnology is the latest "craze" in research. I'm sure there will be neat new things brought about by this technology wave. However, maturity brings a certain perspective. Do you remember these fashionable research topics: grid computing (early 2000s), high-temp superconductivity (early 90s), GaAs CPUs (early 90s), and neural networks (late 80s). I remember lots of hype regarding each of these research topics.
Electrons the same size as ours?! WE'RE DOOMED!
As examples:
Peter Watts, Starfish, 1999. He posits the existence of a type of life that would out-compete anything in our 3.5 billion years old biosphere. As a character says:
(Watts also has made his 2006 stand-alone novel Blindsight available under CC. The reviews are right- this is one of the best hard SF books to come out this decade. "[he] has taken the core myths of the First Contact story and shaken them to pieces. The result is a shocking and mesmerizing performance, a tour-de-force of provocative and often alarming ideas. It is a rare novel that has the potential to set science fiction on an entirely new course." Makes a great gift for anyone who reads hard science fiction. (disclaimers- none, I don't know the guy, but I do want him able to afford to write much more like this.)
Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle, 1963. Ice 9 is the simplest of molecules which will out-crystallize / out-compete anything that life today uses.
Goldstein's worries are just Watts' B-life (or a slightly more complex Ice-9) plus the belief Goldstein can build it.
I would hate for their electrons to be different from ours...
Maybe I'm just ignorant, but how many different 'types' of electrons are there?
The fact that he supports Bill Joy and Richard Smalley pretty well defines this idiot.
Smalley is a wannabe who came late to nanotech and decided to use his higher conventional scientific status to try to take over the field from Drexler. He failed, despite this guy's opinion.
Joy is simply incapable of rational reasoning.
And this guy's paranoid fantasies about nanobots "spontaneously impregnating" each other with technology to become an artificial life form - and one that dooms all other life in addition, despite millions of years of evolutionary adaptation on this planet to just about every conceivable hazard - is just drivel.
Sure, nanotech could be designed to destroy all life - but it would have to be DESIGNED to do so. The odds of it happening by chance are so low as to be not worth considering. Sure, badly designed nanotech - and there WILL be badly designed nanotech, we CAN count on that - COULD cause massive medical issues on a par with a deadly virus such as the flu virus in the early 20th century or something like Ebola. So what? You take the risk and you try to prevent it. Nanotech offers many technical options for inhibiting this sort of thing. If the IT industry will get off its ass and develop some AI-based engineering programs that check for stupid engineering mistakes, the entire engineering industry would be better off as well.
What IS going to happen is that Transhumanists will use nanotech to transform themselves into a superior species And that's where the threat is going to come from as monkey-ass humans follow their usual primate instincts to try to suppress the Transhumans - and unlike the Star Trek shows and Terminator movies, the humans will get their asses kicked trying - at least until the Transhumans have improved enough that they can just ignore the chimps and go about their business anyway.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
So this guy has a PHD in Biochemestry? Where does he get his facts??
He states that the human body has a potential of thousands of Volts. In reality it seldom reaches 1 volt. (A potential of 1/2 volt over a distance of a 50 angstroms is not a potential of millions of volts, it may be high in terms of Volts per Meter, but over any larger distance, it just dissapears. That's why we can't power pacemakers or laptop computers off your neural energy. Zero power is just zero power, no matter how clever you think your argument is.) He states that there are strong similarities between Carbon and Silicon chemistry. Yes, but there are also energy differences that are profound. Reality, there are very few living creatures that can use Silicon. Most of those that can are bacteria, and they use it only to create a shell or frame.
A little reality here, there are good reasons to believe that the first engineered bio machines will not be too greatly different than the ones we've already been living with. We call them bacteria. Control is a problem. It has been a problem for a very long time.
The article is just an attempt to scare people with little knowlege of the underlying science. The Author appears to be ignorant of basic physics or chemistry. His biology may or may not be suspect. I don't know that area as well. If this is the best that the critics of nanobot research can do, then they should be doomed to failure.
Rank superstition and scary fiction are a very poor way to make technical policy.
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
I'm tired of the fact that intelligent people, such as yourself, continue to dream up these lame prophecies of Ai's "coming to life". Naturally, I assume you are a big fan of Isaac Asimov or Vernor Vinge.
You guys blather on about how a bunch of abstractions processed in a computer could result in life. But can you not see that life happens in reality, before the abstraction process even takes place?
Life creates the very abstractions you are thinking about. You create them, when you think them. Abstractions don't create you, and abstractions don't create life.
The real question is, why, then, is an intelligent person like yourself so convinced that they could, even offering predictions of exactly how it will happen? The simple answer is that you are a computer programmer with an ego to feed. That's all there is to it.
Pardon my bluntness, but this is the only reply which is telling you the truth. All the other replies are from other programmers with their own egos to feed. They just want to argue with your set of predictions because it clashes with their own. It never goes anywhere and, in fact, it never can.
Excuse me if I'm wrong, but I was somehow under the impression that all electrons are the same size :/
Anyone can "stand up for what they believe", but it takes a very brave individual to change what they believe. - Loundry
When I was a student we called that biochemistry, or biotechnology. Even in 1989 we already worked on the nano scale. We just didn't mention it because it was so obvious. Then the suits started throwing money at everything that was called 'nano', so now everybody who wants money for research calls whatever (s)he is doing nano.
-- Cheers!
First law of nanorobotics:
- I will not replicate myself.
Because we wouldn't want the earth to become grey goo.
Newsflash: there won't be any nano(ro)bots anytime soon (if ever). We are not even close.
Furthermore, it has been argued that for technical and financial reasons building self-replicating machines doesn't make much sense (C. Phoenix, E. Drexler, Safe exponential manufacturing, Nanotechnology 15, 869-874 (2004))
This reminds me of Greg Bear's "Blood Music", lots of stuff by John Varley, Bruce Sterling's (?) "Distraction", and Marget Atwood's "Oryx & Crake"... Anyone else?
60 years ago we were told that nuclear energy (or to comply with the buzzword thingy: atoms) would change our lives, not much mention about computers. After all, the world would only need 4 of them, right?
The point is that buzzwords don't often live up to their hype. The overuse of the prefix "nano" is just an example.
"OK, Alan Goldstein, I will not call you Ishmael. But somewhere along your road to Melville, you took a detour into speculative fiction, because that is clearly the genre of your Salon article, I, Nanobot." More here