Accelerating Future

Like the Lifeboat Foundation, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists is an organization formed to address catastrophic technological risks. In catastrophic risk management, vision and foresight are essential. You take at technological, social, and political trends which are happening today - for example, steps towards mechanical chemistry, increasing transparency, or civil atomic programs - and brainstorm with as many experts as possible about what these trends indicate about what is coming 5, 10, or 20 years down the road. Because catastrophic risk management is a long-term enterprise, one where countermeasures are ideally deployed before a threat has even materialized, the further and more clearly you try to see into the future, the better.

Traditionally, The Bulletin has focused on the risk from nuclear warfare. Lately, they have expanded their attention to all large-scale technological risks, including global warming and future risks from emerging technologies. However, the language and claims used on their website show that the organization’s members are only just beginning to get informed about the emerging technologies, and the core of their awareness still lies with the nuclear issue.

From The Bulletin’s statement regarding their decision to move the clock 5 minutes to midnight, from the “emerging technologies” section specifically:

The emergence of nanotechnology - manufacturing at the molecular or atomic level - presents similar concerns, especially if coupled with chemical and biological weapons, explosives, or missiles. Such combinations could result in highly destructive missiles the size of an insect and microscopic delivery systems for dangerous pathogens.

“Highly destructive missiles the size of an insect”? Depressingly, statements like this are a red flag that the authors and fact-checkers at The Bulletin are poorly informed about nanotechnology and molecular manufacturing. To my knowledge, no one in the entire defense research industry has ever proposed creating highly destructive missiles the size of an insect. Highly destructive missiles the size of an insect are impossible for the same reason that meals in a pill are impossible - chemical bonds only let you pack so much energy into a given space. We cannot improve the energy density of explosives like we can improve the speed of computers or the resolution of satellite imagery. There can be incremental improvements, yes, but suggesting that nanotechnology has something to do with highly destructive missiles the size of insects is not just dubious from the point of view of physics, but particularly embarassing because it seems to have been made up from scratch, and was missed by everyone in the organization that reviewed the statement.

The general phrasing of the statement makes it seem like the scientists that wrote it are still stuck in the way of thinking that says “molecular manufacturing has to do with molecules, and molecules are small, so the products of molecular manufacturing will be small”. This is also the bias frequently seen displayed by the general media, although early products based on nanotechnology (not molecular manufacturing), including stainless pants and sunscreen, also subtly direct the popular perception of nanotech. It’s natural to think that nanotechnology, and therefore, molecular manufacturing, means small. However, this natural tendency is flawed. We should recall that the world’s largest organisms, up to 6,600 tons in weight, were manufactured by the molecular machines called ribosomes.

Molecular manufacturing (MM) would greatly boost manufacturing throughput and lower the cost of large products. While some associate MM with smallness, it is better thought of in connection with size and grandeur. Although microscopic killing machines built by MM will definitely become a risk by 2015-2020, the greatest risk will come from the size, performance, and sheer quantity of products. Because a nanofactory would need to be able to output its own weight in product in less than a 12 or so hours or it wouldn’t have been developed in the first place (scaling up from a single molecular manipulator to many trillions requires 33 or so doublings - which could take a long time if the product cycle is not measured in hours), these factories, given raw materials and energy, could produce new factories at an exponential rate. Assuming a doubling time of 12 hours, a 100 kg-size tabletop nanofactory could be used to produce 819,200 kg worth of nanofactory in only a week. As long as the nanofactories can support their own weight and be supplied with adequate matter and energy, they can be made almost arbitrarily large. Minimal labor would be necessary because the manufacturing components are so small, they must be automated to work at all. Regulations and structural challenges from excess height can be circumvented by fabricating nanofactories that are long and wide rather than tall and fragile. Once created, these factories could be programmed to produce whatever products are technologically possible with the tools at hand - at the very least, products at least as sophisticated as the nanofactories themselves. Unscrupulous governments could use the technology to mass produce missiles, helicopters, tanks, and entirely new weapons, as long as their engineers are capable of designing diamondoid versions of these products. Their rate of production, and quality of hardware, would outclass that of non-nano-equipped nations by many orders of magnitude.

Because unregulated, exponentially replicating molecular manufacturing units would create a severe threat to global security, it seems prudent to regulate them with care. Restrictions should be placed on what products can be manufactured and in what quantity and quality. Just as permits and inspections are required to operate industrial machinery, restrictions should be placed on industrial-scale molecular manufacturing. In some cases, preexisting regulatory infrastructure will be sufficient. In others, we’ll need to augment or expand the purview of historical regulations and customize them to address the specific challenges that MM represents.

Further Reading:

30 Essential Nanotechnology Studies
Lifeboat Foundation NanoShield
Nanotechnology Category on Accelerating Future

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I strongly support the idea that regulations and ethics agreements should be adopted as universally as possible in biotechnology, because the danger is very great. However, it bugs me when religious bioethicists use a secular tone to win other scientists over to their point of view. That’s what Dr. Nancy Jones has been doing lately, with a press release that appeared on Eurekalert:

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. — The time is ripe for scientific organizations to adopt codes of ethics, according to a scientist and bioethicist from Wake Forest University School of Medicine in the current issue of Science and Engineering Ethics.

“Medical practice and human subject research is influenced by the Hippocratic tradition,” said Nancy L. Jones, Ph.D., “but no similar code of ethics has been formalized for the life and biomedical sciences. Like the Hippocratic oath, a code of ethics for the life sciences can provide a continual standard to shape the ethical practice of science.”

But Jones points to a more far reaching impact of scientific activities. “Scientific prowess claims to not only predict our future, cure, or destroy people, and control evolution, but more portentously reframe what it means to be human.”

Scientific prowess not only claims - it delivers. Religious bioethicists like the idea of using science to heal surface problems, but want the general cycle of life to remain as it is, eschewing human enhancement. Transhumanists like myself cautiously support enhancement. But unlike most transhumanists, I see a profound danger in all transhumanist technologies, and think that transhumanists should more often consider selective relinquishment, or at the very least, selective development which boosts safe applications while supressing unsafe applications.

Nancy Jones is part of the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity, the bioconservative answer to the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. In an article on the CBHD site, “Genetics, Biotechnology, and the Future”, Jones writes,

The genetics and genomics revolution has at its core information and techniques that can be used to change humanness itself as well as the concepts of what it means to be human. The age-old human fantasies of the mythical chimeras of the ancients, supernatural intelligence, wiping disease from human inheritance, designing a better human being, the fountain of youth, and even immortality now have biotechnical credence in the theoretical promises of genetics and genetic engineering. Not only can humanity’s collective genetic inheritance be shaped by selecting which embryos are allowed to develop via pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, but genetic engineering, the availability of the human embryo for experimentation, and combining genes from many species require only sufficient imagination to catalyze the designing of a new humanity.

Religious bioethicists are keenly aware of advances in biotechnology, because of the “yuck” factor, but few of them recognize that it is cybernetics that will impact us most profoundly in the coming decades, not biotechnology. For more on this, see John Smart’s insightful “Performance Limitations on Engineered Biological Systems” and Al Fin’s “Limitations to Biology”. For the most part, the future is nano, not bio. (Actually it’s cogno, but it’s better for more people to be thinking nano than bio, when considering 7+ year timeframes.)

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See more at Nanorex’s website and Damian Allis’ website.

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Lifeboat Foundation, one of the most important organizations of the early 21st century, was recently mentioned briefly in the Wall Street Journal article “Colonize the Moon” (subscription required) by our Scientific Advisory Board member William E. Burroughs. Burroughs proposes using the Moon as a backup drive for civilization. His organization, known as ARC, was absorbed into Lifeboat not too long ago. By working together, we’ll have a better chance of achieving our goal - ensuring that the human species survives these crucial next decades. Here is the relevant excerpt from the article:

It was for that reason that a few individuals, myself included, started a group called the Alliance to Rescue Civilization (ARC) several years ago. Its purpose was to start an archive on the moon that would be a continuously updated international record of our civilization. That way, if a major catastrophe happens, the record would survive. Keeping a record on the moon (and perhaps at one of the poles on this planet) would be like backing up a computer’s hard drive. We would emerge from the chaos knowing who we are in the fullest sense of the term.

ARC has been absorbed by the Lifeboat Foundation, a group of likeminded people who are trying to make certain that we can survive a truly awful world-wide occurrence. They are emphatically not doomsday types. But they understand that while no skipper goes to sea thinking the boat will sink, they nonetheless carry life preservers and dinghies. That, after all, is only prudent. So is starting a self-sufficient colony on the moon.

I repeat: we are emphatically not doomsday types! I would love nothing more than to partake of all the ambrosia the Spike will offer, giving orders to my AI genie and hanging out in my expansive VR paradise-world. However, this favorable scenario is contingent on whether or not we can dodge the numerous bullets filling the magazine of the gun called existential risk. That gun has to be fired by someone willing to pull the trigger - although they most likely would not anticipate the consequences of their actions. A scholar once wrote:

All else being equal, not many people would prefer to destroy the world. Even faceless corporations, meddling governments, reckless scientists, and other agents of doom, require a world in which to achieve their goals of profit, order, tenure, or other villanies. If our extinctions proceeds slowly enough to allow a moment of horrified realization, the doers of the deed will likely by taken aback on realizing that they have actually destroyed the world. Therefore I suggest that if the Earth is destroyed, it will probably be by mistake.

That mistake will happen when some reckless engineer builds a mind they can no longer control. Not that “control” is the critical factor - it’s not. Not the way it is with humans interacting with other humans, anyway. The challenge is one of creation, not control. We have to create something that can acquire wisdom and displays unconditional benevolence to all mankind. The original idea was to tweak some human to produce that outcome, but the prospects for that avenue look bad. The true power is in the convenient nonbiological medium. Learning and intelligence are not just abstract philosophical ideas. They correspond to real math. Different varieties of learning and intelligence use different weightings in their equations. We have to make an equation that is weighted to care about us, and rewrites itself in ways that improve the quality of that care, without getting in our way.

Keep in mind that freezing progress in computing would be one way to buy time. Accelerating the researchers may be less invasive on society, but is, in general, dubious.

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