The Great Mambo Disappointment and the Cynical Condition Monday, May 19 2008
futurism and nanotechnology 6:08 pm
Ed Regis is a science journalist type I’ve always liked, mainly for 1995 book Nano, which got me into nanotechnology when I was 11. Although the book generally has good reviews on Amazon, I had to post this one, by Robert J. Crawford:
As a professional reviewer, once in a while you come across a book that is so ridiculously bad, that so appallingly falls short of what the author claims, that you wish you had never contracted to review it because that means you have to carefully read it. Of the hundreds of popular science books that I have read, I can say without hesitation that this one may be the worst. And yet its tone is utterly arrogant and self-satisfied. It is truly a monument to the author’s egotism.
Though billed as a science book, there simply is no science in it. Instead, it is a kind a hagiographic biography of Eric Drexler, who has done nothing but talk.
However, if you are uncritically convinced of Drexler’s vision, which is nothing if not arresting, you will probably like this book. What it does is seek to elevate Drexler to prophet status before he has accomplished anything but unproven hypotheses at best, and speculation and hype at the worst.
Since his “hagiographic” worship of Dr. Drexler in 1995, Ed Regis has totally changed his mind. For instance, in a 2001 interview with Nanotech Now, he had this response:
Nanotech Now: With the advent of mature MNT, where do you see the most drastic changes occurring? How can society and industry prepare for it?
Ed Regis: “Advent of mature MNT”? You’ve got to be joking. The one thing that has most impressed me about MNT since I’ve been aware of the field, which I guess has been for about 15 years, is the snail’s pace of progress toward the goal. We’ve seen tons of conferences, books, theories, predictions, discussions, workshops, institutes, companies, scenarios, simulations, pictures, articles, initiatives, meetings, study groups, Web sites, magazines, newsletters, matching grants and unmatching grants, et cetera. The one thing we haven’t seen is any substantial progress toward MNT.
I also question the common assumption that we have to “prepare for it.” I see no reason why we cannot simply wait until it happens, and then accommodate ourselves to it then and there, after the fact, when, if, and as it occurs. I think a lot of this before-the-fact worrying, handwringing, theorizing, scenarioizing, worst-case and best-case planning, et cetera, is a waste of time, especially in the event that the hoped-for revolution does not occur, or does not occur in the time frame envisioned by its prognosticators.
Most people have had no trouble accommodating themselves to all sorts of incredible technological feats, everything from the moon landing to the Concorde, VCRs, CAT scans, heart and lung transplants, hip replacements, cloned sheep, and truly stylish Japanese sports cars. Who would have thought!
The tone here sounds a bit bitter — Mr. Regis is disappointed that his dreams were crushed when the Great Nanotechnology Revolution didn’t occur soon enough. No need to be so sad, the 21st century is just getting started.
As you might have guessed, I totally disagree with Mr. Regis. There has been progress towards MNT. (See some of the talks at Future Current for a small sampling.) It’s a huge deal, and preparing for it is critical. Numerous scientists, futurists, and VCs start thinking about it for the first time every day. We ignore it at our peril.
The next Google could be a molecular nanotechnology company.
I just wanted to post Regis’ comments to make it obvious that there are people who have lost their faith in MNT, and regarding what bit of faith they have left, they still think it isn’t worth preparing for. That’s their choice, and I disagree. Much of the preparation work for MNT arms control and regulation issues overlaps strongly with legal/sociological issues surrounding rapid prototyping, and those are already materializing as we speak.
Honestly though, I think it’s worth snickering a little bit at Mr. Regis’ earlier overconfidence in the nearness of molecular assemblers. When asked by Edge.org “what have you changed your mind about?”, he said:
I used to think you could predict the future. In “Profiles of the Future,” Arthur C. Clarke made it seem so easy. And so did all those other experts who confidently predicted the paperless office, the artificial intelligentsia who for decades predicted “human equivalence in ten years,” the nanotechnology prophets who kept foreseeing major advances toward molecular manufacturing within fifteen years, and so on.
Mostly, the predictions of science and technology types were wonderful: space colonies, flying cars in everyone’s garage, the conquest (or even reversal) of aging. (There were of course the doomsayers, too, such as the population-bomb theorists who said the world would run out of food by the turn of the century.)
But at last, after watching all those forecasts not come true, and in fact become falsified in a crashing, breathtaking manner, I began to question the entire business of making predictions. I mean, if even Nobel prizewinning scientists such as Ernest Rutherford, who gave us essentially the modern concept of the nuclear atom, could say, as he did in 1933, that “We cannot control atomic energy to an extent which would be of any value commercially, and I believe we are not likely ever to be able to do so,” and be so spectacularly wrong about it, what hope was there for the rest of us?
And then I finally decided that I knew the source of this incredible mismatch between confident forecast and actual result. The universe is a complex system in which countless causal chains are acting and interacting independently and simultaneously (the ultimate nature of some of them unknown to science even today). There are in fact so many causal sequences and forces at work, all of them running in parallel, and each of them often affecting the course of the others, that it is hopeless to try to specify in advance what’s going to happen as they jointly work themselves out. In the face of that complexity, it becomes difficult if not impossible to know with any assurance the future state of the system except in those comparatively few cases in which the system is governed by ironclad laws of nature such as those that allow us to predict the phases of the moon, the tides, or the position of Jupiter in tomorrow night’s sky. Otherwise, forget it.
Further, it’s an illusion to think that supercomputer modeling is up to the task of truly reliable crystal-ball gazing. It isn’t. Witness the epidemiologists who predicted that last year’s influenza season would be severe (in fact it was mild); the professional hurricane-forecasters whose models told them that the last two hurricane seasons would be monsters (whereas instead they were wimps). Certain systems in nature, it seems, are computationally irreducible phenomena, meaning that there is no way of knowing the outcome short of waiting for it to happen.
Formerly, when I heard or read a prediction, I believed it. Nowadays I just roll my eyes, shake my head, and turn the page.
It’s important to remember that it’s possible to make predictions about the future that are entirely correct, as long as you’re not excessively specific. Anyone that makes money on the stock market or who runs a startup knows how to take risks and make predictions on a 2-5 year timeframe. If you have an above-average ability to predict the future, you can potentially use it to collect free money on the prediction markets. But most of the time, anything we predict is just a guess.
Life extension, risk prevention, human enhancement, etc., are worth pursuing for their own sake, no matter how long it takes, not to fulfill some rigid timeline or vision. Even incremental gains can be incredibly beneficial.
H/t to Mark Plus for bringing this to my attention.
(For those not in the know, the name of this post is a play on Regis’ other book, The Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition.)
