Foresight Debate with Scientific American
"TOO HARD?" An Editorial published
in Analog
A recent addition to the debate between Foresight and Scientific
American is the editorial "TOO
HARD?", by Stanley Schmidt, published in the January
1997 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact.
The following is republished here with the permission of the
author and copyright holder, Stanley Schmidt. Analog
Science Fiction and Fact often carries items of interest
to Foresight members and to others interested in advanced
technologies and their possible effects upon society. Other
material from Analog that is available online
includes John G.
Cramer's "The Alternate View" columns on cutting
edge science.
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and Fact write P.O. Box 5133, Harlan IA 51593-5133.
Copyright © 1996 by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown
Publications. Used by permission of the author and his agents,
Scovil Chichak Galen Literary Agency, Inc., New York, New York.
Not to be reproduced or redistributed without permission of the
author.
TOO HARD?
by Stanley Schmidt
Nanotechnology has been a familiar concept to Analog
readers for about a decade now. K.
Eric Drexler's book Engines
of Creation was published in 1986. In case you
didn't find it on your own, I called your attention to it in
my November 1987 editorial, "Great Oaks from Little
Atoms." The basic idea, that molecular-scale robots
called "assemblers" might be able to build
virtually anything that can exist, atom by atom, is so full
of potential consequences for humanity's future that many
science fiction writers have been quick to seize on exploring
them.
A few recognizably nanotech-based stories, such as Greg
Bear's "Blood Music," appeared even earlier, but in
the last decade nanotechnology has become as pervasive a
theme of science fiction as space travel or robots. The
ramifications authors have explored span a spectrum from
Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason's ominous Assemblers
of Infinity, to Michael F. Flynn's whimsical
"Soul of the City," to Marc Stiegler's expansively
hopeful "The Gentle Seduction."
Which pretty well reflects the real range of promise and
threat if the potentials of nanotechnology are as Drexler
envisions them--and if real scientists and engineers achieve
them.
So what's been happening in the real world?
Well, you might try to find out from Gary Stix's
article "Waiting for Breakthroughs" in the April
1996 Scientific American--but, in my opinion,
that would be a mistake. It pains me to have to say so,
because I have long thought of Scientific American
as a good layman's source of fairly in-depth information
about what's going on in many fields of research, but this
article seems to me to contain far too much opinion presented
as factual reporting--and ultimately to give an impression
that may be dangerously wrong.
On the face of it, the article is a factual account of the 1995
Foresight Conference in Palo Alto. The Foresight
Institute is an organization established by Drexler and
colleagues to promote the study of nanotechnology and its
implications, and ways we might best prepare to take
advantage of its potential benefits while avoiding its
pitfalls. That's a kind of "foresight" we will very
much need if those potentials develop as they might, and as
fast as they might. The Institute has been hosting annual
conferences at which scientists and engineers working in
fields laying the groundwork for nanotechnology talk about
their findings.
One might expect that a Scientific American
report on such a conference would focus on the scientific and
technological content of those presentations. Thus it was a
bit jarring to find it opening by quoting a dentist pointing
at Drexler and saying, "That's the messiah."
Unfortunately, that pretty much sets the tone for the whole
piece. Yes, it does occasionally quote some of the speakers
at the conference--but the quotes are brief and less often
about the substance of their work than about their
philosophical disagreements with Eric Drexler.
Stix's bias is quite clear in both his selection of quotes
and his personal comments. He seems to be trying his best to
make Drexler look like a wild visionary whose "fanciful
scenarios" far exceed anything that will actually
happen, and strongly (but without supporting data) suggests
that more reputable scientists and technologists agree with
him than with Drexler. Heavily stressing the difficulties of
detail being encountered by experimentalists, he largely
ignores the significance of the fact that many of them
thought enough of the subject to do the work and to go to
this conference. He concludes by comparing aspirations toward
general assemblers to what Richard P. Feynman called
"cargo cult science."
Needless to say, folks at the Foresight Institute were not
amused. They published a brief critique, in my opinion right
on target, in
Foresight Update No. 24--mentioning, among other things,
that Feynman's son, Carl Feynman, "has written a letter to Scientific
American objecting to their misuse of his father's
essay." They have also posted an in-depth rebuttal by
Ralph Merkle on the World Wide Web at http://www.foresight.org/SciAmResponse.html
(though of course I can't be sure whether it will still be
there by the time you read this).
Disturbing as some of us find the nature and tone of the Scientific
American piece, that is not my main concern at the
moment. What I want to comment on is the kind of controversy
that exists about the extent to which nanotechnology is
achievable. Controversy does exist, of course; Stix at
least got that right, even though I am unconvinced by his
portrayal of its nature and extent. Such controversy always
exists in a radically new field of study.
And there are always difficulties with the details. Stix
says, "What inspires actual researchers at the nanoscale
is infinitely more mundane than molecular robots--but also
more pragmatic." Skipping over the misuse of the term
"actual researchers" (if it really only meant lab
types, we'd have to exclude a lot of exceedingly important
researchers, such as Einstein and Fermi), I'll say only,
"Of course it is." This field is very new and, as
the old saw says, you have to walk before you can run.
The fact that researchers are having trouble doing much
simpler things than Drexler's long-term vision of a radically
transformed future in no way proves that vision invalid. It
may simply mean that we're not yet ready for any but the
simplest parts of it--and that, for reasons that Drexler
spelled out quite clearly in Engines of Creation,
could easily change much faster than the workers in any one
field might expect. (It could, of course, conceivably turn
out that there are obstacles that can't be overcome--but that
has by no means been proved so far.)
It's hardly surprising that the people doing the hands-on
work on a frontier are likely to be much more conscious of
the immediate difficulties than the long-term possibilities.
I seriously doubt that many early American frontiersmen and
women were thinking about anything resembling modern American
civilization, with its interstates, internet, and jet
airplanes. They were much too busy trying to survive in a
wilderness. But each generation made a little advance here
and a little advance there, and since each could build on the
gains of its predecessors, the process moved faster and
faster. So, hard as our great-great-grandparents might have
found it to imagine, we did get where we are now--and
we haven't stopped.
Scientific research is not exactly like settling a
physical frontier, of course, any more than settling one
frontier is exactly like settling any other. But there are
similarities. The people who made the first vacuum tubes,
early in this century, had plenty of trouble just getting
them to work in quite simple circuits, and felt justifiable
pride whenever they found a way to make them work a little
better. At each stage, an experimenter with an idea might see
one improvement he could reasonably aspire to making with the
time and resources he had available. If you had described to
him the tiny, powerful, ubiquitous computers of the late
twentieth century, or the huge, sophisticated communications
networks of the same period, he probably would have found it
hard to believe you were serious. If you were his boss and
told him he had to build one of those computers, he
would have had little choice but to give up in despair. He
would have had no idea how to do it, and no reasonable chance
of learning. But he could take small steps on which
others could build, and still others could build on those,
and in mere decades those computers and networks were not
only real, but taken for granted by millions of people.
Similarly, I doubt that the Wright brothers or many of their
contemporaries imagined just how far their pioneering steps
in aviation might lead. If you had described the Concorde
supersonic transport and told Orville and Wilbur to build
one, they probably would have told you it was impossible. It
was--for them. But it was--eventually--quite reasonable for
the industry that grew from the seed they planted.
And such things grow much faster now than they used
to, because of the number of people working in fields that
can help each other synergistically, and because of the
enormously increased ease and speed with which those people
can now talk to each other.
Gary Stix is undoubtedly right that there are some
experimenters working on embryonic nanotech projects who have
trouble imagining that the field will ever progress to
anything like the state Drexler and Merkle describe. But I
have a strong hunch--though of course I can't prove it--that
they are modern-day counterparts of turn-of-the-century
bicycle repairmen trying to build the first crude flying
machines. Unlike those bicycle repairmen, somebody has
described to them in considerable detail what an SST can
be--and they find it hard to believe.
But they're still taking those first halting steps--and some
of them do understand that what eventually develops
may go far beyond what they can presently imagine in detail.
Somebody once said something like, "If an old, respected
scientist tells you something is possible, he's almost
certainly right. But if an old, respected scientist tells you
something is impossible, he's very likely wrong."
History is full of highly regarded scientists either saying
that such things as airplanes, spaceships, telephones, and
home computers either were impossible, or that they would
have no commercial importance.
[Editor's note: For examples, see the collection of erroneous
predictions taken from a Congressional Research Report.]
Surely that's something to bear in mind in listening to
debates about how far nanotechnology can go. Let's just hope
that everybody doesn't get so discouraged by the immediate
difficulties at each early step that they give up on the
ultimate goal.
And let's hope that the Foresight Institute keeps trying to
look ahead at what this stuff can do for and to us--and what
we can do about it. We just may need that knowledge a lot
sooner than some of us think.
Copyright © 1996 by Dell Magazines, a division of
Crosstown Publications. Used by permission of the author and
his agents, Scovil Chichak Galen Literary Agency, Inc., New
York, New York. Not to be reproduced or redistributed without
permission of the author.
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