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May 20, 2002
Nanotechnology -- Good or Evil?
If you haven't heard about nanotechnology by now, don't worry, you will. Nanotechnology is the science of developing tools, materials and machines with atom-by-atom precision. A nanometer, for starters, is a billionth of a meter -- bigger than a water molecule, smaller than DNA. With the technology to manipulate the basic building blocks of matter we will develop revolutionary new applications across a variety of industries.
Imagine, for example, what a material 100 times as strong and 1/6th the weight of steel would do to the aerospace or automotive industries, or to our everyday lives. As existing semiconductor technologies reach their physical limitations, atomic scale manufacturing is the next frontier in electronics. Biotech, which already deals, in a sense, with machines and materials at the molecular level, is another area that will be profoundly influenced by nanotechnology.
In fact, as the Internet changed virtually every industry to some extent, nanotechnology may do the same. The shift to nanotechnology is not just smaller, but qualitatively different and may be to matter what the transition from analog to digital was to information. But enough hype--there has been much of that already and it presents one of the first challenges to the industry.
The visions of nanotechnology, far outpacing implementation, have the power to awe and alarm, and it has prompted some to urge putting on the brakes. Yet while nanotechnology gathers steam, such apprehension is premature. Nanotech is just now taking baby steps out of the world of science and academia and entering the world of commercialization.
Things are moving fast, however. Nearly 500 companies are researching and developing nanotechnology, including such behemoths as IBM, Motorola, Hewlett Packard, Lucent, Hitachi, Mitsubishi, NEC, Corning, Dow Chemical, and 3M as well as scores of start-ups, looking to raise money from nearly 75 different venture capital firms who have made bets on nanotech. A financial bubble, while not in the immediate future, will come eventually.
The "nano" prefix has already been glued on to the names of dozens of start-ups that hope to catch the wave, as many dot coms did in the late 1990s, and, industry insiders are quick to point out, some of these companies aren't even nanotech companies at all. Perhaps we will see many nano-bubbles over time, as has been the case with biotech over the last couple of decades.
The early thinking about nanotechnology started with physicist Richard Feynman, the Nobel laureate who told us in 1959 that there was "plenty of room at the bottom." Perhaps the best known visionary of nanotech, Eric Drexler of the Foresight Institute, wrote Engines of Creation in the 1980s, which impressed many leading technologists and sparked the imagination of many a science fiction buff. But it was Bill Clinton, of all people, who created a flurry of activity when he announced the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) in 2000.
This initiative created an alluring budget ($270 million) of government funding for nanotechnology and many existing projects were simply reclassified as nanotech. NNI spending has grown to $600 million this year and President Bush has proposed nearly $700 million in his budget for 2003. This money has gone to 15 government agencies, such as the National Institute of Health, Department of Energy, DARPA, Department of Defense, and NASA. Much of it has ended up in universities.
While the NNI certainly did not create nanotechnology, it has advanced the timing and intensity of interest and investment in nanotech, and many states have followed suit with large funding initiatives of their own, hoping to become the home of Nano Valley.
In addition to the economic importance, there is a sense from some in government that investing in nanotechnology is a matter of national security-as nuclear technology was. Dr. Meyya Meyyappan, Director of the NASA Ames Center for Nanotechnology, points out that this may be the first major technology realm in which the US doesn't have a sizeable lead, but rather is on par with the aggressive government investment in nanotech in Europe and Asia. Large corporations welcome the government funding particularly because they believe that university programs in nanotech are essential to train their future work force, which is currently a substantial obstacle to growth of the industry. However, some entrepreneurs worry that this comes at a hefty price as they must license the technologies from the universities that develop them.
In some cases, entrepreneurs must cobble together their companies by licensing intellectual property from many universities, and the costs can be prohibitive to new ventures. This is not a problem limited to nanotechnology, of course, and exists in most areas of tech transfer from universities to the commercial sector-technology areas such as semiconductors, telecommunications, storage, medical devices, drugs, gene therapies, energy sources, and, perhaps most significantly, biotech.
However, while political forces are moving nanotechnology in the forward direction for the moment, it is quite possible that this relationship will become strained. As with all powerful technologies, nanotech has the potential to be quite dangerous.
The best known Chicken Little -- or Paul Revere, depending on your perspective -- is the brilliant Bill Joy, inventor of Berkely Unix, co-Founder of Sun Microsystems, and key figure in the development of Java. Joy, now Sun's chief scientist, published his concerns in a famous Wired article in April 2000 and is writing a book on the subject. In it he argues that we are making a Faustian bargain by developing the power of nanotechnology and run "the risk that we might destroy the biosphere on which all life depends." Joys clumps genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics together into GNR, a technological axis of evil, if you will.
He envisions the evolution of a new self-assembling, self-replicating species that will threaten the very existence of the humans or produce some dystopian middle ground. One only has to imagine a nanovirus, specifically engineered or self-evolved, which could do the trick. Joy quotes artificial intelligence pioneer Ray Kurzweil as giving us a "better than even chance of making it through."
To avoid this fate, Joy calls for "relinquishment: to limit development of the technologies that are too dangerous, by limiting our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge." This comes as a fairly radical suggestion from a man who has spent his life in the pursuit of knowledge. It's not clear how Joy believes this should happen, but he suggests that "if we could agree, as a species, what we wanted, where we were headed, and why, then we would make our future much less dangerous-then we might understand what we can and should relinquish."
And here is why, if you haven't heard of nanotechnology yet, you will. Sometime, coming soon to a global summit near you, nanotech will be the hip new thing to protest, following in the steps of items such as genetically modified foods. But nanotech's potential to scare is broader than the neo-luddite left, with its potential to create new (potentially intelligent) species, it will also vex the "human dignity" right, who have been so vociferous in their opposition to stem cell and cloning research.
Nanotech packs something for everyone to worry about. Yet, while Joy's concerns are worth considering, and his call for discussion appropriate, his quest for relinquishment is not.
The opinions of brilliant technologists notwithstanding, it is not at all clear that we are headed for Armageddon. And if we are, the path to dystopia has always been at the hands of humans bent on control, using technology as their tool, not the other way around. Joy's solution requires a global unanimity impractical today and very likely impossible ever. Even if "good" scientists held back from certain areas of research, this may simply put that knowledge exclusively in the hands of the "bad" scientists who may use it for destruction, with no one capable of countering them. Knowledge among virtuous may be the only thing to protect us from the wicked.
There is the chance that the evil potential of nanotech is unleashed unwittingly by those with good intentions. But given the amount of introspection on this topic (The Foresight Institute, for example, has developed a list of self-governing principles in the development of nanotechnology), it is far more likely that it will be evil that will beget evil. With that being the case, who knows what virtues nanotech could bring to the world in the intervening decades before it can become a danger? Joy seeks to determine for the rest of us that the costs of this technology may outweigh the benefits, but it is simply impossible for one individual to tell whether the reverse may be the case.
Despite the horror stories, the development of technologies, though not without costs, has overwhelmingly proved a net positive force for the state of humanity. While human suffering continues, as a global society we live longer, healthier, and wealthier lives, thanks not exclusively, but in great part due to innovation. Thomas Malthus was wrong, and while Joy or some other neo-Malthusian may be right in the future, history suggests that the surer path to dystopia is not to pursue knowledge, but to ban it.
For more on nanotech, check out this piece in InformationWeek and for A LOT more on nanotech, check out the Nanotechnology Opportunities Report.
I think that the fundamental issue here is the assessment of the potential nano-tech risk. Is Joy a chicken little or a Paul Revere? Joy, correctly or incorrectly, views the risk as the ultimate risk to humanity, since its potential could wipe out our biosphere. Perhaps nano-tech (and more to the point GNR) poses more of a threat than nukes or anything else that man-kind has created in its history.
Your discussions of economics, knowledge pursuit vs. regulation and good vs. evil are interesting, but they are (distantly) secondary to the real issue regarding nano-tech (GNR), which is risk assessment.
You simply don't view the risk as Joy does. Before dismissing the dangers raised by Joy (and others), I think that you should focus on whether the gray-goo doomsday scenarios invisioned by Joy are at all likely. Address the argument on Joy's terms, and then move on to the analysis you discuss in your post if you conclude that Joy is a chicken little rather than a Paul Revere.
Side Note: You state that "While human suffering continues, as a global society we live longer, healthier, and wealthier lives, thanks not exclusively, but in great part due to innovation."
Just who is the "we" to whom you are referring? This statement represents a narrow and western perspective on the world. Life expectancy in many parts of the world is actually DECREASING (largely due to aids), and the gains reflected in life expectancy charts are largely the result of a reduction in infant mortality.
"Unfortunately, AIDS has taken its toll in Africa, Asia and even Latin America by reducing life expectancy in 34 different countries (26 of them in Africa)." (quote from following link: http://geography.about.com/library/weekly/aa042000a.htm
Whether Joy will turn out to be right or whether he will turn out to be wrong is actually fairly academic to the point I'm making here. I think most, even Joy, would agree that it is far from certain what will or may happen--the how and when especially. Perhaps this will be our doom, or perhaps it will come in a thousand different ways. This can be debated by really smart people forever. The real question is do you move this from the realm of scientific inquiry to the political realm, in which politicians and bureaucrats will set conclusive policy based on these theories? Are you sure that the problem can be adequately understood, that we even have enough information to understand the problem, that the remedies will also be understood, that the remedies won't cause more problems in the end that they will solve, and that the remedies, which will be espoused and implemented by humans with individual motivations, will truly serve some notion of public good, and not the good of the folks espousing and implementing? This theory is sufficiently complex--it's like saying you can predict what the weather will be 100 years from now (wait, people think we can do that, but this is for another discussion...) and know eaxactly how to change it, weighing properly all the costs and benefits. My point is this: I beoieve it is a practical impossibility to come up with a policy solution that actually has more of a chance of making the problem better not worse, and the mere fact transfering power on these issues to political sphere is a near certain, short term risk. Simply: it wold be a disaster to allow politicians to regulate innovation by demogaguing about incredibly complex, long term problems that even the smartest folks can't predict with any level of certainty. It's lovely to think that we can solve these problems with enough academic thought and study, the the PRACTICAL consequences of shifting power on these issues to the political sphere is that innovation, and freedom, will suffer, and the only guarenteed beneficiaries will be the politicians pandering to special interests.
As to your side note, I am aware of the terrible AIDS epidemic still ravaging parts of the world. It is a tragedy of enormous proportions. However, I stand by what I said: "While human suffering continues, as a global society we live longer, healthier, and wealthier lives, thanks not exclusively, but in great part due to innovation." The "we" I referred to was the whole world. It is not a "narrow and western perspective on the world" to make this statement, it is in fact the broadest of all perspectives, because what I said is in fact true for the globe as a whole. I never said it was universally true--or true for every person or every society. Sadly there are and probably will always be areas in which things are actually getting worse. But the point I was making is that innovation is to credit in great part for the gains the human species have made over the ages (would you rather live in Africa today or 100 years ago? Or 1000 years ago?) The AIDS epidemic isn't a counter-example to this point, and in fact it is innovation, such as drugs and forms of birth control, that are helping to combat this problem, while dysfuntional political systems are contributing greatly to the problem in the first place.