Special Issue of Scientific American devoted to nanotech
from the The-vision-thing dept.
Nanotechnology is the focus of a special issue of Scientific American (September 2001). About half of the articles are available online, including a relatively brief piece by Eric Drexler ("Machine Phase Nanotechnology").
However, the tenor of the other articles is, in general, either skeptical or openly hostile to the concept of machine phase chemistry or mechanosynthesis, as well as advanced applications, as pointed out by Sander Olson, who writes "Scientific American's latest issue has the cover story on nanotechnology. Although the issue has an article from Mr. Drexler ("Machine Phase Nanotechnology"), most of the articles are highly critical of Drexlerian nanotechnology concepts. In one article, Gary Stix claims that Drexler's contribution to nanotechnology will be akin to Star Trek's — a fantasy that will nevertheless encourage people to enter the field. In another article, George Whitesides argues that "The charm of the assembler is illusory: it is more appealing as metaphor than as reality, and less the solution of a problem than the hope for a miracle." "
Read more for the table of contents and links to the articles available online. Additional articles about nanotechnology from SA are also available, including the 1996 article from Gary Stix that triggered an extensive online rebuttal from Foresight. Special Nanotechnology Issue of Scientific American (September 2001)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
- From the Editors: Megabucks for Nanotech
- Little Big Science, BY Gary Stix
Nanotechnology is all the rage. Will it meet its ambitious goals? And what is it, anyway? - The Art of Building Small, by George M. Whitesides and J. Christopher Love
The search is on for cheap, efficient ways to make structures only a few billionths of a meter across. - Plenty of Room, Indeed, by Michael Roukes
There is plenty of room for practical innovation at the nanoscale–once the physical rules are known. - The Incredible Shrinking Circuit, by Charles M. Lieber
Researchers have built nanoresistors and nanowires. Now they have to find a way to put them together. - Less Is More in Medicine, by A. Paul Alivisatos
Nanotechnology's first applications may include biomedical research and disease diagnosis. - Machine-Phase Nanotechnology, by K. Eric Drexler
The leading visionary in the field forecasts how nanorobots will transform society. - Of Chemistry, Love and Nanobots, by Richard E. Smalley
A Nobel Prize winner explains why self-replicating nanomachines won't work. - The Once and Future Nanomachine, by George M. Whitesides
Lessons from nature on building small. - Nanobot Construction Crews, by Steven Ashley
One company's quest to develop nanorobots. - Shamans of Small, by Graham P. Collins
Nanotechnology has become a favorite topic of science-fiction writers. - Nano Nonsense and Cryonics: True believers seek redemption from the sin of death by Michael Shermer, September 2001
August 29th, 2001 at 6:54 PM
Critiques are available.
A critique of the Smalley article is here and the Whitesides article is here.
Being polite, I think I will say their arguments are less than "robust".
To be fair, I thought the article "Less is more in Medicine" by A. Paul Alivisatos wasn't fairly good. And Charles M. Lieber did provide a good discussion of the state of the art in molecular electronics in "The Incredible Shrinking Circuit". So it wasn't all bad.
August 30th, 2001 at 12:28 PM
Stix Trek
I wonder if Gary Stix was skeptical of one particular Star Trek 'fantasy' I saw on 'Deep Space Nine' many years ago. An entire episode was devoted to a primitive spaceship propelled by a solar sail…given recent testing, it shouldn't be long before this theory is well and truly proven in practice. I look forward to more 'fantasies' brought into reality by forward thinking scientists in the coming years. Pity though that even the harshest of skeptics rarely suffer any retribution for misplaced comments. I guess that is why it is so easy to be a skeptic.
August 30th, 2001 at 12:38 PM
not good news
Scientific American is the most technical publication that is widely read by nonscientists, including the decisionmaking elites in the government, corporate, and cultural worlds. I fear that this special issue on nanotechnology represents a very serious blow to the credibility of K. Eric Drexler and the Foresight community. To people who are not capable of making an independent technical assesment, the clear message is that Drexlerian ideas have been given due consideration, and are not to be taken seriously.
Eric's essay is balanced and well-written, but the impression I got on first reading was of a man taking a casual stroll on a battlefield, as if unaware of the bullets being fired at him from all directions. Scarcely two paragraphs are devoted to specifically addressing the points raised by critics, and then only in very general terms. It is certainly not enough to say, 'the answers can be found in Nanosystems.' People are not going to rush out and buy the book if leading scientists, writing in Scientific American, are telling them not to bother. And even if they did buy it, how many would read it and be persuaded?
The response to Smalley's "10 fingers" argument does not even address the point squarely:
Smalley did not say you needed 10 "manipulators", in the sense of full robotic arms; rather his argument is that you may need 10 constraints on atomic motion, 10 points of contact between your "tool" and the atoms within a nm of the reaction site. If that is true — it clearly is not true in all cases, but Smalley evidently judges that it will be the general rule — then you have to worry about steric interference between the tool and the workpiece, which could prove a very severe restriction on the ability to do atom-by-atom assembly in general cases.
These issues may be too technical to have been resolved in the short space allowed, or even if the entire magazine had been dedicated to them. But I think it would have been better to maximize the words addressing fundamental technical issues, because Eric's credibility as a scientist was at stake.
Instead, space is given to the wonderful benefits of molecular nanotechnology, even including cryonics and eternal youth. Whatever the merits of those arguments, many of the people one might have hoped to persuade to be open-minded about the technical questions are instead going to react by dismissing Eric as a fringe thinker. The biggest mistake at all is to bring up the argument that global warming may be fixable, and therefore ignorable. When half the country views the other half as ignoring the scientific consensus for political reasons, identifying oneself with the science-rejecting side, when one's credibility as a scientist is at stake, is a serious blunder.
Please understand that I write all this as a supporter who thinks very highly of, and has been deeply influenced by Eric and his work.
The attacks, I believe, are mostly unfair, and often the critics are completely wrong. But they have the upper hand at the moment, because the top scientists and bureaucrats of the NNI are desperate to disassociate "nanotechnology" from "grey goo" plagues, rogue robots, and all the other complications and lurid science fiction sprung from Eric's visionary work.
Unfortunately, their strategy could backfire by deflating public expectations and producing a backlash against the aggressive expansion of nanotech funding under NNI. And the work of the Foresight community could be set back a decade by a widespread perception that its fundamental propositions have been discredited.
August 30th, 2001 at 9:33 PM
Re:not good news
Mark commented on Eric's piece saying, "Scarcely two paragraphs are devoted to specifically addressing the points raised by critics, and then only in very general terms".
My response would be that Eric has already written the "response" in Nanosystems. Its Smalley and Whitesides that have to make a better case. They need to provide some indication that they have read what Eric has written and point out where it is wrong. Just because you have a Nobel Prize doesn't mean you are always right. Smalley's article reads like he thought a little bit about what he had heard in some unscientific forum and decided that it just wasn't feasible. But any biologist or biochemist that thinks about it for even a few minutes is going to recognize that molecular nanotechnology is possible and self-replication is possible. Nature could not exist if molecular assembly or self-replication were impossible. The only thing that open to question is whether much stronger molecular nanotechnology is impossible.
That is what makes the Smalley and Whitesides positions so pitiful. They not only have to find flaws in Nanosystems or perhaps the Musgrave et al. paper on hydrogen abstraction tools. They also have to make a strong claim that no existing methods in biotechnology can produce increasingly stiffer assemblers as outlined in Nanosystems, pg. 471.
I doubt Smalley and Whitesides have read the background material mentioned otherwise they would have perhaps presented better arguments. So I can understand Eric not engaging in a detailed discussion. Its futile to argue with people that are simply not informed about all of the facts. Smalley may be correct in one small respect, there may be molecular structures that do indeed require ten fingers to assemble, perhaps molecules like N4 or N8 (see Rodney Bartlett's work), but that in no way invalidates work to date with single-arm assemblers.
Global warming is fixable even with robust biotechnology, it doesn't require diamondoid nanotechnology at all. Eric's scientific credibility speaks for itself. For people who don't take the time to investigate it, they are just demonstrating their own stupidity.
Even if some scientists associated with or being funded by the NNI want to disassociate themselves from nanoplagues (and I've spoken with a few), a forthcoming paper I've written will document how VC driven biotechnology and software development can get us robust MNT. So it doesn't matter what the government decides to do. For example, Bruce Don from RAND commented on the recently launched studies on effectiveness of the NNI saying that they wouldn't be looking at the long term impacts. He does understand, stating about MNT, "That could bring the marginal cost of production down to zero, an unprecedented situation in manufacturing". (Quote from SmallTimes article here.) (Its worth noting Bruce is not completely correct because the marginal costs would be the feedstock and energy costs which are not "zero".) So even of Whitesides and Smalley don't understand the vision, and even if the government decides to go slow, there are plenty of people in the VC community that are beginning to understand what the future impact will be. Of course if they aren't careful we will have another dot-com boom and bust cycle (Eric pointed this out in his recent letter to the Senior Associates) because getting to robust MNT will be difficult.
Finally regarding cryonics, I think there is an interesting moral dilemma involved. I recently calculated there are potentially 53 million deaths a year that could be saved by robust biotechnology and nanotechnology. One could perhaps save the most people by taking the shortest path to robust MNT. But that path isn't completely clear — I'm aware of at least 3 different paths. If getting the shortest path means not talking about cryonics when there are presumably people who are unaware of it but who would embrace it (and whose lives might eventually be saved by it), then Eric would be making a moral decision to sacrifice current lives for future lives by not using an available opportunity to make people aware of a potentially life saving technology like cryonics. Can you make the case that the needs of the "few" current people who would embrace cryonics should be sacrificed to the "many" who "may" be saved by nanotechnology in the future? I'm not sure I can. I think the best you can do is give the people information as you see it and let them make their choices. Even if those choices are potentially wrong.
Eric is in a way imposing an evolutionary filter for "intelligence" and "flexibile thinking" on anyone who reads his article. If you aren't smart enough to seriously investigate cryonics and reject it before robust bionanotech arrives, you probably end up dead (at least if you are the age scientists such as Smalley and Whitesides are). If you want a future where the population as a whole is smarter, and somewhat more open to novel ideas, then Eric's approach seems to make sense.
August 31st, 2001 at 12:30 AM
Re:not good news
That's not going to convince people who are reading about it in Sci Am.
The person who has a Nobel Prize is going to be considered a more credible source than the person who is right when the reader has no way of judging independently who is right.
Yes, that is the question. Smalley does not say self-replication is impossible. He does say the kind of machine Eric describes in Nanosystems is impossible.
You are probably right, but they both seem to have a prettty good idea what they're talking about. Their arguments have to be addressed directly, even if they are often unfair. They have the upper hand right now.
Maybe so, but raising this point only distracts from the key issue of whether assemblers, and Drexler, are credible. If you believe fervently that assemblers are on the way, it may seem obvious to you that global warming is no big deal. On the other hand, if you believe fervently that global warming is a serious problem which is being ignored by ideologues who refuse to accept what is by now a very strong scientific consensus, and you see someone trying to argue that global warming is no big deal because unproven technologies of the future will provide a fix, then it may seem obvious to you that the person making such an assertion can be dismissed.
Most people can't and won't take the time to investigate it, and that does not make them stupid, nor does it mean that they don't matter. I personally believe Eric is one of the most brilliant minds of my generation. But I don't think he did himself much good with his essay, and I think this Sci Am issue as a whole is a fairly devastating hit on his credit rating (and, by the way, on mine).
September 3rd, 2001 at 4:51 PM
Re:not good news
Two points. Drexler has had a consistent message for over 15 years that technology will transform the world before the humans can permanently muck up global weather patterns. If he suddenly changed his message, it wouldn't look statesmanlike, it would look shifty. Yes, the Bushmen are all about ignoring global warming, but everyone knows why, it's because of the company they keep (or rather, the companies they keep).
Second point: I read Smalley's article a little differently. Yes, there's hostility towards Drexler's vision of atom-by-atom construction. Maybe he's laying groundwork for a different vision…tube by tube, perhaps? The man has started a company that sells carbon nanotubes. I'm just parroting what I've heard, but I hear that it's easy to tell when carbon nanotubes get defects, they can be manipulated easily, and now they can be made into n-type as well as p-type semiconductors. His argument may eventually become: who needs the complication of trying to build a computer atom by atom when you can knit one out of tubes?
Third point: (our THREE points are!) to oversimplify some recent social history: the black community of the 60's was full of heated arguments over who was too black and who wasn't black enough, the feminist community of the 70's argued over who was too feminist and who wasn't feminist enough, the gay community of the 80's argued over who was too gay and who wasn't gay enough. In retrospect, the arguments weren't nearly as helpful as the fact that the majority eventually became less hostile to the goals of those communities. As that happened, the rhetoric died down, the divisions within the communities died down, and things got better. I agree with Gubrud that we see evidence in this Scientific American issue of a raging battle, and it looks like a war over who's too visionary and who's not visionary enough. The public has come a long way, even in the past year. (Imagine Bush's father making a national address over the issue of cloning, even if the science had been there in 1990…I think not. He would have been derided as a freak by his cohorts.) It's now acceptable to talk about a future that looks like science fiction around corporate water coolers and write about it in media on the level of Teen Beat (such as USA Today and Headline News). As the public becomes less hostile towards visionary scientists, I predict the bitter in-fighting over who's too visionary and who's not visionary enough will subside.
September 18th, 2001 at 2:46 PM
The future Scientific American style
After leafing thru the issue on nanotech I only find my basic belief about SA reenforced. From looking at various issues over the years I have concluded that the magazine looks at the future in the following way. 1) If an advance is coming on the market next year it's far out future stuff. 2) If an advance has been demonstrated in the lab, but will not be on the market within the next five years it is really far out and risky to even consider as a serious technology that will have any relevant impact on anything. 3) If an advance is more than five years from the market or hasnt been fully demonstrated in the lab yet, it is complete fantasy worthy only of ridicule or 'debunking'. The only exceptions to this seem to be NASA, DoD or other federally funded projects. The next 100yrs according to SA will apparently be just like today with only incremental advances in technology.