The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (43 page)

You and people around you have scared our children.

I would point out to Smalley that earlier critics also expressed skepticism that either worldwide communication networks or software viruses that would spread across them were feasible. Today, we have both the benefits and the vulnerabilities from these capabilities. However, along with the danger of software viruses has emerged a technological immune system. We are obtaining far more gain than harm from this latest example of intertwined promise and peril.

Smalley’s approach to reassuring the public about the potential abuse of this future technology is not the right strategy. By denying the feasibility of nanotechnology-based assembly, he is also denying its potential. Denying both the promise and the peril of molecular assembly will ultimately backfire and will fail to guide research in the needed constructive direction. By the 2020s molecular assembly will provide tools to effectively combat poverty, clean up our environment, overcome disease, extend human longevity, and many other worthwhile pursuits. Like every other technology that humankind has created, it can also be used to amplify and enable our destructive side. It’s important that we approach this technology in a knowledgeable manner to gain the profound benefits it promises, while avoiding its dangers.

Early Adopters

Although Drexler’s concept of nanotechnology dealt primarily with precise molecular control of manufacturing, it has expanded to include any technology in which key features are measured by a modest number of nanometers (generally less than one hundred). Just as contemporary electronics has already quietly slipped into this realm, the area of biological and medical applications has already entered the era of nanoparticles, in which nanoscale objects are being developed to create more effective tests and treatments. Although nanoparticles are created using statistical manufacturing methods rather than assemblers, they nonetheless rely on their atomic-scale properties for their effects. For example, nanoparticles are being employed in experimental biological tests as tags and labels to greatly enhance sensitivity in detecting substances such as proteins. Magnetic nanotags, for example, can be used to bind with antibodies, which can then be read using magnetic probes while still inside the body. Successful experiments have been conducted with gold nanoparticles that are bound to DNA segments and can rapidly test for specific DNA sequences in a sample. Small nanoscale beads called quantum dots can be programmed with specific codes combining multiple colors, similar to a color bar code, which can facilitate tracking of substances through the body.

Emerging microfluidic devices, which incorporate nanoscale channels, can run hundreds of tests simultaneously on tiny samples of a given substance. These devices will allow extensive tests to be conducted on nearly invisible samples of blood, for example.

Nanoscale scaffolds have been used to grow biological tissues such as skin. Future therapies could use these tiny scaffolds to grow any type of tissue needed for repairs inside the body.

A particularly exciting application is to harness nanoparticles to deliver treatments to specific sites in the body. Nanoparticles can guide drugs into cell walls and through the blood-brain barrier. Scientists at McGill University in Montreal demonstrated a nanopill with structures in the 25- to 45-nanometer range.
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The nanopill is small enough to pass through the cell wall and delivers medications directly to targeted structures inside the cell.

Japanese scientists have created nanocages of 110 amino-acid molecules, each holding drug molecules. Adhered to the surface of each nanocage is a peptide that binds to target sites in the human body. In one experiment scientists used a peptide that binds to a specific receptor on human liver cells.
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MicroCHIPS of Bedford, Massachusetts, has developed a computerized device that is implanted under the skin and delivers precise mixtures of medicines
from hundreds of nanoscale wells inside the device.
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Future versions of the device are expected to be able to measure blood levels of substances such as glucose. The system could be used as an artificial pancreas, releasing precise amounts of insulin based on blood glucose response. It would also be capable of simulating any other hormone-producing organ. If trials go smoothly, the system could be on the market by 2008.

Another innovative proposal is to guide gold nanoparticles to a tumor site, then heat them with infrared beams to destroy the cancer cells. Nanoscale packages can be designed to contain drugs, protect them through the GI tract, guide them to specific locations, and then release them in sophisticated ways, including allowing them to receive instructions from outside the body. Nanotherapeutics in Alachua, Florida, has developed a biodegradable polymer only several nanometers thick that uses this approach.
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Powering the Singularity

We produce about 14 trillion (about 10
¹³
) watts of power today in the world. Of this energy about 33 percent comes from oil, 25 percent from coal, 20 percent from gas, 7 percent from nuclear fission reactors, 15 percent from biomass and hydroelectric sources, and only 0.5 percent from renewable solar, wind, and geothermal technologies.
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Most air pollution and significant contributions to water and other forms of pollution result from the extraction, transportation, processing, and uses of the 78 percent of our energy that comes from fossil fuels. The energy obtained from oil also contributes to geopolitical tensions, and there’s the small matter of its $2 trillion per year price tag for all of this energy. Although the industrial-era energy sources that dominate energy production today will become more efficient with new nanotechnology-based methods of extraction, conversion, and transmission, it’s the renewable category that will need to support the bulk of future energy growth.

By 2030 the price-performance of computation and communication will increase by a factor of ten to one hundred million compared to today. Other technologies will also undergo enormous increases in capacity and efficiency. Energy requirements will grow far more slowly than the capacity of technologies, however, because of greatly increased efficiencies in the use of energy, which I discuss below. A primary implication of the nanotechnology revolution is that physical technologies, such as manufacturing and energy, will become governed by the law of accelerating returns. All technologies will essentially become information technologies, including energy.

Worldwide energy requirements have been estimated to double by 2030, far
less than anticipated economic growth, let alone the expected growth in the capability of technology.
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The bulk of the additional energy needed is likely to come from new nanoscale solar, wind, and geothermal technologies. It’s important to recognize that most energy sources today represent solar power in one form or another.

Fossil fuels represent stored energy from the conversion of solar energy by animals and plants and related processes over millions of years (although the theory that fossil fuels originated from living organisms has recently been challenged). But the extraction of oil from high-grade oil wells is at a peak, and some experts believe we may have already passed that peak. It’s clear, in any case, that we are rapidly depleting easily accessible fossil fuels. We do have far larger fossil-fuel resources that will require more sophisticated technologies to extract cleanly and efficiently (such as coal and shale oil), and they will be part of the future of energy. A billion-dollar demonstration plant called FutureGen, now being constructed, is expected to be the world’s first zero-emissions energy plant based on fossil fuels.
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Rather than simply burn coal, as is done today, the 275-million-watt plant will convert the coal to a synthetic gas comprising hydrogen and carbon monoxide, which will then react with steam to produce discrete streams of hydrogen and carbon dioxide, which will be sequestered. The hydrogen can then be used in fuel cells or else converted into electricity and water. Key to the plant’s design are new materials for membranes that separate hydrogen and carbon dioxide.

Our primary focus, however, will be on the development of clean, renewable, distributed, and safe energy technologies made possible by nanotechnology. For the past several decades energy technologies have been on the slow slope of the industrial era S-curve (the late stage of a specific technology paradigm, when the capability slowly approaches an asymptote or limit). Although the nanotechnology revolution will require new energy resources, it will also introduce major new S-curves in every aspect of energy—production, storage, transmission, and utilization—by the 2020s.

Let’s deal with these energy requirements in reverse, starting with utilization. Because of nanotechnology’s ability to manipulate matter and energy at the extremely fine scale of atoms and molecular fragments, the efficiency of using energy will be far greater, which will translate into lower energy requirements. Over the next several decades computing will make the transition to reversible computing. (See “The Limits of Computation” in
chapter 3
.) As I discussed, the primary energy need for computing with reversible logic gates is to correct occasional errors from quantum and thermal effects. As a result reversible computing has the potential to cut energy needs by as much as a factor
of a billion, compared to nonreversible computing. Moreover, the logic gates and memory bits will be smaller, by at least a factor of ten in each dimension, reducing energy requirements by another thousand. Fully developed nanotechnology, therefore, will enable the energy requirements for each bit switch to be reduced by about a trillion. Of course, we’ll be increasing the amount of computation by even more than this, but this substantially augmented energy efficiency will largely offset those increases.

Manufacturing using molecular nanotechnology fabrication will also be far more energy efficient than contemporary manufacturing, which moves bulk materials from place to place in a relatively wasteful manner. Manufacturing today also devotes enormous energy resources to producing basic materials, such as steel. A typical nanofactory will be a tabletop device that can produce products ranging from computers to clothing. Larger products (such as vehicles, homes, and even additional nanofactories) will be produced as modular subsystems that larger robots can then assemble. Waste heat, which accounts for the primary energy requirement for nanomanufacturing, will be captured and recycled.

The energy requirements for nanofactories are negligible. Drexler estimates that molecular manufacturing will be an energy
generator
rather than an energy
consumer
. According to Drexler, “A molecular manufacturing process can be driven by the chemical energy content of the feedstock materials, producing electrical energy as a by-product (if only to reduce the heat dissipation burden). . . . Using typical organic feedstock, and assuming oxidation of surplus hydrogen, reasonably efficient molecular manufacturing processes are net energy producers.”
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Products can be made from new nanotube-based and nanocomposite materials, avoiding the enormous energy used today to manufacture steel, titanium, and aluminum. Nanotechnology-based lighting will use small, cool, light-emitting diodes, quantum dots, or other innovative light sources to replace hot, inefficient incandescent and fluorescent bulbs.

Although the functionality and value of manufactured products will rise, product size will generally not increase (and in some cases, such as most electronics, products will get smaller). The higher value of manufactured goods will largely be the result of the expanding value of their information content. Although the roughly 50 percent deflation rate for information-based products and services will continue throughout this period, the amount of valuable information will increase at an even greater, more than offsetting pace.

I discussed the law of accelerating returns as applied to the communication of information in
chapter 2
. The amount of information being communicated
will continue to grow exponentially, but the efficiency of communication will grow almost as fast, so the energy requirements for communication will expand slowly.

Transmission of energy will also be made far more efficient. A great deal of energy today is lost in transmission due to the heat created in power lines and inefficiencies in the transportation of fuel, which also represent a primary environmental assault. Smalley, despite his critique of molecular nanomanufacturing, has nevertheless been a strong advocate of new nanotechnology-based paradigms for creating and transmitting energy. He describes new power-transmission lines based on carbon nanotubes woven into long wires that will be far stronger, lighter, and, most important, much more energy efficient than conventional copper ones.
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He also envisions using superconducting wires to replace aluminum and copper wires in electric motors to provide greater efficiency. Smalley’s vision of a nanoenabled energy future includes a panoply of new nanotechnology-enabled capabilities:
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• Photovoltaics: dropping the cost of solar panels by a factor of ten to one hundred.
  
• Production of hydrogen: new technologies for efficiently producing hydrogen from water and sunlight.
  
• Hydrogen storage: light, strong materials for storing hydrogen for fuel cells.
  
• Fuel cells: dropping the cost of fuel cells by a factor of ten to one hundred.
  
• Batteries and supercapacitors to store energy: improving energy storage densities by a factor of ten to one hundred.
  
• Improving the efficiency of vehicles such as cars and planes through strong and light nanomaterials.
  
• Strong, light nanomaterials for creating large-scale energy-harvesting systems in space, including on the moon.
  
• Robots using nanoscale electronics with artificial intelligence to automatically produce energy-generating structures in space and on the moon.
  
• New nanomaterial coatings to greatly reduce the cost of deep drilling.
  
• Nanocatalysts to obtain greater energy yields from coal, at very high temperatures.
  
• Nanofilters to capture the soot created from high-energy coal extraction. The soot is mostly carbon, which is a basic building block for most nanotechnology designs.
  
• New materials to enable hot, dry rock geothermal-energy sources (converting the heat of the Earth’s hot core into energy).