"Nanotechnology: Bringing Digital Control to Matter" Eric Drexler at O'Reilly Emerging Tech conf 2003 Cory Doctorow doctorow@craphound.com -- The major data-storage system on your computer is the bacteria that colonizes it -- 1MB/bacterium. The major US source of electronic goods are the corn-fields of Iowa. If something exists, we can make more stuff like that. Processes on this scale are cheap, low-powered, clean and powerful. We won't use biology, but the principles that biology demonstrates. Aircraft are like birds, but they don't have feathers. Chemistry shows the range of things that can be made. We have more materials at our disposal than occur in nature: the full range of possible structures that can be made from atoms. Mechanical engineering: we can build robotic arms. We can build them at nanoscale. Conventional machines are big clumps of atoms, -- we can make similar things from small clumps of atoms. These small clumps are comparable in size to living cells: 1000nm^2. As Feynman said, there's plenty of room at the bottom. Compsci: If you work with bits (or atoms) and manipulate things so that things are either exactly right or exaclty wrong -- binary, bonded/nonbonded -- you can make very general-purpose machines that can do billions of sequential ops with high reliability. Intel will be a nanotech company in a year. This threshholded machinery yeilds intricate systems that can build more intricate systems. Nanomanufacturing will give us a new basis for putting goods into the world. -- Your body is built and maintained by molecular machine systems. If we can build computer-controlled molecular systems, we can do molecular repair on ourselves -- surgical control at the molecular scale. This will be cleaners, too, since the control will be so fine as to eliminate pollutants. Downsides: Grey goo. Convert the biosphere to dust in short order. This wouldn't be accidental: it would have to be deliberate malice. Building a car is hard: building self-replicating cars won't be accidental. Not motivated by economic concerns and can be supressed. There are also potential military systems -- fast, cheap, precise and smart. A destabilizing arms-race. The existing nuke superpower (the US) could be overturned. We should avoid this by keeping the US ahead. -- The media calls me an opponent of nano and a proponent. Both are true. Faulty analogies caused people to draw erroneous conclusions about the space-program. The same is happening with nano. Characterized as the ability to have many little fingers to manipulate atoms. No one has ever proposed this. But the chief advisor of the National Nano Project has invented this as a strawman. Nano is where computation has to go to keep the Moore's Law curve healthy. We're edging toward a key nano threshhold. -- Ananlogy: three boxes, one 1-D, the other 2-D, the third 3-D You used to need a flute player, a palace, etc, in order to hear orchestral music. Today, we have CD players. Once, if you wanted a 2-D shape of a letter A, you needed a typesetter with an A slug, and a B slug for B, etc. You had to be wealthy. Today, a general purpose machine can do it. Now, if you want to build a car, you need to be GM. But tomorrow, digital systems will control the placement of the finest elements of matter. They will produce any 3D pattern of materials the way that a CD player can play any sound and a word-processor can print any words. The difference is that a unviersal matter-shaping engine can make more matter-shaping engines. You can ask it to make any object -- a computer more powerful than all of today's computers combined, SARS immunity, etc. People will be able to make bad things -- weapons systems, etc. -- The future of digital systems is molecular. The future of the material world is digital. -- Q&A Will the DRM and DMCA be the thing that keep us from making bad goods with nano? The challenge will be to maximise liberty while still restricting bad tech. The prospect of regulating nano makes me queasy about the possibility of centralized control. Kevin Kelly asks: what's changed in the past 20 years since you started giving this speech? A: Not much, seems like. The cultural response was surprising. Richard Smalley is a jerk. The range of useful computation extends far beyond digital systems we've built to date. People will come up with better stuff. Ken Thompson compiler hacks are the kind of controls being proposed today. Nanogoods won't be purely non-rivalrous -- we'll have to develop new ways of organizing themselves.