In the book Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization, K. Eric Drexler explains how the accelerating pace of technological progress will lead to massive benefits through the field of atomically precise manufacturing (APM).
One of the first things he does is to zoom in on molecules by a factor of ten million and try to explain what this world would look like if scaled up to macroscopically sized objects. In one example he states that if atoms were about 3 mm in diameter, the size of a capital O in medium font, then basic molecular machines and proteins would fit in the palm of your hand but a white blood cell would be the size of a football stadium and a human hair would be a kilometer in diameter. It is certainly an interesting perspective to picture.
Another point that is continually made and which carries incredible importance, is the acceleration of progress. He compares the coming APM revolution to three previous revolutions, the Agricultural revolution that occurred thousands of years ago at the end of the last ice age, the Industrial Revolution that only occurred hundreds of years ago and the Information revolution which only took a few decades. At this rate the next revolution is set to bring monumental change on a scale of months to years.
Throughout the book he mentions several of the impressive technologies that
this new way of manufacturing will bring. Higher quality photovoltaic solar
panels will revolutionize the energy industry and breakthroughs in energy
storage will finally be made in the form of atomically precise hydrogen fuel
cells. At one point he states that computers will have, "memory storage
densities in the range of a billion gigabytes per cubic centimeter"
(Drexler 168). A billion gigabytes would be a million terabytes, all in the
size of a flash drive. We don't even have to look back very far to realize he
is right. The challenge, it seems, will be developing creative uses for storage
spaces this size. Already it seems like an external hard drive of a few TB is
all that we will need for the foreseeable future. It will be fascinating to see
how computers this capable will be used although one can certainly imagine they
will enable some of the brain cell-computer interactions mentioned briefly in
my previous posts.
Drexler describes how APM will spur a new type of arms race since the
ability to manufacture extremely advanced weapons for a thousandth of the
current cost will be incredibly desirable. However, this is not quite the
doomsday scenario it appears to be. Since the use of the most deadly weapon
ever in the 1940's, the nuclear bomb, the trend has actually been towards less
lethal forms of warfare. Drones take out individual people and buildings and
attempt to spare as many civilians as possible. Additionally, the reasons for
much of the conflict may be taken care of by APM as well. Today, resource
scarcity continues to be the leading cause of international tension, but when
the entire world's energy supplies can be met with a 200x200 km array of solar
panels, these causes will become obsolete.
In this book, Drexler touches on some of the questions we should be asking
and vaguely describes some of the changes we can expect to see. However, given
the sheer number of times he says radical in this book, he actually keeps his
imagination quite restrained, and his enthusiasm to a bare minimum. In fact, at
one point he even speaks directly to the readers and asks them to keep their
enthusiasm to themselves as well. He does have a good reason for doing this,
which is that some of his own ideas were ironically part of the reason that the
field of nanotechnology both got its start and suffered a major setback.
In 2000, enthusiasm for APM and "building atom by atom" was high
enough that Congress established a billion dollar federal program, the National
Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI). The founders of this program supported many of
the ideas in Drexler's revolutionary 1984 book
Engines of Creation and
at that point defined nanotechnology as, "the ability to work at the
molecular level, atom by atom, to create large structures with fundamentally
new molecular organization" (Drexler 205). Drexler states that he was not
personally consulted regarding this definition but he would have approved.
However, only a few years later, Congress had completely redefined
nanotechnology as, "the understanding and control of matter at dimensions
of roughly 1-100 nanometers" (Drexler 206). Nanotechnology was now only
defined by size alone and the emphasis was gone on building AP structures.
Anyone from any field could now get funding so long as what they were working
on was small and they called it nanotechnology, but the people who wanted to
work on atom by atom assembly could not because atoms are substantially smaller
than 1 nm.
The reason for the redefining of the term was not explicitly clear but an
article published in
Wired magazine by Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems
probably had a lot to do with it. In the
article, Joy describes how he
had recently met Ray Kurzweil and listened thoroughly to ideas by him and Hans
Moravec. He was amazed that people as smart as them had such wild and
potentially dangerous visions of the future, visions in which uncontrolled,
exponentially self-replicating machines could turn the planet to “grey-goo” in
a matter of days and computers could reach levels of intelligence vastly
exceeding the entirety of worldwide human intelligence. Ironically, both
Kurzweil and Moravec cite
Engines of Creation as a source of inspiration
and the ideas they based on it scared Bill Joy so much that in his article, he
called for a ban on nanotechnology research. Although rightfully scared of a
few dangerous scenarios, Joy did not realize that by banning something you
surrender all control over it. Of course nanotechnology research is going to
continue and if not in this country than somewhere else. If not through the widely
published world of science than in the confidentiality of corporations. Public
outcry threatened to upset politicians and rather than missing out on a billion
dollar program, nanotechnology was quietly redefined to placate the public
fears.
Drexler states several times that APM does not mean swarms of highly
intelligent or conspiratorial “nanobugs,” he simply means a more efficient way
of manufacturing. The threats of increasing artificial intelligence may derive
some of their power from the ever more powerful capabilities of computers but
this is not something that Drexler ever comments on. After having his name
dragged through the mud and inadvertently causing damage to a field he helped
give birth to, it is not surprising that Drexler asks his audience to contain
their enthusiasm. He does support the creation of an institution that would
discuss the future of this technology in a calm, conservative way and hopefully
bring the meaning of nanotechnology back to what he meant when he originally
coined the term, Atomically Precise Manufacturing.
Drexler, K. Eric.
Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization. New York: PublicAffairs, 2013. Print.
