Nanofactory Regulation Revisited
I noticed that a post of mine was linked via the Wikipedia article on post-scarcity -- my post about nanofactory regulation. In it, I proposed a DRM-like system to prevent any old nanofactory from manufacturing things like bombs. Radical and Luddite, I know.
The link to my page read, "ideas on preventing post-scarcity through extensive DRM-like legal restrictions on nanofactories". This is completely false. I don't want to prevent post-scarcity with my ideas, but rather manage it in a sensible way. Thus I changed the text to "ideas on managing post-scarcity through extensive DRM-like legal restrictions on nanofactories". I consider this an interesting turning point, though, because I've spent over a decade advocating the ushering in of post-scarcity via nanotechnology or whatever other means are available, and here is someone saying I am trying to prevent post-scarcity.
At the post itself, there's a recent couple comments that illustrate a common response to my ideas on nanofactory regulation -- they wouldn't work due to hackers busting everything open, and we shouldn't want them to work anyway. Hackers may break restrictions, it's true, but I'd prefer to have common desktop nanofactories be fundamentally incapable of manufacturing certain dangerous products, like bazookas and millipede robots with enough poison to kill 50 people in their sleep. That way, even if you hacked the nanfactory, it still couldn't build dangerous products, or at least it would be a big hassle to do so. (Though still way easier than it would be to buy them on the black market today.)
I don't doubt that hackers may break restrictions, but where I disagree with the commenter is when he/she says that there is no risk from anyone being able to manufacture anything:
Why are they going to grenade their neighbor when whatever they want could just as easily be manufactured on their desktop.
Because your neighbor slept with your wife. Or harassed your daughter after school. Or told their associate that your business was selling a bad product. Humans find a huge number of reasons to tangle. The primary thing that prevents people from going hog wild on people right now is the fear of being arrested or getting a bad reputation. People need to spend some time in ignorant rural areas and then come back and tell me that anyone on the globe should be able to manufacture nanoweapons.
Then the commenter says:
Eventually, wouldn’t advanced technology make it possible to create habitats in space? Industrial scale nanofactories building you your own torus shaped world with a tropical archipelago on it? And if you could do it with just a few parameters entered in, and a push of the button, wouldn’t that be easier than invading and conquering people living on the original archipelago?
That's the funny thing. Since human nature evolved in a highly limited world, we have the desire to conquer no matter how much abundance exists. Sure, that desire might be neuroengineered out, but people would have to figure out how to do that and then willingly choose it.
As I've said before, sharing music and movie files is one thing, but sharing physical structures for manufacturing weapons and addictive drugs like methamphetamines (and worse) is another. It's perfectly possible to embrace the former but not the latter. There are things I can imagine (that can be built with nanofactories but not current manufacturing technology) that are so awful, it would take a gun held to my head for me to even care to share them.
As of now, my current position on nanofactories is that they'd be extremely dangerous because open source and peer-to-peer advocates will triumph in their desire that the millions of nanofactories available to everyone around the world be able to manufacture practically everything. Once we're in that situation, how could order be restored? Through some warlord, most likely and unfortunately. I fear that could lead to an Aristoi scenario. (I haven't read Aristoi
My position on the regulation of nanofactories is quite different than that of the two big names in molecular nanotechnology (MNT) policy, the Foresight Institute and the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology. It can be compared to the position of Mark Gubrud as laid out in his paper "Nanotechnology and International Security" or Jürgen Altmann in "Military Uses of Nanotechnology: Perspectives and Concerns" and his book Military Nanotechnology
Contrary to what folks like Dr. Richard Jones say, that MNT-oriented thinking on nanotechnology only consists of a small in-group citing each other endlessly, Altmann's paper has 28 citations, according to Google Scholar. Gubrud and Altmann's co-authored paper, "Anticipating Military Nanotechnology", published in IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, has 22 citations. My last post on nanotechnology policy was linked from Instapundit, which is always nice publicity.
May 8th, 2009 - 01:17
It’s not so clear from the article that you are exclusively focused on the danger of things like weapons–you also say “Investors will balk at the falling prices of real estate, raw materials, energy, and just about everything. To ensure that runaway hyperdeflation does not occur will require a minimum price tag per kilogram of product in conjunction with a personal energy budget.” But isn’t “runaway hyperdeflation” exactly what post-scarcity advocates want? Isn’t the idea that virtually every good, with the exception of certain intrinsically scarce goods like land or services provided by intelligent beings (which will at least be ‘scarce’ until these services can be provided by uploads willing to make copies of themselves for anyone who wants their help!) will become essentially free? If post-scarcity aims to essentially eliminate capitalism as we know it, why should we care about how “investors” feel?
May 8th, 2009 - 01:22
Good point. I forgot I argued that. I think the possibility of avoiding extremely rapid hyperdeflation should at least be considered, but if it turns out not to be a big deal, I would drop the idea of a minimum price per kilogram of product. I am a post-scarcity advocate, but I can imagine reasons why (to minimize social and economic chaos) we might want to stretch out the process of deflation at least a little bit. I’m not an economist, so I have trouble thinking about this one. Maybe I should just stay out of economic matters and focus on public safety and geopolitics.
May 8th, 2009 - 03:17
I don’t have a strong opinion on your main point (“giving everyone deadly weapons is likely to lead to societal collapse”), since I don’t have a good understanding of what the social dynamics in question really look like.
However, I think it’s a very bad idea to conflate the idea of control of powerful weapons with that of psychoactive substances, for the following reasons:
1) The current drug control schemes are highly suboptimal; for instance there are various controlled substances that likely have significant nootropic effects, which currently aren’t being researched because the authorities aren’t interested in making it legal to buy such substances for personal intelligence enhancement. Some people use them anyway, despite the associated legal risks.
2) Even if the goals of the regulation agency were more aligned with that of the transhumanist community than those of, say, the current FDA, it’s far from obvious that a central regulation agency is a good way to manage such things – such organizations usually tend to become rather inefficient.
From a libertarian perspective, enforcing regulation is a bad idea by default, and should be justified by clear benefits in every case. For drugs, the standard argument is that individuals can’t be trusted to make informed decisions about this and should leave it to government bureaucrats (who have far weaker incentives to get it right then the individuals using the substances) instead, which seems like a rather dubious idea to me.
3) As an empirical fact, there are people who like to use illegal drugs, for all kinds of reasons. Any fabricator control system enforcing controls on drugs is likely to come under attack (both political and technical) from this group; i.e. you could increase the chances of any such scheme being accepted by not extending it to drugs.
You could make an equivalent argument for not using your control scheme to restrict any other good you don’t absolutely need to restrict for your primary purpose (preventing an anarchic collapse of society).
Am I wrong? Do you have a specific reason to limit fabrication of drugs (as opposed to substances primarily usable for chemical warfare)?
May 8th, 2009 - 05:34
I have posted on various forums about remote controlled robotics. We are very close to the technological point where some guy with a very small hobbyist robot can commit crimes with close to zero arrest chance. The low hanging fruit of robot crime is espionage (paparazzi), theft, burglary, vandalism (murder?) and exposing government excesses. I think there is quite some money in that. Imagine how the US would go about enforcing drug laws when dealers use robots to smuggle and manage logistics with robots they assemble from radio shack and lego parts.
Robots have discrete parts. When diverse populations of bots will be mass-produced (and they will be) the parts can become smaller and in only 2 decades their performance and miniaturization drops into realms thought of as magical before the revolution started.
I don’t believe the example of 3D printers will see much in terms of market saturation – people need only that many toothbrushes or bottle caps. So 3D replicators will stay specialized and niche for a long time, *until* the market comes up with a fairly sudden a need for parts for a comparably new kind of device… robotics!
Governments have a strong urge to repress what’s scary. Robots will be used in all kinds of civilized ways (washing grandma) but we all know that is not what we’ll drool over on TV. Plus telepresence robots will create new types of expression that lawmakers will trip over their shoelaces to write laws over.
Try explaining the linkage between RC cars, RC helicopters, RC barneythedinosaurs, RV spiders, massproduced CAD plastic or ceramic parts, a 400 gram robot that looks like a lunch box crawling in the airducts of a server farm, operated with a fillament RC cable, and dumping a key trojan in the first data slot it can find… politicians in 2009 won’t get it. Most politicians won’t understand why nanofabrication and robotics will feed off another…
Next step will be countermeasures – and when you get those you enter a mad scramble where potentially millions of people will effectively be forced to buy their own automated home defense systems… evolution in action.
May 8th, 2009 - 10:40
Sebastian,
I’m not particularly against illegal drugs myself, but I think there will be strong political pressure to keep most of them regulated, even if decriminalized. I don’t conflate bombs and joints with each other just because I mention them in the same sentence, but I do worry that new drugs could be created that are even more addictive than anything we’ve seen before. (Conversely, we might create new hallucinogens that are more interesting than anything we’ve seen before.)
Dagon,
I agree with everything you’re saying. Most openness advocates aren’t aware of the crime potential of robotics and the will of millions of people to commit crimes. They grew up in privileged homes and communities where overt crime was rare. It’s a certainty that people will have to take their own steps to defend their homes, what I want to see is that those steps are as un-drastic as possible because there are already inbuilt controls that prohibit manufacture of the most nasty robotic infiltration or spying systems.
May 10th, 2009 - 09:36
Michael,
Instead of your previous DRM-like structure, have you considered a more cooperative regulatory environment built around the individual nanofactory user instead (Ok, human brains being as they are, as well is probably a more realistic way of stating things)?
One potentially false postulate I think you have been making in this general area of discussion has been that a nanofactory necessarily includes the instruction set for a given product’s fabrication. This is often equated as analgous to computing software, and while I’m unconvinced as to precisely how relevant the analogy is, it does have the benefit of common recognizability so will offer it here. If you separate the factory “hardware” from the product design “software” you have a realistic potential for both a continuing market exchange function as well as a mechanism to promote system security. Just as your existing proposal doesn’t offer total security neither will be this, but together they can function in a re-inforcing pattern that adds a degree of enforcement that neither could achieve separately.
Two tangentally related points. You said:
“Because your neighbor slept with your wife. Or harassed your daughter after school. Or told their associate that your business was selling a bad product. Humans find a huge number of reasons to tangle. The primary thing that prevents people from going hog wild on people right now is the fear of being arrested or getting a bad reputation.”
You seem to assume that the wife/daughter/business is somehow not also an active participant in the putatative dispute entirely separate from the belligerants you stipulate (neighbors). Why is that and how does one’s ability to manufacture a complex threat mechanism (as opposed to simply picking up an available stick or rock) mitigate the existing inhibitory mechanisms you identify?
You subsequently stated:
“People need to spend some time in ignorant rural areas and then come back and tell me that anyone on the globe should be able to manufacture nanoweapons.”
Leaving to another time your obvious elitist prejudices and false assumption, have you really examined the logical inconsistancy of your statement? Precisely how ignorant can anyone capable of constructing a nanoweapon from scratch actually be said to be? Further to that, why are you so willing to assume that capability=intent in this instance? Please don’t tell me that the mere (and to this point entirely hypothetical) potential for capability is the only reason. Should that prove to be the case we’re back to oogy boogy strawmen again. :)
May 12th, 2009 - 13:07
You are proposing a top-down regulatory approach to deal with what is a decentralized threat, and that cannot work. I think the examples of Linux vs. Windows is illustrative here. Linux, because it was created by a decentralized network of software people also has a decentralized network of the same people to fix whatever bugs or viruses show up in Linux. Windows, on the other hand, has only the team in Redmond to deal with such. This is why bug and virus fixes show up faster for Linux than for Windows.
Likewise, it is the same for bio/nano. If bio/nano is allowed to develop in a decentralized open-source manner, is it not likely that this decentralized network will be able to response more quickly to develop an effective treatment for any kind of bio-terror device than the centralized bureaucracies of CDC and WHO? I would think so.
I believe only a decentralized bottom-up social order can effectively deal with decentralized bottom-up terror threats. The only thing top-down social order can do is to piss-off those who want nothing to do with it.
August 15th, 2010 - 17:52
Cool web-blog you have over here, good job what you did in your free time :-)