One Day I Just Woke Up A Messiah

Eric Drexler just pinged me to point out that what I usually refer to as “Drexlerians” do not speak for him. It reminds me of the scene in the Life of Brian where trying to dissuade his growing band of disciples from following him, Brian shouts “You don’t need to follow me. You don’t need to follow anybody! You’ve got to think for yourselves. You’re all individuals!”

Some hope!

In a similar fashion, Drexlers work on nanosystems was simply a treatise on what could be possible, possibly, not a manual detailing how to build Utopia, atom by atom. While many scientists I know have been inspired by this to pursue real and feasible nanotechnologies, a small minority didn’t feel any need to pop into a lab and do any science, and have spent the last twenty years sitting on their backsides watching Star Trek while deifying Drexler. As I have said many times, science just doesn’t happen because a bunch of people go on and on and on about it, it actually involves some work, and shouting down anyone who disagrees with you certainly wasn’t part of my scientific training, and doesn’t do much good in the business world either.

Still, it could be worse, as Will Self’s satirical Book of Dave pointed out a couple of years ago. Let’s just hope no one has printed a copy of Nanosystems on diamond!

One of the oddest arguments of the molecular manufacturing community (the bunch that believe that nanofactories will lead to eternal life. personal freedom, and do away with the need for money, government, clothes and apparently, good manners or common sense) is their possessiveness of the term nanotechnology.This extract from a recent tirade is typical:

By appropriating the term nanotechnology for what it was they were doing, the scientists had pulled a neat rhetorical trick: they were associating themselves with the wonderful promises of Drexler’s vision without having explicitly promised anything themselves. And they reaped the benefits of billion-dollar funding levels worldwide, interest from investors and the media, the cream of the students, and all the rest.

What always mystified me about the Foresight Institute(and associated groups) is that they simultaneously wanted to keep nanotechnology to themselves but put no effort whatsoever into doing any science that make make their dreams come true. As soon as the scientific community begins to investigate nanotech they start prancing wildly around waving sticks and accusing all kinds of people of stealing it. Now, as a recipient of the Foresight Communications Prize in 2003 I recall that the molecular manufacturing community did all that they could to reap the benefits, it’s just that sitting in front of a computer all day speculating about what a nano enabled Utopia would be like wasn’t felt by government or industry to be an any more worthy recipient of funding than sitting in front of a computer all day speculating on what it would be like to be a potato.

It’s a real shame. The early work by Drexler was uniquely visionary,and I can’t help thinking that his adoption by a bunch of silicon valley nerds rather than exploring the ideas within the scientific community is a mistake of tragic proportions. Certainly demanding that scientists do what they were unwilling or incapable of doing and then getting all bitter and twisted over a word, and a poorly defined one at that, isn’t going to advance their cause.

I’m always staggered by the progress being made in nanoscience, with tens of billions of dollars of global funding our understanding of the nanoscale is progressing in leaps and bounds.

Perhaps more roadkill than tortoise to nanoscience’s hare is diamondoid mechanosynthesis, beloved of the Drexlerians, which doesn’t seem to have made any progress whatsoever, and increasingly resembles a cross between a south sea cargo cult and Waiting for Godot.

According to the Foresight Institute, “the diamondoid mechanosynthesis approach is only in the very early stages of computer simulation” whereas ten years ago it was being pushed as advanced technology.