The most exciting article to come out this week is definitely, “I, Nanobot”, by Alan H. Goldstein, over at Salon.com (small ad detour required for viewing). Goldstein discusses existential risk and the danger of nanotechnologies with lifelike characteristics, something called bionanotechnology, or synthetic biology, or artificial life. The tagline is “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.”
I was fortunate enough to briefly meet Goldstein in the flesh at last year’s Foresight Vision Weekend. He debated the merits and risks of human enhancement with Ronald Bailey of Reason magazine, a leading transhumanist who published Liberation Biology last year. Although, in the context of a highly transhumanistic audience, Bailey seemed loosely billed as the “good guy” and Goldstein as the “bad guy”, I agreed highly with Goldstein’s cautious approach and disagreed with what I thought was Bailey’s reckless enthusiasm. Goldstein points out that never before has Earth seen forms of life based on anything but our carbon chemistry. By creating new forms of life that reproduce and gather nutrients using chemical reactions outside of what we would consider “biological”, these newcomers threaten to rapidly displace us.
Even though I disagree with some of his points, I think Goldstein is the biggest new genius to hit the promise-and-peril-of-future-technologies scene lately. He is presenting several radical key ideas to the mainstream, through the high-traffic medium of Salon.com, in excellent literary style. A typical eloquent passage:
What this all means is that within a generation, biology will face its ultimate identity crisis. Researchers in the field of nanobiotechnology are racing to achieve the complete molecular integration of living and nonliving materials. We will hack into the CPU of life in order to insert new hardware and software. The purpose is to extend the capabilities of biology far beyond the limits imposed by evolution, to integrate the incredible biochemistry of life with the equally spectacular chemistry of nonliving systems like semiconductors and fiber optics.
Here are some of the key points made in the article (some directly copied):
- We will soon build nanorobots that exchange information with our bodies, eliminating the wall between living and non-living.
- Because this will lead to life forms based on heretofore never seen types of chemistry, the effects will be huge and unpredictable.
- Non-living materials will become embued with “anima”, biological qualities like self-copying, adaptability, and evolution.
- Eventually a pseudo-biological life forms will start reproducing using a class of chemical reactions fast and efficient enough that traditional biology will be helpless to compete against it.
- These things don’t need to be complex to be a threat.
- Despite being initially very pleased and excited by these new biologies, they will quickly lead to our total demise.
Goldstein is thinking way outside the box, and bringing his unorthodox thoughts to an incredibly mainstream venue. It’s unfashionable to say that mankind will bring itself down totally and completely. And if one does discuss this, they are strongly pressured to refer to the made-for-Hollywood-type scenarios, such as alien invasions, nuclear warfare, virii based on traditional biology, etc. But Goldstein is talking about something newer, more abstract, and difficult to understand.
In the article Goldstein explains how initially mundane applications of nanotechnology in medicine will lead to unanticipated variation and disasterous consequences. Part of my problem with his approach, however, is his dismissal of entirely nonbiological nanorobotics:
Cancer-hunting nanobots are often depicted as tiny robotic machines — thus reassuringly impervious to fundamental changes brought on by merging with their biological environment. But they will not be tiny robots. That mechanical fantasy, promulgated by proponents of “Drexlerian” nanotechnology who appear devoid of even the most rudimentary knowledge of chemistry, has been decisively refuted by people who actually build the components for nanobiotechnology systems.
Goldstein argues that, by necessity, we will build nanobots that blend together biological and nonbiological components to perform medical functions. Actually, I think people like Robert Freitas have shown that we can go a long way by using purely mechanistic nanomedicine to fill in for biological functions like distributing oxygen - his diamond-walled (designed but not yet built) respirocyte can contain oxygen at much greater pressures than those inside a red blood cell. A human circulatory system filled with these bots could allow someone to hold their breath at the bottom of a pool for 20 or more minutes, or sprint for hours on end. The potential of mechanistic, entirely nonbiological nanomedicine has been extensively analyzed from every angle. But Goldstein believes this is hogwash.
His warnings are to be taken seriously, however, because while I’m not sure that 1st-generation nanorobots will contain biological aspects, 2nd and 3rd generations very likely will. By augmenting or repairing the body, these bots (even if entirely nonbiological) will be exchanging tons of information with it, making a de facto integrated system and presenting the very same risks - forms of life based on new chemistries. So his point still stands.
I’m probably fond of Goldstein and his ideas because I can empathize with him. His arguments about crossing the “carbon barrier” sound remarkably similar to Singularitarian arguments about “stepping outside of the human realm” with regard to superintelligence. I also notice Goldstein has begun whimsically inserting the word “Singularity” into his writing, in lower case letters of course. The publication of Kurzweil’s book has apparently made this acceptable in public discourse.
The similarity between Singularitarians and Goldstein - he says, “step outside of the traditional carbon chemistry and everything you know goes out the window”. We say, “step outside of traditional Homo sapiens intelligence and everything you know goes out the window”. The risks discussed by Goldstein in his article seem severe enough that we need friendly superintelligence to manage them. The human governmental solutions proposed by the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology and others will simply not work for the long term, and in the era of technological acceleration that nano will promise, the “long term” could easily be as little as a few years.
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