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.
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