Future Current

Within the next few decades, and perhaps sooner, a new type of manufacturing will be made possible by molecular nanotechnology (MNT). Considering its enormous potential for profound social, environmental, economic, and military impacts, MNT has received insufficient attention in ethical and policy discussions. Mike Treder, co-founder and Executive Director of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, presented on the global risks posed by molecular nanotechnology and the potential for resilience at the November Global Catastrophic Risks conference .

The following transcript of Mike Treder’s GCR08 presentation “Nanotechnology’s Global Risk and Promises of Resilience” has not been approved by the speaker. Video and audio are also available.

Nanotechnology’s Global Risk and Promises of Resilience

Productive Nanosystems movie file

Eric Drexler was the first one to conceptualize some of these ideas.  This is what they are projecting in another ten, fifteen years when we get to the point that we can build and manipulate machines that small.  When the actual nanofactory, as this is called, is produced, it may or may not look like what you are seeing here.  We are not predicting this is what it will look like—we’re not even predicting this is how it will function—we could very easily find better ways to do things between now and then.

However, from what we know now, this is a plausible progression to where we could get, based on the best science we have today.  First of all, you saw her push a button.  The display screen up there might be a touch screen.  The machine is a general purpose manufacturing appliance.  It can produce any product for which a blueprint can be entered into the machine. The blueprint you would expect to be downloaded from the internet.

What is going to be required in addition to the actual manufacturing appliance is a catalog of designs.  Those are going to have to be very complicated designs because they are going to contain trillions of atoms in atomic precision. That is going to require a very powerful CAD program to produce those designs. It is not just the machine itself, but the adjunct of developments that have to go on around it, that are actually being developed today at the same time as this hardware.  It’s all coming along.

The canisters you see over here to the side would contain basic elements, probably in gas form, carbon being the most important element.  You might have other supportive elements like oxygen, whatever is needed to make the basic products.  Carbon is the key element, and can be combined in many different ways to make many different products.  You can use carbon in different arrangements to make diamond and graphite, so carbon is a very versatile element and can make almost any product you can think of, if it is put together in the right design.  Food and medicine will require later generations of more advanced nanofactories.

Notice that inside the nanofactory, most of it is empty space for the product to emerge.  Up there, that is one of those laptops emerging from the base here.  Again, you are likely going to be working with carbon, hydrogen and potentially some oxygen and nitrogen.

You just saw the video of the molecular manufacturing appliance here.  We usually refer to it as a desktop nanofactory. I’m going to talk about risk and resilience in molecular manufacturing, with the emphasis unfortunately on the risk side.  Hopefully we will be able to build some resilience as well.  As I mentioned, this appliance will be able to build any product that can be designed using some simple chemical elements, probably carbon as the primary element.

The interesting question is, once you have your first desktop nanofactory, what is the most important and most valuable product that that nanofactory can produce?  When I ask that question in front of large groups I get some interesting answers.  The obvious answer, if you think about it, is: another nanofactory.  One can make two; two can make four; then four can make eight.  Pretty soon, through the miracle of exponential proliferation, if you can double the number of nanofactories you have only once a day (and theoretically it should happen in only a couple of hours) after thirty days you could have one billion nanofactories.  That gets pretty disruptive, if you go from having zero to a billion in thirty days.  The next day after that, if you keep up the doubling you have two billion.  Within six weeks you could have enough for every person on earth.  Obviously, it’s not likely to develop that way, but it gives you the idea of the disruptive potential for exponential proliferation.

When you have that nanofactory and it’s able to make different products, wouldn’t it be great if you could make low cost onsite water filters, as many as you needed, anywhere in the world that they are needed, so that you could get clean water to people who are suffering because they don’t have clean water?   Rapid prototyping would mean you could create a new design, try it out, build it in a couple hours, test your new design and see if it’s functioning the way you want it, and if you wanted to make some refinements, you could go back into your CAD program, change up the elements you need to change, make a new prototype in another couple of hours and you reduce your design cycle from initial concept to distribution from today’s cycles of years to weeks.

That’s wonderful in terms of how fast we can get new products to market or out in the field, but it also could be disruptive in its own right, particularly when you think about making things like military products: unmanned vehicles, explosives, whether they are unmanned aerovehicles or vehicles to go into space.  Don’t forget that this nanofactory can build a computer with a billion processors.  That was the finished product at the end of this video.  That is far more powerful than any computer in the world today, and it could be made, assuming you didn’t artificially inflate the price, for the cost of raw materials, which is a couple of dollars.

The company that Josh is affiliated with, Nanorex, in Michigan is the leading company in designing software able to create those CAD programs.  Today they are able to design molecular machines with atomic precision that have 40,000 atoms.  In order to be able to have products, you are going to have to be able to have trillions of atoms to fit in there.  On the other hand, you are not going to have to specify where every single atom goes.  A lot of it is going to be “fill this space with a lattice of carbon.”  Or you can say, “Take this block of actuators here and make ten more just like them in a row.”  You can simplify the problem by reducing the level of design.

The design cycle for weapons systems today is like ten years. If you have militaries competing to develop weapons systems, and the design cycle is reduced to ten weeks, and if adversaries decide they think they are ahead, it really increases the first strike incentive.  The weapons you make today will be obsolete in two months if you don’t use them now.  It also will be extremely difficult to tell who has got weapons-making potential.  In the last arms race, in the Cold War, it was pretty easy to track who had the potential to make nuclear weapons.  You needed exotic materials, massive manufacturing facilities, and so on.  It was a lot easier to keep track of who might have that potential than it will be in this coming case.

What this leads to is the possibility of a concentration of power.  If one nation develops this first and decides an arms race is too dangerous, they may decide to put a lock on the technology.  They may distribute the nanofactories, but the designs will be under their control.  They may also make monitoring facilities and a network of trillions of tiny cameras that will be distributed all over the world to keep track of what everyone is doing.  It may not work out that way, but it is one of the kind of scenarios that we have to be thinking about.  At the same time, it allows for what Fareed Zakaria has termed “the democratization of violence” , where far more individuals could have the means of acquiring weapons of far greater potential.  What we are seeing today might just sort of be a tip of the iceberg compared to what it could be in the next decade or two, when hundreds of thousands of individuals could get hold of weaponry that could kill millions of people.

What should we do?  Should we go off-planet, as was suggested, and use the NEOs to build places in space where we can keep safe?  Is it actually a good solution to maybe go for monopoly control?  Do we rely on the market to find solutions that will be generally beneficial for the most number of people?  Computer viruses are an annoyance, but they are not nearly as destructive as they might be, except for literally thousands of people around the world who do the right thing.  Many of them do the right thing for no financial gain.  On the other hand, we might do as Bill Joy suggested back in 2001, which is to give up, and say we renounce the use of potentially species-destroying technologies.  That is something that A. I don’t think is possible and B. I don’t think is advisable.  Those are at least four directions, and there are many other possible directions we might go.

Other things to consider as we try to look for true solutions are wild cards.  If you’ve read Michael Cricton’s book Prey, I feel sorry for you.  Crichton takes severe liberties with science and describes sort of a fantasy scenario of nanotechnology running wild and creating beasts that try to take over the world.  That derives from the earlier, more scientifically plausible ideas of grey goo.  We have a real challenge when we try to talk to people about the risks of nanotechnology.  We can’t say that grey goo should be entirely ruled out.  Grey goo means self-replicating nanoscale robots that are either designed or accidentally released into the environment, that can find their own source of food and create a copy of themselves, then exponentially replicate and essentially devour the earth, leaving the planet nothing more than a sea of grey goo.  We can’t say that will never happen, but what we do try to tell people is there are far more imminent and likely dangers that we have to deal with.  Once we understand how to avoid an arms race or massive social disruption, then we can worry about grey goo.

The planned evolution of humans into something posthuman is a wild card that nanotechnology likely will accelerate.  It’s hard to say in what direction now, but it’s something to be thought about.  Finally, the spread of ubiquitous surveillance is something quite likely to occur.  When you can manufacture a nanoscale robot that has a camera, transponder and receiver built-in that can basically report to the network, and carry onboard a supercomputer, it’s going to be nearly impossible to go anywhere without being seen, unless there is something to prevent it.  In that case, the cure may be worse than the disease.  Surveillance is going to be a huge issue if we can avoid war.  It might be a way to avoid war, or it might be a result of war, but surveillance is a wild card that needs to be thought of in terms of the resilient solution.  That is not so much a wild card as a pretty likely development.

Just to run through the three main planks of our proposal, we believe that the first and most important step is an international treaty for the cooperative peaceful development of molecular manufacturing.  We have been calling for that for five years.  It is probably no more likely now than it was five years ago.  Wherever I travel around the world to make this plea, I am told that I am naïve and idealistic.  And I’ll say, “Yeah, but can you suggest a better solution to prevent us from having bad outcomes?” I still think this is the best solution that we know of now and is probably going to happen once it becomes obvious to everyone that there is not any better way.

The second point that we feel makes sense to follow along with that: after nanofactories are developed, to distribute the manufacturing potential to everyone, but restrict the nanofactories so they can’t make obviously dangerous products.  They can’t make dangerous weapons and so forth.  Designs should be made available for basic standard of life—water filters, toilets—essentially for free, so that anyone can have life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.  Then, if you want to have designer products, you pay extra for that.  That can be left up to the market to determine.  That is where designers will be able to make money, and maybe spend some of their other time designing basic products that they give away for free because they like the good feeling that comes along with it.

There are four different boxes in which we can put the nanofactory control options.  This is available on our website in a paper called “Three Systems of Action.”  It shows how you can either make distribution and access of nanofactories tight or loose.  You can make the technical restrictions on nanofactories tight or loose.  In each way, if you analyze what the implications are, our view is that the one that comes out as most obviously achieving the objectives is to have tight technical restrictions (so that the nanofactories can only produce certain products) but to have loose distribution (to make them widely available.)  If you want to read in more detail why we think this is the case, go to our website and look for the paper called “Three Systems of Action.”

This entry was posted on Friday, February 27th, 2009 at 8:33 pm and is filed under IEET events, Nanotechnology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.