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!

Following on from the recent spat of name calling, there do seem to be opposing camps in the nanotech world, let’s call them the super optimists and the super pessimists.

The super optimists, and here I include the folks at Foresight, Institute of Molecular Manufacturing etc, tend to be people who spend a lot of time sitting in front of a computer but have little understanding of the wider world. Hence for them the path from reading Engines of Creation to terraforming Mars and curing all known disease is straight and clutter free.

The super pessimists on the other side tend to think dark gloomy thoughts about all kinds on things – I’m thinking of a number of NGO’s here – and use scare tactics to add two and two together to make 27.581 in the sense of taking pieces of real science and although failing to understand what the science actually means, conclusions are still drawn and regulation demanded.

Both groups tend to be somewhat idealistic and take a very black and white view of a world that is quite gloriously and defiantly Technicolour, as the rest us know only too well.  I’m reminded of Peter Bruegel the Youngers 1559 painting “The Battle of Carnival and Lent” and its imagery still speak to us after almost four hundred and fifty years.

As a footnote about regulation, one of the rather simplistic views of nanotechnology is that if it can be regulated than that somehow makes the problem go away. Nothing could be more wrong – hazards are intrinsic and risks can be minimised but any regulation needs a system of policing to allow it to have any effect. The failure of various financial watchdogs on both sides of the Atlantic to spot the danger of highly leveraged investors or the actions of Bernie Madoff and Alan Stanford, through the recent tainted baby milk scandal in China to the failure of almost every ‘war on drugs’ shows how easy it is to set up a regulatory system, but how hard it is to have any effect on the real world.

My estwhile colleague Dexter Johnson who also blogs for IEEE Spectrum received a number of plaudits from readers of the Foresight Institutes Nanodot blog after daring to suggest that the sunny optimism of current President J Storrs Hall might be rather displaced and that the assertion nanobots will save us may be rather missing the point.

Illustrating the difficullty of contrsuctive engament with fanatics, the discussion consited of

Pessimists like Dexter get a pyschological kick out of declaring that “things are bad man, get real”, much like the fundamentalist christians who claim that we are living in “the last days, the most awful phase in human history”, when in fact (for Europe at least) the 14th century is probably the best example if you want war, death and misery in abundance. Did armageddon happen? No it did not.

Dexter Johnson’s bad attitude is borne of ignorance.

and

“Dexter Johnson is an ignoramus whose ignorance leads him to view optimists with contempt.”

and even J Storrs Hall who waded into the debate with a comment that is simultaneously naive and hare brained

@Dexter: Saying “just some people who made some bad investments” is a very incorrect characterization of what I said. The bad investments are the effect: the cause is the widespread coordinated incorrect beliefs. There were lots of them, ranging from fund managers who thought they could use Li’s Gaussian copula without understanding its assumptions and applicability, to investors who thought they could trust the managers.

Nano-hype — the overpromising of near-term nanoscale bulk technologies — was clearly a very minor part of the problem, but it was real. I’ve been amazed how many people asked me for investment advice once they heard I’d written a book on nanotech. (My stock answer: “Buy land.”)

So that’s another argument settled. The various nutcases, fruitcases, burned out hippies and galactic megalomaniacs that orbit the Foresight Institute are always right, and scientists, governments, investors and anyone else who disagrees with them is an ignoramus.Whatever next? Crucifixians, gas chambers, or plagues of nanobots to root out any dissenting thought? It rather looks like “the leading think tank and public interest institute on nanotechnology” has been taken over by the nanotech equivalent of the Taliban, or at least some kind of set of nerds that have been driven to the brink of insanity by the thwarting of their plans for global domination and the inability to get a real live girlfriend.

Dexter got off lightly – the last time I questioned anything from this bunch a number of people wished various diseases on me. I wonder what Richard Jones’ postbag looks like?

The Foresight Institute are continuing their series on the Singularity – it’s fascinating stuff, it really is.

I would guess — and this is blatantly a speculation, albeit a fairly well informed one, that the “secret trick” of AI will fall in the next decade. That means that the 20s will see robots not just as good as humans at specific, well-defined tasks, but able to learn new tasks the way humans do.

Please remember that AIs won’t necessarily be autonomous robots — most of them will be like having a secretary built into your computer (although I imagine that in the 20s having a robot butler will be a status symbol for a while).

Oddly enough this was addressed in 1977 in the comic 2000AD where a disobedient robot called “Call-Me-Kenneth” rebels against human authority leading to the “Robot Wars.” This was set in 2099, whereas singularians see it happening within fifteen years. I can’t help but think of Walter the Wobot, but watch out for the Heavy Metal Kids!

Is this nanobot week?

Ray Kurzweil appears to be planning to use nanobots to bring his dead (since 1970) father to life according to this extract from a recent Rolling Stone interview reproduced at RoughType….

Using technology, he plans to bring his dead father back to life. Kurzweil reveals this to me near the end of our conversation … In a soft voice, he explains how the resurrection would work. “We can find some of his DNA around his grave site – that’s a lot of information right there,” he says. “The AI will send down some nanobots and get some bone or teeth and extract some DNA and put it all together. Then they’ll get some information from my brain and anyone else who still remembers him.”

When I ask how exactly they’ll extract the knowledge from his brain, Kurzweil bristles, as if the answer should be obvious: “Just send nanobots into my brain and reconstruct my recollections and memories.” The machines will capture everything: the piggyback ride to the grocery store, the bedtime reading of Tom Swift, the moment he and his father rejoiced when the letter of acceptance from MIT arrived. To provide the nanobots with even more information, Kurzweil is safeguarding the boxes of his dad’s mementos, so the artificial intelligence has as much data as possible from which to reconstruct him. Father 2.0 could take many forms, he says, from a virtual-reality avatar to a fully functioning robot … “If you can bring back life that was valuable in the past, it should be valuable in the future.”

Most of the comments at RoughType assume that Kurzweil is some kind of sociopath, and there has always been a fine line between genius and madness. Perhaps this does go some way to explaining why many in the singularian camp simply refuse to believe that their version of the future won’t happen – they are just looking for the parental approval they never had as a child.

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.