3.15.2003
Responsible Nanotechnology

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Dr.J:  Welcome to ChangeSurfer radio.  I'm Dr. J.  For the next half hour keep your mind open and your radio tuned to the left as we present a sexy high-tech vision of a radically democratic future. 

Speaking today with Chris Phoenix.  He is a nanotechnology theorist, took his first class in nanotechnology back in 1988 at Stanford University, and since then has been deeply involved in this emerging field.  He's the co-moderator of the sci.nanotech newsgroup and a senior associate of the Foresight Institute.  He's got a degree in computer science from Stanford University.  And recently here in 2002 he co-founded the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology which we're going to be talking about today.  Welcome, Chris.

CJP:  Thank you.

Dr.J:  Now let's bring the audience that's not entirely familiar with this term up to speed.  What is nanotechnology?

CJP:  There's two kinds of nanotechnology.  There's structural nanotechnology which is what we're doing in the lab today, making small nanoscale structures with new properties, new features that we can build into products, and then there's molecular nanotechnology or MNT, which is a future technology that has some people very excited and some people very afraid, which is fabrication by mechanically guided chemical operations.

Dr.J:  Now you're, with fabrication by chemically guided operations, that sounds a little bit broader than the original Drexlerian idea of having a mini robot that can assemble more of its own.  You don't necessarily think that we need that to have nanofabrication?

CJP:  Well it seems like the simplest way to do it.  I mean, robotics is reasonably well understood, and a lot of that translates to the nanoscale.  And if you can attach molecules to the robot, the end of the robot arm, and make them react, which has already been done to a small extent in the lab, then that sems like one way of making a very flexible manufacturing system.

Dr.J:  Self replication would be the core of this idea.  Because we would never be able to get anywhere if we had to build them one by one, right?

CJP:  Right.  To build a cubic micron of products would take quite a few hours  And to make a cubic millimeter of course would take a billion times that.  So yes.  We would want to have the nanofabricator be able to duplicate itself many times.  And if you can find a way to fasten all those fabricators down, or otherwise make them work together, then you can build big products.

Dr.J:  Now what are some of the things that we might be able to get out of nanomaterials, the kind of nanofabrication that's going on now, and what are some of the things that we might get out of the later kind of self replicating nanofabrication?

CJP:  OK.  Today's nanomaterials are all sorts.  There's titanium dioxide, I think, for sunscreen.  There's buckytubes which have already found their way into tennis rackets to make them stiffer.  In fact carbon black is a nanomaterial that we've been using for quite a while in tires and other applications.  Molecular computers are being researched and some interesting early successes have been reported.  So there's no short answer to what can we do with nanostructured materials.  Almost, well I won't say almost any, but a wide range of materials can be nanostructured and may be more useful in that format.  Molecular nanotech, if the calculations are correct, should allow us to build covalent three-dimensional carbon, in other words diamond and graphite and bucky materials, build it to order, thus making very small structual components and machines out of essentially diamond, which allows great strength and stiffness and other things that are important in mechanical design.  Of course it could use other materials, alumina has been proposed, and it doesn't have to be extremely strong material for the basic self-replication, but of course stiffness helps when you're trying to do precise chemistry with a robot arm.

Dr.J:  Now, you have also written a paper called "Nanotechnology and Life Extension" where you extrapolate some of the applications of this.  One of the advantages of nanotechnology is that you could build potentially a computer and robot which would be smaller than a human cell, which could actually do work on a human cell, is that right?  What are some of the applications at the cellular level?

CJP:  OK.  Well for one thing you can build sensors, essentially as small as molecules.  The body uses molecular sensors in every nerve synapse.  So if you can build those sensors without a huge manufacturing  overhead, then you can pass a whole lot of chemical smarts into a nanomachine.  You can for example build surgical robots with a full robotic and sensor capability smaller than a hypodermic needle.  So you might inject the needle into the middle of the tumor, and it starts wiggling around and detecting and killing cancer cells and vacuuming out the pieces.  And literally feels the molecules on the surface of the cell to see whether each cell is cancerous or not.  That would take a while and it would take some smarts to say if everything around the edges is cancerous then I can kill everything in the middle.  So there's a lot of research involved but you can start to see some of the things that can be done that couldn't be done today.

Dr.J:  And in industry, some people talk about just creating a bucket full of programmable or tele-programmable nanotech stuff and having it sit on your desk.  In fact you've recently published a paper about how to create buckets of nanostuff that will make other stuff.  Is that... Can you illuminate on that a little bit?

CJP:  OK.  The paper isn't actually out yet, it's in review. And the point of the paper is actually to get away from the bucket of stuff.  It's to... it's hard to control a bucket of stuff, because each little stuff-bot has to be able to know where it is and how to cooperate with the bots around it.  If you can fasten them down in some sort of organized grid then it's a lot easier to control them.  Each one can make a small block, and it knows exactly where that block is going to go in the final product.  You just stick the blocks together and you have your product.  That's what the paper is about, and hopefully it'll be published in a few weeks once the reviewers get done with it.

Dr.J:  So actually making an assembly line of some sort out of all these microscopic bits of robots.

CJP:  Yes, exactly.  Each microscopic fabricator would make a small block, send those blocks to an assembly line to be joined into larger blocks.  Then those would go to a bigger assembly line and so on.  It's called convergent assembly.  And with about fifteen stages of going from small blocks to big blocks, you can get something human sized, something about a liter, starting with blocks of 200 nanometers, which is small enough to be made in a reasonable time by a single fabricator.

Dr.J:  This is Changesurfer Radio, I'm Dr. J.  We're talking today with Chris Phoenix.  Chris Phoenix is a nanotechnology theorist, the author of papers such as the Ethical Administration of Nanotechnology" , the "Three sytems of Ethics for Diverse Applications," and "Safe Utilization of Advanced Nanotechnology.  Let's turn to that for a second, Chris.  There has been a growing interest in nanotechnology from unwelcome quarters, I suppose from your perspective, environmental organizations who see it as the next great environmental threat.  The University of Toronto Bioethics Center just recently published a paper arguing that the ethical implications of nanotechnology would be the next great ethics issue.  You have in your work and part of the mandate of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology is to address the real dangers of nanotechnology and create policies to address those.  What are some of those dangers?

CJP:  OK.  First  let me say that the University of Toronto's publication is not at all unwelcome.  They're simply identifieng a trend that's disturbing, which is nanotech is new, it's not well understood, and a lot of people are getting scared of it.  It's important to keep in mind when talking about nanotech risks, which kind of nanotech you're talking about.  Structural nanotechnology is just as risky as any other technology.  Because it is just an extension of other technologies.  It's possible to make poisonous nanoparticles.  It's also possible to make completely inert nanoparticles.

Dr.J:  Essentially chemical, the production of chemicals in industry has always been the production of nanoparticles hasn't it?  I mean when people talk about the threats from nano-pollution, really the size of a nano-particle is no different from the size of a gas, right?

CJP:  Nanoparticles are somewhat bigger than gases.   And they may not be easy for biological things to break down.  I mean a gas floats around in the atmosphere, gets hit by ultraviolet light, and I suppose it eventually decomposes.  A nanoparticle might get taken up by a cell and persist and then get eaten by whatever eats that cell.  This what the ETC group is worried about, that nanoparticles might get taken up by cells, and among those that are taken up, some of them might be poisonous.  They go from there to call for a blanket ban on all nanotech, which I don't think is useful or even advisable.

Dr.J:  What, let's stop there for a second.  What would be the problem with a global ban on nanotechnology?  What would we be forgoing, in your view, I mean it seems obvious, enormous industrial productivity, potential radical extension of life expectency, do you see, you know, is that the basic argument, that we can't give up nanotechnology because of all the potential benefits?

CJP:  That's one of several arguments for why we can't give up nanotech.  Just to take one example, semiconductor manufacturing is not particularly clean, it uses all sorts of nasty chemicals.  If we could come up with a cleaner way to make computer chips we would be doing the environment a favor.  To take another example, hydrogen storage for fuel cell cars may depend on nanotechnology.  And if we can do that then we can greatly reduce the carbon dioxide load in the atmosphere.  So there are some very real benefits, even in the short term, to developing nanotech.

Dr.J:  So this is what Doug Mulgall's been talking about. A nono-ecology.  That nanotechnology may be the answer, the solution to a lot of our ecological challenges, at the same time that it poses some new ones.

CJP:  Certainly.  Certainly.  Looking farther ahead, people who are wealthier, better educated, and longer lived, tend to have fewer children.  So indirectly, technology advances including nanotech could help ease population pressure even while they extend their lifespans.

Dr.J:  And if you plan to be around a thousand years you might litter less.

CJP:  Yes, that's true, that's true, it would give people a longer view.  Also war and weaapons research tends to be hard on the environment, and people who are more cautious might go to war a little bit less.  There's all sorts of non-economic but very tangible benefits from both short-term and long-term nanotech.

Now we're about to go to war to prevent weapons of mass destruction that are, some people believe, hidden in small trucks all over Iraq, and scuttling around impossible to detect.

Wouldn't even your idea of small nanofactories not to mention the other people's ideas of

buckets that nano-manufacture, wouldn't they be even more undetectable and even more dangerous in their productive capability, of being able to make very dangerous things?

CJP:  A nanofactory without built-in restrictions could be, not dangerous in itself, but it could produce very, very dangerous products.  Weapons could be a lot smarter, a lot smaller, with stronger materials they could have a lot more space for functionality.  I mean, imagine a .22 shell with tracking and little fins--that, we might even get with microtech.  Imagine an unmanned aerial vehicle that is self-guiding and, see the thing about a nanofactory is it can make another nanofactory as easily as any other product.  So if you have one, you can double your manufacturing base in a few hours.  So starting with one you can have a million in maybe a week or at most a month.  That means that any design, any weapon design that you come up with, or any other design, you can make as many of them as you want very quickly.

By feeding it garbage and rocks and grass and stuff?

CJP:  Not quite that.  You'd probably have to feed it preprocessed chemicals.  I don't know what "lab on a chip" is going to do for chemical processing in the next decade.  It may be that by the time we have nanofactories, we will have some complementary technology that turns grass clippings into feedstock.  I don't know, in other words, how much of a bottleneck the chemical supply for the factory will be.  Also, of course, it depends on the manufacturing chemistry that's actually chosen, which we don't know yet.

Twenty years ago the novel Blood Music by Greg Bear introduced, I don't know if it was the first introduction, but it was one of the most compelling introductions of the idea of gray goo.  That nanotechnology could escape and eat everythying on the surface of the earth.  Now his actually turned out not to be that terrible an outcome because the gray goo preserved everything in its memory, but most people who have looked at this gray goo scenario think it's pretty scary, if they believe in it at all.  Do you believe in it as a possibility and do you think it's as scary as people think?

CJP:  It's certainly not as scary as certain science fiction authors whose name begins with Crichton would have us think. 

Well Crichton's new novel Prey is not even a gray goo scenario so much as an intelligent nanoswarm, right?  He goes one step further and says it's not just robots eating everythng, it's intelligent robots. 

CJP:  Yes, exactly.  And I've written a review of Prey.  If you type "Prey nanotechnology" into Google, my review will come up.  Which basically points out many gaping holes in his science, reasons why it couldn't happen the way he said.  However, I should say that I think some form of gray goo is possible.  If you take a very small nanofactory, where very small can be a few microns, you can build a complete nanofactory that small, fasten it together with a lab on a chip and some simple swimming and plankton gathering robotics, suddenly you have an ocean-going version.  This would be kind of hard to find, rather hard to clean up completely.  And it's the kind of thing that the same kind of scum who write computer viruses might release gray goo bots for fun.  So I think there is eventually, if nanotech ever gets, unrestricted nanotech ever gets into the hands of script kiddies, I think there is some risk of gray goo that could require a significant effort to clean up.  Will it eat the biosphere?  No.  Could it damage parts of ecosystems?  That would depend on how sophisticated it was, how many releases there were, and what level of effort we were willing to expend either to catch the script kiddies or to vacuum up all the teeny little gray goo particles.

This is ChangeSurfer Radio.  I'm Dr. J and we're speaking today with Chris Phoenix.  Chris Pheonix is co-founder and President?

CJP:  Director of Research.

Director of Research for the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, which can be found at CRNano.org.  He's also the author of a number of papers about nanotechnology, the moderator of the sci.nanotech newsgroup  Let's turn to the CRN, the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, which is attempting to develop some policies to address the problems that we're talking about, the international regulatory issues, the national regulatory issues, around nanotech.  Let's start off with the obvious difference between CRN and, say, most of the people involved in the Foresight Institute, which is a place where most of the nanotech thinking has been going on hitherto, and that is that CRN is a decidedly less libertarian think tank.  You guys, you and Mike Treder who co-founded it, are clearly committed to the legitimacy of certain kinds of government regulation.

CJP:  It's not so much the legitimacy, it's that we see a necessity for it.  I mean I wish that libertarianism worked as well as its proponents say it would.  I don't believe that it actually would work that well.  Basically if we didn't have government we'd have to invent it.  Government solves certain kinds of problems, and even libertarians will generally admit that it might be necessary to have something government-like to fund national defense.  I think also regulatory agencies would quickly become government-like, and there's a reason for that.  If you're trying to avoid major risks, then that takes a different mindset than trying to maximize profits on a bunch of small transacitons.  So it's not that I like the idea of centralized control, it's that I think for solving some subset of the large number of problems that molecular nanotech can generate, I think centralized control is probably the only practical way to do it.

Now on your website, you're also developing at the CRN an idea of which kinds of regulations would work and which kinds won't work, and you're leaning towards the idea of having kind of industrial protocols that the manufacturers of nanotechnology are obliged to build into nanotech.  Which is actually, work that's already been done at Foresight.  The Foresight people would generally prefer that they be done voluntarily, but you're recommending that this be some kind of industrial safety regulation, right?

CJP:  Well, I think what you're talking about is the suggestion in the Safe Utilization paper that says nanofactories should have some kind of built-in restrictions on what products can be fabricated with them.  If they have no restrictions at all, then the first person who steals a nanofactory can have a million nanofactories in a couple weeks and a million weapons assembly lines a week after that.  Or can build like I said experimental gray goo and set it loose just for the heck of it.  Or, I should say by the way, I don't think gray goo can happen accidentally.  What I'm worried about someone actually doing it on purpose just for the heck of it.  Or we could run into a problem like with Napster and Gnutella, where industry freaks out at the thought of people building replacements for its products for free, whether or not that actually hurts industry, it hurts consumers and citizens because all sorts of technical restrictions and bad laws are passed to try to prevent The Demise Of The American Media Conglomerate.  (sighs).  I'm sorry, I've forgotten what question I'm answering.

I'm talking about the need for technical protections built into the nanotech.  I think of the parallel, that when people first recognized that cars were dangerous to drive, and you could die in an accident in a car, some people might have said, well, we should ban the damn things, and other people said no, we can build in you know safer tires and airbags and seat belts and all kinds of other protections that everyone will be obliged to have that will make these things a safer technology.

CJP:  It's not an exact analogy, because what I'm trying to do is not protect consumers from their own nanofactories.  I'm trying to protect--that sounds too grandiose.  I'm hoping that the bigger picture of society and geopolitics can be spared some of the consequences of unbridled nanotech being used aggressively or irresponsibly and causing significant problems.  I am thinking that these restrictions will work best if they are designed very carefully and implemented uniformly, which means essentially mandatory implementation.  Because all it takes is one nanofactory without restrictions hitting a black market, and it's very hard to put that genie back in the bottle.

So you have written about the need for international regulation, which again is welcome news to my ears, I'm an old school world federalist, I've always, you know, touted the benefits of a democratic world government which is a bit of a chimerical dream, but then again we live in rapidly changing times, and this whole conflict over Iraq seems to be about just what we're talking about, whether the international community can set some standards with the International Atomic Energy Agency, for instance, about the safe use and who gets to use nano, in this case, nuclear weapons.  What do you think that the Iraq conflict portends for the direction of our ability to create an international regime that can safely regulate these incredibly dangerous technologies?

CJP:  Well, I don't actually know.  You mention international cooperation.  I'm seeing a lot of international disagreement, and I'm seeing that the world's superpower appears not to be listening a lot to the international infrastructure.  That doesn't look to me like an especially good thing.  On the other hand, Bush kind of has to convince Saddam that he's serious, so I'm not sure what else he could do.  I think it's good to recognize that there are times when we'll have to go in and physically stop people from developing overly dangerous technologies, and that such actions may have to cross international borders.  Whether the process that's in use now is the one I'd prefer, I'd have to say no, I'd like to see a lot more international agreement about how things are being done.

Tell us a little bit about what the future prospects for the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology are.

CJP:  We're looking at lots of ideas.  Conferences are one possibility .  Educational videos are another possibility, we've applied for a grant for that.  Basically we have several different focuses.  One is education, of the public and of policy makers, on the risks of molecular nanotech, and sad but true, on the difference between molecular and structural nanotech, because we can't have a reasonable discussion until everyone's clear on that.  The ETC group apparently worked pretty hard to blur the issue so that they could call for as much of a ban as possible.  But structural and molecular nanotech have to be handled almost completely differently.  We're also at CRN doing research, technical research, including the paper that's in press, it's about 45 pages ling, describing just how easy it is to go from a single assembler to a desktop format nanofactory.  I think a lot of people don't realize yet how easy that'll be, and it's a very important point for policy, whether the change comes in a month or a decade.

That sounds like a wonderful agenda.  Let me just ask one more question about the agenda of the CRN.  Your proposal for a nanofactory, you're arguing very explicitly for the widespread dissemination of not only the technology, but the access to the technology, but also actually giving people the technology so that people could meet their needs and there'll be useful benefits for everybody, but that it should only be this restricted technology that you've talked about.  So you see, also the, what are the things that people talk about in terms of the social ramifications of nanotech is that it might disintermediate our economy, people will be able to make their own goods, it might cause widespread unemployment and force people to make their own goods just to make a living because there wouldn't be wage slave system anymore.  Are you also going to work on some of those social ramifications?

CJP:  We're certainly looking at that.  The first two risks on our list at the moment, which doesn't mean the biggest, but two of the risks on our list are economic disruption from an abundance of cheap products, and economic oppression from overly expensive products.  There's going to have to be a balance struck between the capitalist urge to make as much money as possible, which is a very powerful force for innovation and optimization of anything involving money, and other parts of the picture.  Capitalism is only one mindset, only one approach, and it's only good for certain problems.  Humanitarian issues can't be ignored.  Social unrest from extreme poverty can't be ignored.  If nanofactories are too restricted, if most people are denied the benefits of them, then that will fuel a black market that'll be harder to shut down than the drug market, the illicit drug apparatus that's worldwide and currently seems impossible to stop.  So I think that probably the safest way to go is to make the technology available very widely, but carefully restricted, and probably make basic goods free and charge for luxury goods.  I'm not an economist, but I suspect that that model creates the most income in the end for the capitalists.  Because of course as people climb out of poverty, from an abundance of free basic goods, I'm not talking about merely lack of income, I'm talking about poverty where you can't feed your kids, they turn into consumers and start buying luxury goods.  So I think that the rising tide would float all boats, including the market for luxury goods.  That's the capitalist argument for making nanotech widely available.  The humanitarian argument is obvious.  Political argument is to reduce social unrest.  There's a lot of reasons to avoid being shortsighted.  The shortsighted solution of course is to over-regulate it, but that appears to actually increase the risks.

I've been speaking today with Chris Phoenix.  He is a nanotechnology theorist, the co-founder of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, which can be found at CRNano.org.  Chris's website is at www.xenophilia.org and he's the author of many papers which you can also find on the web, including the Ethical Administration of Nanotechnology, a critique of Michael Crichton's new novel Prey, Safe Utilization of Advanced Nanotechnology, and the one I like best, Nanotechnology and Life Extension.  Chris, thanks so much for being with us today.

CJP:  You're welcome.

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