Nano manufacturing development timeline (was Re: Nanotech arms raceworries: all smoke and no fire?)

From: Chris Phoenix (cphoenix_at_CRNano.org)
Date: 07/14/04 

Date: 14 Jul 2004 03:02:03 GMT

Richard Steven Hack wrote:
> If someone comes out with a fully developed assembler tomorrow, the
> issue might be how long it would be before it was developed into a
> weapon versus how long it would take for the technology to be used to
> complete the mapping of the human body and brain and genetics and then
> modify same to not produce psychopathy. Presumably the former would
> be quicker than the latter.

Yup.

> However, the probability of a fully developed assembler technology
> occurring in the next decade or two is quite unlikely.

If you could convince me of that, I'd radically rethink most of CRN's
statements and recommendations. But I've given it a lot of thought
already; I'll outline some arguments below.

> It is much
> more likely that nanotech applications to the biological sciences will
> progress at a pace even with nanotech development - as is the case
> with most technologies - applications follow development - with the
> result that nanotech will be applied more often to solving mental
> health and other biological programs (not to mention aging - the fear
> of death is the root of all evil) and by larger and better equipped
> organizations than those who would use it for negative purposes.

Medical applications of diamondoid molecular manufacturing will be
considerably harder than, say, projectile weaponry. I don't see why
biological applications would be expected to proceed so rapidly.

Medical applications of nanoscale technology are already being
developed. But this is a completely different technology set, and
there's no reason to expect development times to be correlated with
molecular manufacturing. And nanoscale technology is limited by the
sheer number of different pathways to explore and the diversity of
nanoscale phenomena. (Molecular manufacturing is less limited by this;
I'll get to that.)

> Speculation about whether nanotech will be more used as a weapon than
> as a technology for human development is poorly thought out.
>
> There are two time frames: the one before we have fully developed
> nanotech and the one after. The one before is where any possible
> threats may develop. The one after will see the transformation of the
> human species into something else ....

What do you see as "fully developed nanotech"? I think you mean when we
have the ability to build or tweak pretty much anything we want. In
that case, I'd agree that discussions of weapons and human development
don't make much sense in the "after" case.

But let me suggest another milestone, much closer. When we have the
ability to build what we want in even one high-performance chemical
family (e.g. diamondoid), to the point that we've achieved exponential
manufacturing, then we can ignore all the nanoscale stuff and build
high-performance devices using high-level design. I'm talking about a
levels-of-abstraction approach very similar to software engineering,
where the application programmer doesn't care what semiconductor, CPU,
or device driver is under the OS API.

Calculations based on simple scaling laws and basic mechanical
engineering imply about 6-8 orders of magnitude improvement in
computational density, computational efficiency, power density, and cost
per feature; and 2-4 orders of magnitude in mass per strength, energy
lost through friction, and fabrication time.

Assuming an intelligent but modest predesign effort, we could achive all
this within a few months of building the first mechanosynthetic
fabricator. These performance advances would require only a very small
number of molecular mechanical systems to be designed and built, then
reused and recombined.

Such drastic advances would make several aspects of the design process
much easier, leading to very rapid development of simple products. Of
course, "simple" is relative; they'd be simple compared to today's
software, but they could be quite complex compared to today's machines.

> In the earlier time frame, the issue is no different than any other
> technology - nuclear, biological or nanotech. In other words, those
> who are developing the tech will be far more advanced at it than those
> who are expropriating it for criminal or other negative purposes.

Those developing the tech may be the source of the problem. For
example, defending one's country isn't criminal and isn't usually
considered negative. But if this leads to a military buildup that leads
to war, the good intentions won't matter.

> We
> might have the nanotech equivalent of "crackers" but to extrapolate
> from that they will have fully developed nanotech and be able to wreak
> havoc on the world (or even much more than locally) is simply
> scare-mongering.

First, consider that the distinction between government military
organizations, paramilitary organizations, and criminal/terrorist
organizations is being eroded from several directions. These include
corporate contracting for military activity, technology sharing from
states to terrorists or future terrorists, and terrorist use of dual-use
or even civilian technology (e.g. airliners and computers).

Second, go back and study the performance estimates. Even the earliest
and crudest uses of this technology will be vastly more powerful than
anything we can build today. I think it's not exaggerating to say that
$10,000 could buy the resources to kill a million people. (On 9/11,
$50,000 killed 3,000 people.)

Would defenses be able to counteract offenses? First, the defenses have
to be invented. This is hard, because the possible attacks are so very
diverse. Second, the defenses have to be used. On a mass-vs-mass
basis, defending a large volume is very expensive compared to attacking
selected points within it. And defense in detail (of civilians) would
require substantial lifestyle changes and/or widespread adoption of
cutting-edge and unproven technology.

> ... wooly-minded speculation.

Do you consider what I've written here to be wooly-minded? I can show
calculations to back up my numbers.

Chris 

-- 
Chris Phoenix                                  cphoenix@CRNano.org
Director of Research
Center for Responsible Nanotechnology          http://CRNano.org

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