Nanoethics

12 Oct 2007 12:24

In the technology world, it's rare for people to predict the potential impact of their work in detail, as they do in this book. You may think the future projected here sounds more like science fiction than science fact. But if it happens, at least you were warned.

You don't have to resort to fearing 'grey goo' to see that a technology which lets you play intimately with the building blocks of matter itself is not only going to be disruptive but also risky. Even the optimists warn that nanotechnology could lead to the complete disruption of our manufacturing, economies, medical care and biology.

It was dislike of the notion that human and artificial intelligence might merge to form some kind of augmented post-human that caused Bill Joy, then chief scientist at Sun Microsystems, to publish the essay Why the Future Doesn't Need Us in Wired magazine in 2000. Joy had been talking to well-known and respected inventor Ray Kurzweil, and after a year of thought had concluded that some technologies are just too dangerous to pursue. Nanotechnology advocates now say this article slowed down research funding in the field, and that it's only now that the cloud it created is beginning to lift.

Nanoethics: The Ethical and Social Implications of Nanotechnology reprints Joy's essay, along with testimony Kurzweil gave to the Committee on Science, US House of Representatives, in 2003. In it, Kurzweil predicted that "most of technology will be 'nanotechnology' by the 2020s". As scary as that might sound, he asks, would we want to remove the technology we've developed in the last two centuries and go back to 1800 and a life expectancy of 37 years? Bill Joy, he says, has it wrong: nanotechnology is not a single development we can reject; instead it's a diverse array of hundreds of technologies in all fields.

These two contributions set the tone for the rest of the book, whose many contributors examine the issues confronting us in trying to move forward with some mitigation of the risks involved. Among the writers are Mike Treder and Chris Phoenix, joint founders of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, who believe this is technology so disruptive that, 'Informed preparation is essential'. Independent scentist J. Storrs Hall writes about the moral sense that artificial intellects might (or might not) develop. Robert Freitas, the author of Nanomedicine, discusses the prospects for medical nanorobots. The research engineer Tihamer Toth-Fejel and Christopher Dodsworth examine the role nanotechnology can play in the exploration of space. RFID, says Jeroen van den Hoven, offers an instructive example of how nanotechnology will affect privacy: nanotechnologists should think about how to make the systems they create visible or protect the information they generate and store. Other essays look at the impact of nanotechnology on democracy, the military, education, life extension and developing countries.

In the technology world, it's comparatively rare for people to consider the potential good and bad impact of their work in advance in such detail. You may, like many people, think the future they project here sounds more like science fiction than science fact. But if it happens, don't say they didn't warn you.

Story URL: http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/software/productivity/0,1000001108,39289970,00.htm