Foresight Update 29
Page 2
A publication of the Foresight Institute
 Inside
Foresight: Paradigm Shift in Progress
 As this issue of Update goes to
press, we've received a June 4 media advisory from the National
Science Foundation, forwarded by Senior Associate Richard Smith,
about a lecture on June 16:
Nobel Laureate Eyes Nanoscale Manufacturing
In New Engineering Lecture Series
Nobel Laureate Heinrich Rohrer, inventor of the scanning
tunneling microscope, will inaugurate a new National Science
Foundation engineering lecture series with a talk titled
"The Nanometer Age: Challenges and Chances."
Rohrer will discuss recent advances in precision nanoscale
science and technology, which will permit building things
molecule by molecule and heralding a class of made-to-order
materials with streamlined structures and properties. Ultra
precise medical instruments could permit surgeons to operate
on individual cells. Materials dozens of times stronger than
steel of the same weight could be produced. The ability to
manipulate molecules would greatly contribute to an emerging
field of science that explores how to arrange conditions so
that atoms spontaneously assemble into specific molecular
structures.
Rohrer and Gerd Binnig received the King Faisal Prize and the
Hewlett Packard Europhysics Prize in 1984, and the Nobel
Prize in Physics in 1986. Rohrer was inducted into the US
National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1994. He joined IBM's
Zurich research laboratory in 1963.
More information about the lecture and Rohrer is available on the
Web.
As Richard commented, "This is all getting to be
frighteningly mainstream! Methinks the paradigm shift has
begun."
It has indeed. Consider the current list of cosponsors for this
fall's Fifth
Foresight Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology:
- Argonne Mathematics and Computer Science Division
- Caltech Materials and Process Simulation Center
- Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science
- Elba Foundation (Italy)
- Institute for Molecular Manufacturing
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory NERSC
- Molecular Graphics Society of the Americas
- NASA Ames Numerical Aerospace Simulation Systems Division
- Ohio Supercomputer Center
- Rice University Center for Nanoscale Science and
Technology
- Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology Dept. of Computer
Science
- San Diego Supercomputer Center
- Stanford University Dept. of Materials Science and
Engineering
- USC Molecular Robotics Lab
- University of Wisconsin-Madison
- Washington University Lab. for the Study of Novel Carbon
Materials
This does looks very "mainstream." The increasing
frequency of these kinds of endorsements is making Foresight's
leadership wonder whether it's time to move toward taking on more
difficult issues and more advanced (i.e., less popular) positions
on those issues.
When Foresight started in 1986, we hoped to be able to jump right
into discussions of what nanotechnology and other powerful coming
technologies will mean for individuals, organizations, and
nations. We wanted to consider potential negative scenarios and
how they might be avoided through foresighted actions taken in
advance.
But the time was not ripe for these kinds of discussions. Because
the scientific community was not yet aware of--much less
accepting of-- the concept of molecular nanotechnology, those who
tried to discuss policy based on these concepts found it almost
impossible. The policy community must turn to scientists and
technologists for guidance on technical questions; without that
support, policy progress can't be made.
So Foresight backed off from our original strategy, focusing
instead on educating the technical community on nanotechnology.
It looks as though this paradigm shift is now well advanced. When
the conservative NSF uses ideas such as "building things
molecule by molecule," "made-to-order materials,"
and cell repair, we can be fairly sure that our first task is
basically completed.
What does this mean for Foresight and its sister organizations, Institute for Molecular Manufacturing
and Center for Constitutional Issues in Technology? IMM's charter
and strategy is not affected: conduct nanotechnology R&D,
building off its strength in computational nanotechnology. CCIT's
charter of public policy development is no longer premature--it
can move forward. And Foresight can now revert to its original
task of discussing the difficult issues raised by coming
technologies, focusing on nanotechnology, but increasingly
including others as well, since the various technologies will
interact.
What this means is that the original analysis of Foresight's
ideas--"sounds like science fiction"--will be heard
again. As Gayle Pergamit and I explained in a talk we gave at San
Francisco's Exploratorium for HardWired, even the
most realistic technology scenarios, when projected 30 years into
the future, do in fact sound like science fiction.
And we'll continue to have difficulties with the less-careful
segments of the media. Our run-in
with Scientific American may flare up
again--though their web coverage is increasingly friendly of
late. Peculiar quotes will still appear, such as the one
(mis)attributed to me by the New York Times wire
service, which used the word "forever" with respect to
human lifespan. (In fact, it was an audience member at the
Exploratorium who suggested this; Gayle and I corrected it, as
shown in the videotape.)
But progress can be expected here too, as our Web Enhancement
Project advances and is used for our upcoming Computer Security
Debate. Great progress is being made on these, in large part due
to the work of Terry Stanley, who will be developing ways of
better visualizing our various debates. For more on the four-way
connection between nanotechnology, computer security, web
enhancement, and improved media quality, see my column in Update
27 and ongoing progress
reports on the web.
1997 Senior Associate Gathering
In early May we had a "mini-Gathering" for the
Foresight, IMM and CCIT Senior
Associates. The reason for this modest characterization is
that we had just had our annual Gathering last
November, and this event in May was a transitional meeting to
our new spring schedule--we expect to have these annual Senior
Associate meetings in the spring from now on to avoid conflicting
with the fall technical conferences. We expected that not many
people would attend. Instead we got about fifty, which was an
ideal size for what turned into an educational weekend party
event.
Although these Gatherings are off-the-record to encourage frank
exchange of views and discussion of new companies, we do have a general schedule up
on the Web, and from that you'll see that we heard about Jim Von
Ehr's nanotechnology startup Zyvex; we heard from Artificial
Intelligence pioneer and Foresight advisor Marvin Minsky; we
heard about nanotechnology in space from Tom McKendree, and at
NASA Ames from Al Globus and Deepak Srivastava, life extension
issues from Thomas Landsberger and, of course, some technical
updates from Eric Drexler and Ralph Merkle, as well as quite a
few other topics, including a presentation on "Radical
High-tech Environmentalism" by yours truly. (Editor's Note:
see below for a more
detailed report on the Gathering.)
The real purpose of these events, however, is not only technical
discussion but also the networking that goes on. There is quite a
bit of discussion regarding employment and funding of new
companies, and that certainly is one of the main purposes of
these events from the Senior Associates' point of view.
We also got a new project off the ground at the Gathering: the
construction of a physical model using CPK models of the fine-motion
controller modeled for IMM by Eric Drexler. CPK models can be
expensive; however, because so many companies are moving from
physical models to computational models, we believe that we
should--in theory--be able to find these items as a donation.
There must be many sets that are no longer in use. So if you know
of either a university or, more likely perhaps, a pharmaceutical
company that is no longer using their CPK models, we're looking
for donations of these space-filling atomic models. Eventually
these will be made into a model of the fine-motion controller,
for which we will need approximately 3000 atoms from the CPK
model sets. If you know of CPK models that might be donated,
please contact us at the office.
Hypertext Pioneer Wins Major Technology Prize
One of Foresight's favorite Silicon Valley inventors is Doug
Engelbart, formerly of SRI, now of Bootstrap Institute. Doug has
many inventions to his credit, including the computer mouse, but
what we've always admired most is his foresighted early work on
hypertext systems, including Augment. So we were extremely
pleased to hear recently that Doug was awarded the Lemelson-MIT
Prize, the single largest cash prize ($500,000) given for
American invention and innovation.
Doug also looks forward to nanotechnology: at the award ceremony,
he said "In 20 or 30 years, you'll be able to hold in your
hand as much computing knowledge as exists now in the whole city,
or even the whole world."
Congratulations to Doug--we couldn't have made a better selection
ourselves for this prestigious prize. Join us in this wish by
visiting the Bootstrap
Institute on the Web and seeing what Doug is inventing today.
Web Hardware Matching Fund Needs $500
Those of you who keep up on news on the Foresight web site
know that there has been a new
matching fund established. Foresight is moving heavily into
having advanced graphics on our web site, and working with a
company called E-Spaces
has helped us locate some very reasonably-priced web talent.
However, there is a piece of hardware involved: we need a new
computer for one of our web developers.
We're already three-quarters of the way to our goal, but we need
the remaining $500 to complete the match. Please give us a call
at the office at 415-917-1122 or send e-mail to foresight@foresight.org
if you would like to help on this project. I can tell you that
the results for the Foresight web site should be quite
spectacular in terms of animated molecular machine graphics,
which are much more effective than words or still-shot graphics
at getting across, to both technical and non-technical people,
what it is that molecular manufacturing is going to be all about.
Back at the office
Those of you who keep up with Foresight's web site are aware
that our long-time office manager, Judy Hill, is leaving us. She
is moving on to write a book, having worked here for two years
longer than she meant to (or needed to). While we wish she would
stay, we understand how it is when there's a book that needs to
be born. Foresight's success to date is largely attributable to
Judy. No words are enough to thank her; we will miss her more
than we can say.
There's only one silver lining to this cloud. Against all
expectations, we've located someone to step in and try to fill
Judy's shoes. Tanya Jones, whom some of you may know from Alcor Life Extension Foundation,
joins us starting next week. Tanya's broad background, from her
coursework in statistics, to working for a Senator, to her
ongoing MBA training, make her well-qualified to make major
contributions to Foresight/IMM/CCIT. Elaine Tschorn and I will
need all her help once Judy departs.
Judy Hill (left) and Tanya Jones
If you call soon, you can say good-bye to Judy, wish her well,
and get her to introduce you to Tanya.
Chris Peterson
is Executive Director of Foresight Institute.
Web
Enhancement Project Moving Forward
In Update
27 we described HyperWave, a web-based software
program that appeared to fulfill all the requirements Foresight
has been trying to fill for years: fine-grained, extrinsic (i.e.
third party), bidirectional links in hypertext publishing.
We've run into an unexpected glitch with HyperWave. It does
indeed have fine-grained, extrinsic, bidirectional links;
however, these links are not visible in the original document.
Instead, alongside the original "target" document, the
reader is shown a list of URLs to visit. If the reader follows
one of that list of coarse-grained extrinsic links to the
commenting document, and then follows links back from that
commenting document to the target document, then at that time
the fine-grained nature of the commenting links becomes apparent.
That is, the commented-on section is highlighted in the target
document when visited from the commenting document. This may
sound a bit confusing, but the upshot of it all is that when
you're looking at a document and you want to see embedded
commenting links-they aren't there.
Our plans had included joining the Hyper-G Consortium in order to
obtain the source code, so that we could fix any glitches that
came up, such as this one. However, in the last few months the
open Hyper-G code has been commercialized into HyperWave and
source code can no longer be obtained, so our plans to alter it
will no longer work.
One of IMM's Senior Associates, Dave Forrest, is communicating
with the HyperWave company to see whether this needed feature can
be added. However, we have very little influence with this
company, and we can't depend on this as a solution.
When we hit this roadblock with HyperWave, we looked back at our
previous options—the options we considered prior to
selecting HyperWave as our first choice—and found that our
preferred solution involved extending
some public domain annotation code originally written by Wayne Gramlich.
The term annotation is frequently used to describe what
we've been calling extrinsic links or third-party comments.
Although Wayne now works for a startup company and cannot take
the project further other than as an advisor, Foresight is
fortunate to have located a programmer who is very interested in
completing this project, and who is available full-time and
immediately. This is Terry Stanley, who has a long-time interest
in argumentation visualization. So not only do we expect that
Wayne's code will be given a good front-end and installed on our
server, but also that Terry will continue to develop this code to
make some really useful and unique graphical methods for
argumentation visualization. This will be of great use when we
get into having real debates and find ourselves needing all the
support we can get in figuring out difficult, complex issues.
Special thanks to Ka-Ping Yee, whom some of you met at the recent
Senior Associate Gathering, for handling systems administration
for the project.
Web Enhancement is now moving fast—stay tuned for further news.
Senior
Associates Gather to Discuss
 Long-Term Consequences
& Near-Term Ventures
More than 50 Senior
Associates of Foresight and IMM gathered May 2-4 at the Palo
Alto Holiday Inn for what had originally been advertised as an
experimental "Mini-Gathering".
Because Senior Associate Gatherings are "off the
record", only a portion of what was presented can be
summarized here.
Foresight Chairman and IMM Research Fellow Eric Drexler opened
the Gathering Saturday morning by pointing to the "crisis in
foresight" that exists today in our society as more
researchers and other observers become convinced that
nanotechnology is feasible, but nevertheless remain focused on
short-term objectives and ignore the longer-term consequences of
nanotechnology for society and for the lives of individuals. The
increasing acceptance of nanotechnology as a legitimate
mainstream research topic now allows IMM and Foresight to move
the intellectual frontier "further west," he said.
Instead of studying the next steps in the development of
molecular systems technology and looking for intermediate
technological payoffs, IMM can focus clearly on the long term
objective of defining what systems to build once better tools for
positional chemical synthesis are available. Instead of defending
the feasibility of molecular manufacturing, Foresight can now
speak more clearly about the profound changes that molecular
manufacturing will bring. Specific examples of the latter cited
by Dr. Drexler include radically improving the environment,
manufacturing and living in space more cheaply than on Earth, and
biostasis of currently terminal patients by cryogenic
preservation in the expectation of vastly improved medical
services in the future.
A consequence of the current lack of foresight is that people
contemplate spending hundreds of billions of dollars to lower CO2
levels in the atmosphere, and agonize over the necessity of
making "difficult medical choices", all because they
ignore the profound changes to be brought by the advent of
molecular manufacturing, perhaps 20 or so years from now. Dr.
Drexler emphasized the necessity, when discussing such topics, of
making explicit the time horizon that is being considered. Many
critics of the proposition that nanotechnology will bring
profound changes automatically assume a 5 to 10-year horizon for
considering the future. In noting that there has been very little
negative press about nanotechnology since last year's Web-based debate with Scientific
American, Dr. Drexler concluded that very few critics
now argue that molecular nanotechnology is impossible, but he
encouraged the search for critics to identify specific challenges
in developing molecular nanotechnology so that sufficient thought
is applied to the problems of designing fault-tolerant complex
systems. (Editor's note: see page 13 for a report on a search for
nanocritics.)
Dr. Ralph Merkle of Xerox PARC described his recent work to
design the complete "intermediary metabolism" of a
proposed simple hydrocarbon assembler. The goal: to define a set
of molecular tools (and the reactions each tool would conduct)
such that a simple organic feedstock molecule could be converted
by these reactions to manufacture various stiff hydrocarbons,
including the complete set of tools used, producing more copies
of the tools than are consumed in the process. This proposal uses
butadiyne (C4H2) as the feedstock molecule,
a buckytube as the binding site for the butadiyne,
"vitamins" of silicon, tin, and transition metals for
catalysis, and tools for hydrogen abstraction, for hydrogen
deposition, for forming radicals on carbon, silicon, and tin
atoms, and for inserting carbenes and carbon dimers. It is
assumed that positional control of these tools is available, and
that the reactions occur either in a vacuum or in a noble gas
atmosphere. Dr. Merkle concluded that a hydrocarbon assembler
with a simple intermediary metabolism as described should be
feasible, but that more detailed calculations (including ab
initio quantum chemical modeling and molecular dynamics)
will be necessary to make sure that the proposed reactions will
all work. Further, the design and manufacture of tools small
enough to position several reactive molecular species in the
proper relative orientations remains a challenge. A draft
paper explaining Dr. Merkle's proposal in detail is available
at his Web site. Additional information and background is
available in Merkle's introductory
article "It's a small, small, small, small world".
After lunch, the focus shifted to current entrepreneurial
ventures. Considerable excitement greeted Jim Von Ehr's
announcement that he had founded Zyvex, the first molecular
nanotechnology development company, with the mission to develop
the first assembler. (See accompanying
story for details.)
Philippe Van Nedervelde outlined his ideas, plans and available
assets for EUTACTIX, his own nanotech start-up which is presently
in the early stages of formation. EUTACTIX's goal is to develop
and market high-quality yet affordable nanotechnology tools and
solutions via a suitable stepping stone: the sales of very
competitively priced quality SPMs. Philippe is presently scouting
for further partners and investors for this venture. He can be
reached by email at philippe@e-spaces.com or by phone at
32+14-88-18-63.
Turning from technology to society, Dave Krieger discussed
"Technopolitics and the 'California Ideology'". He
explored reasons why the Internet is more Libertarian than
society as a whole, and speculated that the economics of
molecular manufacturing will be similar to the economics of
computing in that all levels of society will benefit. Chris
Peterson elaborated upon the scenario in which molecular
nanotechnology provides increasing wealth and cheap access to
space so that increasingly the Earth will be reserved to support
a beautiful and restored environment. She encouraged the
audience, whenever possible, to debunk the mistaken notion that
high-tech can mean dirty tech. Ed Niehaus discussed public
opinion about nanotechnology, and how Foresight's approach
towards informing the public has evolved over the past 10 years.
It was suggested to make the topic more personal by publicizing
the stories of the people in the field, and to make movies that
depict a positive future arising from nanotechnology.
To close the first full day of the Gathering, the Senior
Associates were treated to a talk by Marvin Minsky that touched
on most of the significant areas of the intellectual universe.
Since adequately summarizing this talk is impossible, only a few
points made by Prof. Minsky are listed here:
- The deaths of Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan have left a
major social need unfilled since there was no #3
explainer of science and defender of rationality to
debunk the non-critical thinking rampant in our society.
- Students should choose to major in math rather than in
computer science because the half-life for knowledge in
computer science is only about four years.
- To improve performance, computers need to be designed
around three to five knowledge representations that they
can continuously compare, rather than be committed to one
given representation.
Sunday morning Tom McKendree presented a portion of his study
of the potential applications of molecular nanotechnology to the
industrialization of space, discussing the advantages and
limitations of solar sails and rotating tethers, and pointing out
that major advantages offered by molecular nanotechnology include
the bootstrapping made possible by self-replication, and the
importance of self-repair in the high radiation environment of
space.
Foresight and IMM Webmaster Jim Lewis discussed nanotechnology on
the Web, and noted that traffic to Foresight's
Web site has increased three-fold over the past year, and
traffic to IMM's Web site has
increased more than 12-fold (starting from a much lower base).
After discussing the current Web sites, attention turned to plans
to enhance the Web to make it into a true hypertext publishing
system. Terry Stanley presented Foresight's current plans for the
Web Enhancement Project based upon annotator software developed
by Wayne Gramlich to enhance existing server and browser
software. These plans
are elaborated in articles on Foresight's Web site.
After another superb buffet brunch, Al Globus and Deepak
Srivastava conveyed the excitement of the increasing commitment
of NASA to molecular nanotechnology, particularly at the NAS
Computational Molecular Nanotechnology Group, where new
postdoctoral positions in both computational and experimental
nanotechnology are available. They also described their recent
work on "Molecular Dynamics Simulation of Carbon Nanotube
Based Gears." More
information is available on the Web.
Turning from near-term progress to the implications of long-term
prospects, Thomas Landsberger shared his experience of the
deep-seated fears that many people have upon first hearing that
molecular nanotechnology will lead to significant life extension.
Many people worry about how long they will have to work if they
live very long lives, and about the large increase in population
that might result. An aspect of longevity to emphasize is that
people will live with the consequences of their actions for much
longer, and that therefore much greater foresight is called for.
Chip Morningstar addressed one of the difficulties faced by those
trying to rationally discuss the profound changes to be brought
by molecular nanotechnology: that "postmodernist"
scholars in the humanities appear to judge arguments in terms of
cleverness and politics, denying the existence of objective
analysis of reality. He has written an essay
about this topic available on the Web.
The last topic on the agenda was computer security. Dean Tribble
noted that molecular nanotechnology will require very reliable
software to control very complex systems. With today's software,
such systems would crash, be insecure, and be penetrable. After
establishing that intuition about security in the physical world
is not applicable to cyberspace, Tribble briefly discussed some
of the issues to be faced in making secure operating systems,
leading Gayle Pergamit to comment that perhaps the major problems
on the way to molecular nanotechnology will lie in the software,
not the hardware development. u
Jim Lewis is a Forsesight and IMM Senior Associate and
Webmaster for Foresight and IMM.
See next page for
pictures from the Gathering.
From Foresight Update 29, originally
published 30 June 1997.
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