Unbounding the Future:
the Nanotechnology Revolution
Chapter 11
Limits and Downsides
The discussions of potential economic, medical,
and environmental benefits may have given the false impression
that nanotechnology
will create a wondrous utopia in which all human problems are
solved and we all live happily ever after. This is even more
mistaken than the idea that new technologies always cause more
problems than they solve. Many of the main constraints and
difficulties faced by people are based not on technology or its
lack, but instead by the very nature of the world we live in and
the essence of our humanness.
Increasing affluence based on molecular
manufacturing won't end economic problems any more than past
increases in affluence have. Wilderness can still be destroyed;
people can be oppressed; financial markets can be unstable; trade
wars can be waged; inflation can soar; individuals, companies,
and nations can go into debt; bureaucracy can stifle innovation;
tax levels can become crippling; wars and terrorism can rage.
None of these will automatically be stopped by advanced
technology.
What is more, the potential benefits of new
technologies aren't automatic. Nanotechnology could be
used to restore the environment, to spread wealth, and to cure
most illness. But will it? This depends on human action, working
within the limits set by the real world.
This chapter first describes some of the limits
to what nanotechnology can accomplish, and then some of the
adverse side effects of its basically good applications. The next
will discuss the problem of accidents, which seems manageable,
and then the far greater problem of potential abuse of new
capabilities.
Some Limits of
Nanotechnology
The world imposes limits on what we can do.
Technology in general (and nanotechnology in particular) can
provide padding for us as we throw ourselves against these hard,
sharp limitations, and can sometimes help us slip past old limits
through previously unknown gaps. Eventually, though, we will
encounter new limits. In the end, solid constraints will limit
human action no matter how much we juggle atoms and molecules, or the bits and
bytes of information. Let's look at some of these, starting with
the most abstract and long termthe most definite and
hardest to avoidand moving toward the more personal and
near term.
Information Loss
Many problems differ fundamentally from the
material problems of limited matter and energy: they involve
information. Some of the most precious stores of information in
the world today are the genetic codes of the biosphere.
This information, different for virtually every
individual organism, is the product of millions of events that we
are incapable of modeling or recreating. When this information is
lost, it is lost forever. When the atoms encoding this
information are thoroughly scattered, there seems to be no way to
retrieve it.
With any species, most genetic information is
shared in common, found in all members of that species. But the
variations in genetic code between individuals are important,
both to the individuals themselves and to the health and
prospects of the species as a whole. Consider the northern white
rhino, whose numbers have dropped to an estimated thirty-two
animals, or the California condor, of which only forty remain,
all in captivity. Even if biologists succeed in reestablishing
these specieseight condors were hatched in 1989much
of the diversity of their genetic information has been lost.
Worse yet are extinctions of species for which no tissue samples
were saved. The future may see some amazing recoveries: Dry skin
and bones may yield a complete set of genes when sifted by molecular machinery,
and even current techniques have been used to recover genes from
an ancient leaf, almost 20 million years old. Our eyes and
instruments cannot yet tell us how much information from the past
remains, but we do know that genetic information is being lost
every day, and once lost, it is irretrievable.
Physical Limits and
Nonsense
People have often been wrong about physical
limits, confusing the limits of their technology with the limits
of the possible. As a result, learned men first dismissed the
idea of heavier-than-air flight, and then dismissed the idea of
flying to the Moon. Yet physical limits are real, and all
technologypast, present, and futurewill stay within
those limits. There is even reason to suspect that some of those
limits are where the learned now believe them to be.
Nanotechnology will make it possible to push
closer to the real limits set by natural law, but it will not
change those laws or the limits they set. It will not affect the
law of gravity, the gravitational constant, the speed of light,
the charge of the electron, the radius of the hydrogen atom, the
value of Planck's constant, the effects of the uncertainty
principle, the principle of least action, the mass of the proton,
the laws of thermodynamics, or the boiling point of water.
Nanotechnology won't make energy or matter from nothing.
It seems a good bet that no one will build a
faster-than-light spacecraft, or an antigravity machine, or a
cable twice as strong as diamond. There are limits. Science today
may be wrong about some limits, but scientific knowledge is
practically defined to be our best information about how the
world works, so it isn't wise to bet against it.
There will be claims that nanotechnology will be
able to do things that it can't, or that capabilities are around
the corner when they aren't. Sometimes these will be innocent
errors, sometimes they will be culpably stupid errors, and
sometimes they will be what amounts to fraud. Among the problems
that nanotechnology cannot solve is that of misguided claims, by
people calling themselves "scientists,"
"engineers," or "businesspeople," that they
have a big technical breakthrough worth a fortune. Every
interesting new technology, particularly in its early days, is a
chaotic mix of competent workers and charlatans. For every Thomas
Edison inventing useful products such as light bulbs or the
precursor of movie projectors, there were people promoting
electric hairbrushes to cure baldness, and electric shoes,
electric belts, electric hatsthe list goes onthat
authoritatively claimed cures for infertility, overweight,
underweight, and all the ills and discomforts of mankind. Today,
we laugh at the credulity of our forefathers who bought these
gadgets; we shouldn't, unless we laugh at our own times as well.
Population
Natural law imposes limits, but so does the
nature of human beings. These will continue as long as people do.
Reproduction is a deeply ingrained instinct
enforced by the march of time, which ruthlessly discards the
genetic material of all who neglect it. Many would argue that the
Earth is already overpopulated. While nanotechnology could enable
the current population, and even a greatly increased one, to live
more lightly on the Earth, there will still be limits to Earth's
capacity.
The norms of human life are shaped by ancient
patterns: high rates of infant or childhood mortality have been
facts of life for millennia, and having many, many children has
been a way to ensure that one or two will survive to work on the
farm, and to care for you in your old age. Large families
naturally become traditional. When modern medicine and reliable
food supplies change those conditionsas they have, in
cultural terms, virtually overnightbehavior does not shift
as quickly. The result is the Third World population boom. In
Western countries, where there has been time for behavior to
adapt, a huge family is the exception.
It might seem that our problem is solved.
Molecular manufacturing can make everyone wealthy, and wealthy
populations today have stable or shrinking populations. The Earth
can support more people with advanced technologies, and these
will also open up the vast room and resources of the world beyond
Earth. Would that this were true.
If 99 percent of the people in a population
respond to wealth by reducing childbearing, the population will
indeed stabilize or shrink, for a while. But populations are not
uniform. What of the 1 percent, say, who are members of a
minority with different values? If that minority has a growth
rate of 5 percent per year, then in ninety-five years they will
be the majority, and in one thousand years their population will
have grown by a factor of 1,500,000,000,000,000,000,000, if
resource limits or genocide haven't intervened. Note that the
Hutterites of North America, a reasonably wealthy religious group
viewing fertility control as a sin and high fertility as a
blessing, have managed an average of ten children per woman.
Given enough time, exponential growth of even the smallest
population can consume all the resources in reach.
The right to reproduce is often regarded as
basic, as illustrated by the outrage at reports of forced
abortion in the People's Republic of China. The Hutterites and
many others regard it as part of their freedom of religion. But
what happens when parents have more children than they can
supportdoes redistribution solve the problem? If
reproduction is not forcibly suppressed, and if resources
are forcibly and repeatedly redistributed so that each
human being has a roughly equal share, then each person's share
will steadily shrink. Even given the most optimistic assumptions
regarding available resources, with a policy of resource
redistribution and unlimited reproduction, the amount per person
would eventually be insufficient to sustain life. This policy
must be avoided, because if it is followed, it will kill
everyone.
As soon as we grant that any entity is entitled
to certain rightswhether that entity be a human child, an
animal, or some future artificial intelligencethe question
arises of who is responsible for providing resources to support
it when it can't do so for itself. The above argument indicates
that a policy of coercion by some central power to compel the
entire population to support an exponentially exploding
population of these individuals would lead directly to disaster.
Ultimately, this responsibility must rest with the entities'
initiator: the designer of the artificial intelligence, the owner
of the pet, the parents of the child. No new technology can
magically remove the limits imposed by natural law, and thereby
lift the burden of human responsibility.
Solutions Cause Problems
Every time a technology solves a problem, it
creates new problems. This doesn't mean that the change is
neutral, or for the worse, of course. The Salk and Sabin vaccines
for polio virtually destroyed the iron-lung industry, and the
pocket calculator virtually destroyed the slide-rule industry,
but these advances were worth the price of some economic
adjustment.
Molecular manufacturing and nanotechnology will
bring far greater changes, placing far greater strains on our
ability to adapt. We shouldn't be surprised when basically
beneficial applications make someone miserable. Our lives are
largely centered around problems. If we can solve many of these
problems, the centers of our lives will shift, creating fresh
problems. This section sketches some of the issues of change and
adaptation more to raise questions than to offer solutions.
Change Causes Problems
Molecular manufacturing offers the possibility of
drastic change, a change in the means of production more
fundamental than the introduction of industry, or of agriculture.
Our economic and social structures have evolved around
assumptions that will no longer be valid.
How will we handle the changes in the way we work
and live? Nanotechnology will have wide-ranging impact in many
areas, including economic, industrial, and social patterns. What
do historical patterns in similar circumstances tell us about the
future?
Any powerful technology with broad applications
revolutionizes lives, and nanotechnology will be no exception.
Depending on one's point of view, this may sound exciting or it
may sound disturbing, but it most certainly does not sound
comfortable.
In comparison to many projections of the
twenty-first century, though, nanotechnology may lead to comparatively
comfortable change. The changes most often projectedfor
a future not including nanotechnologyhave been ecological
disaster, resource shortages, economic collapse, and a slide back
into misery. The rise of nanotechnology will offer an
alternativegreen wealthbut that alternative will
bring great changes from the patterns of recent decades.
Times of rapid technological change are
disconcerting. For most of humanity's existence, people lived in
a stable pattern. They learned to live as their parents had
livedby hunting and gathering, later by farmingand
changes were small and gradual. A knowledge of the past was a
reliable guide to the future.
Sudden changes, when they did occur, were apt to
be ruinous: invasions or natural disasters. These sudden changes
were fought or repaired or survived as best one could. Making
major changes by choice was rare, and radical innovations
were generally for the worse: the old ways at least ensured the
ancestors' survival, the new might not. This made cultures
conservative.
It is only natural that there be efforts to
resist change, but before undertaking such an effort, it makes
sense to examine the record of what works and what doesn't. The
only examples of successful change fighters have been communities
that have created and maintained barricades to isolate themselves
from the outside world socially, culturally, and technologically.
For the two centuries before 1854, Japan turned its back on the
outside world, following a deliberate policy of seclusion. The
leaders of Albania restricted contacts for many years; only
recently have they started to open up.
Isolation attempts have worked better on a
smaller scale, when participation is voluntary rather than
decreed by government. Today, within the Hawaiian island chain,
the tiny, privately owned island of Niihau, sixteen miles long
and six miles wide, is deliberately kept as a preserve of the
nineteenth-century Hawaiian lifestyle. Over two hundred
full-blooded Hawaiians there speak the Hawaiian language and use
no telephones, plumbing, television, and no electricity (except
in the school). The Amish of Pennsylvania have no surrounding
ocean to help maintain their isolation, but rely instead on tight
social, religious, and technological rules aimed at keeping
external technology and culture out, and themselves grouped in;
those who leave the fold are excluded.
On a national scale, attempts to take only one
part of the packagewhether social or
technologicalhaven't done well at all. For decades, the
Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc nations welcomed Western
technology but attempted tight restrictions on the passage of
people, ideas, and goods. Yet illegal music, thoughts,
literature, and other knowledge still crept inas they do
into the Islamic countries.
Fighting technological change in society at large
has had little success, where that change gave some large group
what it wanted. The most famous fighters of technological
changethe Ludditeswere unsuccessful. They smashed
"automated" textile machinery that was replacing old
hand looms during the early industrial revolution in England, but
people wanted affordable clothing, and smashing equipment in one
place just moved the business elsewhere. Change has sometimes
been postponed, as when a later group, under the banner of
"Captain Swing," smashed hundreds of threshing machines
in a wide area of southern England in 1830. They succeeded in
keeping the old, labor-intensive ways of harvesting for over a
generation.
In previous centuries, when the world was less
tightly connected by international trade, communications, and
transportation, delays of years and even decades could be
enforced through violence or legal maneuvers such as tariffs,
trade barriers, regulations, or outright banning. Attempting to
stop or postpone change is less successful today, when technology
moves internationally almost as easily as people doand
human travel is so easy that 25 million people cross the Atlantic
each year. Change fighters find that the problems they create
mount with time. Products made using the old, high-cost
techniques are uncompetitive. There is no way to bring back the
"old jobs": they no longer make sense. But old habits
die hard, and these same responses to the prospect of
technological change continue todayignoring it, denying it,
and opposing it. Societies that have fought change, as Britain
did, have fallen behind in a cloud of coal smoke.
Why did the Luddites respond violently? Perhaps
their response can be attributed to three factors: First, the
change in their lives was sudden and radical; second, it affected
a large group of people at one time, in one area; and third, in a
world unprepared for rapid technological change, there was no
safety net to catch the unemployed. While local economies might
have been able to absorb a trickle of hungry laid-off workers,
they lacked the size and diversity needed to offer other
employment options quickly to large numbers of unemployed.
In the twentieth century, however, societies have
of necessity become somewhat better adapted to change. This has
been a matter of necessity, because sluggish communities soon
fall behind. In the ancient days of peasant stability, there was
no need for institutions like Consumer Reports to study
and rate new products, or regulators like the Environmental
Protection Agency to watch over new hazards. We developed the
needs, and we developed the institutions. These mechanisms
represent important adaptions, not so much to the technologies of
the twentieth century, but to the increasing change in
technology during the twentieth century. There is great room for
improvement, but they can perhaps provide a basis for adapting to
the next century as well.
Even with the best of institutions to cushion
shocks and discourage abuse, there will be problems. The very act
of solving problems of productionof increasing
wealthwill create problems of economic change.
Clean, Decentralized
Production Causes Problems
Over centuries, the trend has seemed to be toward
centralization, beginning with the rise of factories and
industrial towns. What drove these developments was the high cost
of machinery and plant operations, the need to be near power
sources, the impracticality of transportation among many small,
dispersed sites, and the need for face-to-face communication.
Beginning with the first industrial revolution,
factories employed large numbers of people in one place, leading
to overcrowding and making local economies dependent on one
industry and sometimes on a single company. Costly equipment
necessitated central locations for textile production, rather
than the cottage industries where a lone woman could earn a
livelihood carding wool and creating thread on a spinning wheel
(providing the origin of the term spinster). By the 1930s,
the belief in the virtures of centralization and central
planningthe supposed efficiencies and economies of
scaleled to nationwide or continentwide experiments in
centralization. But over the last decade, these large-scale
experiments have been dismantled, from Britain's privatization of
nationalized utilities to the beginning of a return to the market
system in Eastern European countries.
Because the old limits on transportation, energy
sources, and communication have fallen, business is now
decentralizing. Between 1981 and 1986, the Forbes 500 companies
cut their employees by 1.8 million. But during those same years,
total civilian jobs went up by 9.2 million. Start-up companies
created 14 million jobs; small companies created another 4.5
million. Telecommuting is booming, as are new businesses,
independent professionals, and cottage industries.
We've also seen the resurgence of small, but
highly diverse stores: gourmet food shops, specialty ethnic
shops, tea and coffee purveyors, organic and health food stores,
bakeries, yogurt shops, gourmet ice-cream stores, convenience
stores offering twenty-four-hour access, shops selling packaged
food plus snacks. These stores epitomize something fundamental:
At some point, what we want is not a standard good at an ever
cheaper price, but special things customized to meet our own
individual tastes or needs.
The trend for advanced technologies seems to be
leading away from centralization. Will nanotechnology counter or
accelerate this trend? By reducing the cost of equipment, by
reducing the need for large numbers of people to work on one
product, and bringing greater ability to produce the customized
goods that people want, nanotechnology will probably continue the
twentieth-century trend toward decentralization. The results,
though, will be disruptive to existing businesses.
The computer industry perhaps provides a clue to
what might happen as costs are lowered by nanotechnology. The
computer-software industry is characterized by the garage-shop
start-up. When your equipment is cheapinexpensive PCs built
around low-cost chipsand you can make a product by throwing
in some ingenuity and human labor, it's possible to start a new
industry on a shoestring.
In 1900, when cars were simple, there were many
car manufacturers. By the 1980s, if you weren't an industrial
giant like General Motors or Ford, Honda or Nissan, you had to be
John De Lorean to even get a shot at acquiring the capital to
play in the business. If molecular manufacturing can slash the
capital costs for producing cars or other plant-intensive
equipment, we will see the equivalent of garage-shop businesses
springing up to offer new products, and hiring workers away from
the industrial giants of today just as the personal computer has
destroyed the dominance of the mainframe.
The American dream is to be an entrepreneur, and
the technological trends of the twentieth century point in that
direction. Nanotechnology probably continues it.
In one area, however, the late twentieth-century
trend has been toward uniformity. The nations of Western Europe
are in the process of uniting under one set of economic rules,
and parts of Eastern Europe are anxious to join them. More and
more supranational and transnational organizations knit the world
together. The growth of trade has motivated economic integration.
Molecular manufacturing will work against this
trend as well, permitting radical decentralization in economic
terms. This will help groups that wish to step aside from the
stream of change, enabling them to be more independent of the
turbulent outside world, picking and choosing what technologies
they use. But it will also help groups that wish to free
themselves from the constraints of the international community.
Economic sanctions will have little force against countries that
need no imports or exports to maintain a high standard of living.
And export restrictions will likewise do little to hamper a
military buildup.
By weakening the ties of trade, molecular
manufacturing threatens to weaken the glue that holds nations
together. We need that glue, though, to deal with the arms
control issues raised by molecular manufacturing itself. This
problem, caused by the potential for decentralization, may loom
large in the coming years.
Even Wealth and Leisure
Cause Problems
Lester Milbrath, professor of sociology and
political science, observes, "Nanotechnologies will create
the problem of how to meaningfully and sustainably occupy the
time of people who need not perform much work in order to have a
sufficiency of life's goods. Our society has never faced this
problem before, and it is not clear what social restructuring
will be required to have a good society in those circumstances.
We face much deep social learning."
The world has had little experience with what
anthropologists call "abundance economies." The native
American tribes of the Pacific Northwest were one of those
rarities. Ruth Benedict, in her classic book Patterns of
Culture, wrote, "Their civilization was built upon an
ample supply of goods, inexhaustible, and obtained without
excessive expenditure of labor." The Kwakiutls became famous
for their "potlatches": contests in which they sought
to shame their rivals by heaping more gifts upon them than they
could ever return. The potlatches would often be a year in
preparation, last for days, and occasionally involve destruction
of entire buildings. It was certainly a colorful form of keeping
up with the Joneses.
What will motivate us, once we have achieved an
abundance economy? What will we regard as worthwhile goals to
pursue? Increased knowledge, new art, improved philosophy,
eliminating human and planetary ills? Will we find ourselves
creating a better, wiser world, or sunk in boredom and jaded now
that we have all and want nothing? If boredom gets out of hand,
the lively spectacle of wealthy donors seeking to outdo each
other to endow the arts, aid the poor, and do other good deeds
for the sake of prestige would be welcome.
What will happen as life spans continue to
lengthen and the time needed to make a living decreases? Even
today, there are people who, when confronted with the prospect of
a significantly longer life span, exclaim that they couldn't
imagine what they would do with all that time. This response can
be hard to understand, when it would take a thousand years to
walk all the world's roads, more thousands of years to read all
the world's books, and another ten thousand years to have a
dinner conversation with each of the world's peoplebut
tastes differ, and even a few decades of bad television might
make anyone long for the peace of the grave.
Changing Employment Causes
Problems
A major concern, and certainly the single area of
greatest upheaval, is employment (which may become hard to
distinguish from leisure). Once, people had little choice of
employment. To keep a full belly, most had to work at the only
job available: peasant farming. Eventually, people will have a
complete choice of employment: they will be able to keep a full
belly and a wealthy lifestyle while doing whatever they please.
Today, we are about halfway between those extremes. In advanced
economies, many different jobs are deemed useful enough that
other people will offer an adequate income in exchange for the
result. Some people can make a living doing something they
enjoyis this work, or leisure?
The impact of nanotechnology on patterns of
employment will depend on when it arrives. Current demographics
show a shrinking supply of young people entering the work force.
Agriculture, the assembly line, and entry level service jobs are
experiencing a labor shortage, and no relief is in sight. If
these trends continue, nanotechnology may show up in the midst of
a shortage of labor. If it arrives late enough, it may compete
with industries that are already nearing full automation;
"job displacement" may mean replacing an industrial
robot with a nanomachine.
Employment patterns have shifted radically in the
past. One hundred and fifty years ago, the United States was an
agricultural nation69 percent of all people worked the land
and a growing percentage worked in industry doing things like
building steam locomotives for Baldwin Locomotives Works or
tanning leather for the giant Central Leather monopoly. By the
early twentieth century, agriculture was waning in numbers but
increasing in productivity; most people worked in industry, and
the tiny information and service sector was beginning to grow.
Today, the picture has reversed: 69 percent of employed Americans
work in information or service jobs, only 28 percent work in
industrial production, and 3 percent in agriculture. This tiny
fraction feeds the other 97 percent of Americans, exports hugely
to other countries, and receives subsidies and price support
payments to stop them from growing even more food. Manufacturing,
even without nanotechnology, seems to be heading toward a similar
condition.
With an ever-declining percentage of our
population working in manufacturing, we have as everyday products
things that were once available only to kings and the high
nobility. Yet owning multiple suits of clothes, having personal
portraits of ourselves and family members, having music upon our
command, having a personal bedroom, and having a coach awaiting
our needthese are now regarded as being among the bare
necessities of life. It may be possible to adjust to even greater
wealth with even less required labor, but the adjustment will
surely cause problems. In a world in which nanotechnology reduces
the need for workers in agriculture and manufacturing still
further, the question will be asked, "What jobs are left for
people to do once food, clothing, and shelter are very
inexpensive?"
Again, the twentieth century provides some
guidelines. As technology has reduced costs by efficiently
producing many units of an identical item, people have begun to
demand customization to meet individual needs or preferences. As
a result, there are ever more jobs in producing custom goods.
Today, semi-custom goods that try to help us meet our needs or
express our taste abound: designer linens, ready-to-wear
fashions, cosmetics, cars, trucks, recreational vehicles,
furniture, carpeting, shoes, televisions, toys, sports equipment,
washing machines, microwave ovens, food processors, bread bakers,
pasta makers, home computers, telephones, answering
machinesare all available in large and ever-changing
variety.
Just as varied is the fabulous wealth and
diversity of information produced in the twentieth century.
Information products are a large factor in the economy: Americans
buy 2.5 billion books, 6 billion magazines, and 20 billion
newspapers each year. In recent years, new magazines have been
invented and launched at the rate of one every business day of
the year. A visit to a well-stocked magazine rack shows only a
hint of the wealth of highly specialized publications, each one
focused on a specialized interest or attitude: hotdog skiing,
low-fat gourmet cooking, travel in Arizona, a magazine for people
with a home office and a computer, and finely tuned magazines on
health, leisure, psychology, science, politics, movie stars and
rock stars, music, hunting, fishing, games, art, fashion, beauty,
antiques, computers, cars, guns, wrestling.
Motion pictures, which started as a flock of
independent production companies and then consolidated into the
great studios of the 1930s, have since followed the
decentralization and diversification trends of recent years. Now
an expanding range of film entertainment comes via network TV,
cable channels, private networks, videotapes, music videos.
Independent producers are aided by the technology innovations of
cable, direct broadcast satellites, videotape technology, laser
disks, videocameras.
The arts have burgeoned, with the general public
as the new patron of the arts. Any artist or art form that could
find and satisfy a market boomed in the twentieth century. Not
just the traditional arts of actors, writers, musicians, and
painters, but all forms of "domestic" artistry have
grown to unprecedented levels: landscape and interior design,
fashion design, cosmetics, hairstyling, architecture, bridal
consulting.
Providing for these demands are some of the
"service and information" jobs created in the late
twentieth century. "Service" jobs include many ways of
helping other people: from nursing to computer repairs to sales.
In "information" jobs, projected to have the fastest
percentage growth over the next decade, people find, evaluate,
analyze, and create information. A magazine columnist or TV news
producer obviously has an "information" job. But so do
programmers, paralegals, lawyers, accountants, financial
analysts, credit counselors, psychologists, librarians, managers,
engineers, biologists, travel agents, and teachers.
"Increasingly," states Forbes
magazine, "people are no longer laborers; they are educated
professionals who carry their most important work tools in their
heads. Dismissing them from their jobs, cutting them off from
their places of employment may hurt them emotionally and
financially. But it doesn't separate them from their vocation in
the same way that pushing a farmer off his freshly seeded land
does. For centuries workers were more dependent on a particular
physical setting than they are now. Modern occupations generally
give their practitioners more independenceand greater
mobilitythan did those of yesteryear."
These human skills that people carry with them
will continue to be valued: managing complexity, providing
creativity, customizing things for other people, helping people
deal with problems, providing old services in new contexts,
teaching, entertaining, and making decisions. A reasonable guess
would be that many of the service and information industries of
the twentieth century will continue to evolve and exist in a
world with nanotechnology. What is harder to imagine would be
what new industries will come into being once we have new
capabilities and lower costs.
Along with the old economic law of supply and
demand is another governing factor: price elasticity effects.
People's desire for something is "elastic": it expands
or contracts when the cost of something valuable goes down or up.
If the price of a flight to Europe is five hundred dollars, more
people will take a European vacation than if the price is five
thousand dollars. When you had to hire a highly trained
mathematician to do equations, calculation was slow and
expensive. People didn't do much of it unless they absolutely had
to. Today, computers make calculation cheap and automatic. So now
businesses do sophisticated financial modeling, chemists design
protein molecules, students calculate orbital trajectories for
spaceships, children play video games, moviemakers do ever more
amazing special effects, and the cartoonvirtually extinct
because of high labor costshas returned to movie theaters,
all because computers permit cheap calculation. Nanotechnology
will offer new, affordable capabilities to these and other
people. Today, it's as hard to predict what new industries will
be invented as it would have been for the creators of the ENIAC
computer to have predicted cheap, handheld game computers for
children.
So rather than producing drastic unemployment,
nanotechnology seems likely to continue the trend already seen
today, away from jobs that can be automated and into jobs where
the human perspective is vital. But the true possibilities are,
as always in the modern world, beyond predicting.
Change Disrupts Plans
Major shifts in demographics always cause
disruptions. Even when we know they are coming, we never prepare
for them.
Our plans are based on expectations of what will
happen. If things don't go as expected, we find that we have
"malinvested." Houston real estate was valuable and
looked to become even more so when times were good for the oil
business there; when the fortunes of the oil business changed,
Houston real estate was found to have been overbuilt, overpriced,
and many millions of dollars were lost.
Lengthening life spans push people toward taking
a longer-term perspective, but rapid rates of change force a
shorter-term perspective in investments. Turbulence in technology
and in governmental monetary policy have already shortened time
horizons. Businesspeople once routinely built plants with a
thirty-year useful life. Today, the rate of change is too fast,
and uncertainty regarding inflation and potential changes in tax
laws is too great for such investments to make sense. Faster
change will shrink time horizons further.
Governments have taken on themselves the burden
of looking a lifetime ahead, and the Social Security
Administration is in for some rough times. When Otto von
Bismarck, Germany's Iron Chancellor, came up with the notion of a
guaranteed old age pension, it was a cynically clever and
low-cost way to gain popular goodwill. So few people lived to age
sixty-five that the amounts paid out in pensions were a pittance.
After watching the German experiment for a handful of years,
other governments began following suit. None of them expected a
world like ours where a baby girl born in the United States today
has an average life expectancy of 78.4 yearsdouble
that of Bismarck's timeand even this estimate is based on
the faulty assumption that her medical care will be no better
than her great-grandmother's was.
At present, the Social Security Administration
has two models: one they call "positive" and one they
call "negative." In the "positive" model,
people work like dogs until old age, retire, and promptly
diepresumably before they've had a chance to collect
substantial social security or medical benefits. In the
"negative" model, people retire early, develop
illnesses that require medical intervention, and then live a long
time making doctor visits and hospital stays during those years.
Plans based on these models deserve to be disrupted. A better,
more realistic scenario would have people living and able to
support themselves for a long time, with illnesses that can be
handled easily and inexpensively. Present social security
benefits are enough to provide a certain standard of
livingfood, housing, transportation, and so forth. In a
future of great material wealth, these benefits will be easy to
provide, and present projections of economic woe resulting from
an aging population will seem quaint.
Coping with Change
Back in the seventies, author Alvin Toffler
brought out a book called Future Shock, describing how
disturbing rapid change is for people. The book was a
best-seller, but how much actual future shock has been seen in
the past decade? Most people seem to have come through the last
two decades pretty much all right, not in a state of shock at
all. Rather than being shocked by technology, they are instead
annoyed about pollution and traffic.
Does this mean Toffler was wrong in predicting
future shock? It's true that technology has been advancing
rapidly in many areas over the past twenty years. But consider
the average person's home life: How much of this rapid
technological advance has shown up there? A great deal, yet most
of it is hidden, unlike the earlier part of the century, where
obvious change was the norm. Electric lights and appliances,
automobiles, telephones, airplanes, radio, and television
affected almost everyone's private life. One person's life could
span the time from horse-and-buggy travel to watching the Moon
landings on television.
In contrast, the past twenty years have seen new
technologies move more quietly into the home. The VCR and
microwave oven don't seem nearly as revolutionary as earlier
inventions. Telephone answering machines are useful but haven't
caused major changes in lifestyles. Fax machines are handy, but
they're much like having very fast mail, and as this is written,
fax machines aren't yet in most homes. So it's not surprising
that the average person has felt little future shock lately. New
medicines taken as pillswhich may be radically
improvedlook just like the earlier pills. The computerized
bills that come in the mail aren't any more exciting to pay than
the old human-prepared bills.
This situation is unlikely to last. How much
longer can technology advance so rapidly in so many fields
without major effects on our lifestyles? There's been a respite
from future shock in the last three decades; people have had a
chance to catch their breath. When nanotechnology arrives, will
future shock arrive with it?
Some segments of society today are already
getting practice in dealing with rapid technological advance.
Those getting the most vigorous workout are in the computer
field, where a machine two years old is regarded as obsolete, and
software must be updated every few months to keep abreast of the
new developments.
But has this terrific rate of progress been
dizzying or overwhelming? Not for the consumeron the
contrary, computers have become easier to use. In the 1960s, the
New Math that was introduced into American grade schools and
junior high schools included extensive study of arithmetic using
numbers written in something other than the familiar base 10.
This was to prepare the "Adults of Tomorrow" for
"The Computer Age" in which we would all be writing
assembly language computer programs in binary (base 2) code. But
customers now purchase software rather than write it
themselvesthey need never deal with computer languages at
all, much less a primitive assembly language. The rapid increase
of computer speed has helped make computers easier to use.
This progression has occurred many times before:
Cars started off with external hand cranks, then advanced to
starters you could yank from the comfort of the driver's seat;
now starters perform invisibly when you turn the key in the
ignition. This pattern will surely continue. First, some people
will adapt to the technology, but in the long run the technology
will adapt to us. The more flexible and powerful the technology,
the more easily it will adapt.
Seen from a distance, seemingly trivial patterns
of adaptation form part of a larger process that has marked the
last century: The Western world has begun to invent mechanisms to
handle a world of persistent change. Our mechanisms are by no
means perfect or painless, as any unemployed person can testify.
Employment agencies and headhunters for job seekers; unemployment
and severance packages to ease job transitions; on-the-job
training, continuing education, retraining, specialized seminars
to update professional skills, professional associations,
networking, community resources centers, government training
programs, and volunteer agencies are just a few of the inventions
dealing with change and transition. Consumer information
services, regulatory agencies, and environmental organizations
are others. The most effective will endure. More options will
continue to be invented.
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