It goes without saying, but in case some of you have not made the connection yet, this retraction means that there never was a valid link between vaccines and autism; not even one study can show this. Wakefield’s study was never able to be replicated (because of his poor and dishonest methods), and every scientific study conducted following his that attempted to find a similar link was unsuccessful. Scientists have been saying for years that there must have been something fishy with his study to have gotten that result, but the public (at least a large portion of it) would not listen. Now even Wakefield himself has said that his study is invalid, and yet the supporters remain.

I find it very interesting that there was so little media coverage of the retraction as compared to the attention the paper got when it first came out. One would think that news of false evidence provided to support a false theory of autism would at least be as big of a story, if not bigger. However, that was not the case. Incidentally, I predicted this would happen the very moment I read the press release.

There are a few reasons for this reaction.

First, I must clarify that the “Anti-Vaccine” crowd is a diverse group, each sub-type with their own agenda and reason for believing in the theory so vehemently.

The first group of believers are the Anti-Pharma crowd. These people have been looking for an opportunity to nail the pharmaceutical industry for years, and this was their golden opportunity. So because of their hatred of all things big-drug-company related, no way are they going to back off from their offensive. In their mind, this one study doesn’t matter; the pharmaceutical companies and the government are all out to screw the public any way they can. Some of these types of believers are successful in getting general conspiracy theorist-types on-board, because it just sounds like such a great story.

Another type is the General Anti-Vaccine crowd. These people have been against vaccines specifically for probably their whole lives. They think that injecting live bacteria into our bodies does us more harm then good, and so they are anti-vaccine, anti-flu shot, the whole ball of wax. I feel that while this group may be well-intended, they are grossly misinformed about the science behind what vaccines are and how they work. I have some friends who fall into this category, and I have lost my voice arguing over this topic over and over. Some people just refuse to listen to science long enough to understand it, and once they make up their mind, the conversation is closed.

A third type of believer is the Autism Parent. Now, this is the group I really want to discuss, because I think I understand where they are coming from and why. Because of their unique circumstance (having a child with autism), they are easily susceptible to arguments made by the other two groups, the Anti-Vacs and the Anti-Pharmas, and they are practically preyed upon to join the cause. The Autism Parent is the group I can sympathize with, because I think I’ve had some insight recently as to their perspective on this whole debate and why they refuse to give up on the Vaccine Theory.

The Timing

First of all, the timing of the onset of symptoms coincides with the timing of when children get their first round of vaccines, so it seems natural to point to the vaccine as the cause.

Many parents have reported that their child was fine until the day they got their vaccines, and then the decline began right afterward. Maybe that was the case; I cannot say for sure, because I wasn’t there, and we can only go on what we hear from parents.

However, it is a common phenomenon to have a confirmation bias when recalling events like this, ones that have a high emotional connection. You are more likely to remember the events as falling into that exact time frame because of the unconscious desire to attribute a specific cause, and every other piece of evidence that you can recall will seem to fit into that schema to support it.

I am not saying the parents are lying or making things up in the least; this is a naturally occurring cognitive bias that seems 100% true in the mind of the person recalling the events, and happens frequently.

In fact, the timing of the onset of symptoms is a factor in the next point I am going to make as well.

“Something” to Believe In

They need answers—a reason why, how, when, and where their child developed the disorder, and they need the answers now. I have worked in the field of psychology with children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) for over seven years now, and have spoken with many, many parents about the potential causes of autism. The overriding feeling I get from parents is the frustration of not knowing how it happened to their child.

Most of the children I have seen come from families with highly intelligent parents—doctors, professors, highly specialized technicians, and other fields that take significant intellectual ability to achieve in. Siblings of children with ASD are often typically developing, although may have some quirky traits of their own. All in all though, it would seem that the autism came out of nowhere.

When this happens, the first thing you want to know is why. What did we do wrong? Was it something during the pregnancy? Was it some mystery recessive gene that was passed on? Was it something that my child was exposed to as an infant?

One reason why autism can be especially distressing for parents is because usually, the child will start out as a normally developing infant, reaching the typical milestones- responding to their name with eye contact, playing with toys, and beginning to develop language. Then around 18 months of age, they start regressing. They suddenly stop making eye contact. They lose what language they had. They stop exploring the environment with the variety and vigor that other toddlers do. And this regression is what usually frightens parents into getting their child evaluated.

I knew all of this from an academic standpoint as a result of my education, but it wasn’t until I saw a family’s video compilation of their son from birth to the emergence of autistic symptoms, that I really felt the pain of what it must have been like to witness it in real time. Am I saying I know exactly what it feels like to be a parent of a child with ASD? No. Not even close. But when I saw that video of my client as a baby—babbling, responding to his name, playing with toys, and then watched what followed—gradually losing the few words he had, no longer smiling and cooing, no interest in toys, the distant look in his eyes that didn’t recognize the sound of his name, the parents begging him to look at them with the sound of sorrowful desperation clearly in their voices, I started crying myself.

To have a child born with a disability is heart-wrenching enough. But when your child is born and seems healthy, parents breathe a sigh of relief. They relax a little, feeling fortunate that they escaped the risk of the genetic roulette wheel and came out a winner with a healthy baby. It is once you start feeling confident that everything is fine that the symptoms begin to emerge. That feeling of the rug being jerked out from beneath you when the regression starts out of nowhere is what many parents describe as the shot to the heart.

Just as a parent of a child who has some type of debilitating illness or physical defect needs to know what it is and how they contracted it, parents of children with ASD need an answer as well. Other illnesses and disorders can be traced back to genetics, or a specific toxin exposure, or a defect in an organ, or at least something semi-concrete. Parents of children with ASD need to have an answer as to why it happened, so they can ease their mind. This gives them some kind of closure, in a time when they are feeling so helpless. The dissonance of not having an answer is one of the most painful aspects of this disorder; being so out of control of the entire situation. Most importantly, the parents need to know that it wasn’t something they did to their child. To have an outside agent, or cause, for the disorder gives them peace of mind.

If you can understand just how desperate these parents are for an answer, and how they endured almost 20 years of inconclusive research to provide it, when the Vaccine Theory of Autism came along, it was like manna sent from heaven. They thought, finally, we know where it came from, and it was nothing we could have anticipated at the time. It was a specific thing, a shot of bacteria or mercury entered the bloodstream, and it reacted with their child’s DNA, and this all resulted in autism. A sigh of relief was expelled in many a homes when this news came out. However, there is still that lingering guilt that says, “Could I have done anything to prevent this?” And that is where the anti-vaccine campaign comes in. By being an activist in the campaign against vaccines and bring the “facts” to the public, they feel they are saving someone’s child from developing an ASD, saving another parent from debilitating heartache.

They Need a Champion

So far, the reasons I mentioned explain why they passionately supported the Vaccine Theory in the first place, before they knew the real facts behind it. But even now, after the retraction, why do they still cling to this belief?

Enter Jenny McCarthy.

There was a Time magazine article back in February titled “The Autism Debate: Who’s Afraid of Jenny McCarthy?” in which they interviewed the celebrity Autism Mom about her son’s progress and her feelings on the retraction of the Wakefield paper, among other things. Without getting too much into the content (you can follow that link to read the excellent four-page article), I will just point out a few things that are relevant here:

• Jenny McCarthy (JmC, as I like to refer to her) still believes the vaccines gave her son autism, even though Thimerosal (the mercury-containing organic compound) has not been used in vaccines since around 2000, and her son Evan, diagnosed with autism, is seven years old. You do the math. Initially, it was the Thimerosal that was to blame, but now she just blames the vaccines in general, despite lack of confirmatory evidence.
• JmC claims her son was “cured” of his autism after years of widely varying types of treatments, most of them not recognized as valid treatments for autism. Some now question whether or not Evan even had an ASD; his symptoms mimicked another disorder, Landau-Kleffner Syndrome.
• JmC is quite charismatic and believable, and makes parents want to trust her. She is warm, compassionate, and sympathetic to their plight. She cries with them, gives them her personal phone number, and basically becomes the BFF for every parent of a child with autism.

Point number three is the key here. JmC is the savior every parent has been waiting for.

Parents of children with ASD can get emotionally weary, mentally taxed, and feel hopeless about their child’s future. It is difficult to keep high spirits every day, when the progress can be so painstakingly slow, that it gets nearly impossible to keep the positive energy going, cheering on every new little gain. Parents need to keep their hopes up. They need to keep believing that everything they are doing, the hours and hours of therapy, and the costly schools and treatments, are going to help their child to lead a more normal life someday.

JmC provides that hope. She is relentless in her optimism about “curing autism”, relentless in her fight against “the system”, relentless in making sure everyone knows about the supposed dangers of vaccines, and relentless in making sure that every child with autism is given a chance at a better life. That dedication to every child with autism, however misplaced her reasons, methods, and beliefs about the cause, is what gives her star-power in the eyes of parents.

Her unending enthusiasm in “fighting the Big Fight” is what gives parents the energy to keep going. Even though I feel she is dead wrong in her opinions regarding almost everything (and is the leading cause for the growing population of un-vaccinated kids), she is one dedicated woman. And honestly, I think that is why even if some parents don’t really believe in her reasons behind her activism, they still support her because they need her activism. When parents feel like everything in the world is going against them, it probably feels good to have someone in their corner, fighting for their kid, even if it is a crazy woman.

So I guess the final point I am making here is that everyone needs a hero, and as it turns out, JmC is the hero for the autism community, at least until another one emerges. For the sake of the science community, un-vaccinated children, and the future children of the world, let’s hope that happens sooner rather than later.

We’re witnessing what amounts to no less than a mass exodus to virtual worlds and online game environments. - Edward Castronova

Here’s a video of Jane McGonigal at the 2010 TED (the place for tech, entertainment, and Wall Street elites to rub elbows) conference. In it, she talks about the power of online games. Worth watching.

Some useful stats from her presentation include:

• Active online gamers spend 10,000 hours of play by the time they are 21 (almost as much as the time spent in school).
• There are 500 million active online gamers worldwide (that will grow to 1.5 billion in the next 10 years).
• Three billion hours a week are spent playing online games.

She also hits on some useful observations: people game to this degree because it makes more sense than real life, and gaming is a form of personal super empowerment.

However, at this point the presentation breaks down. McGonigal then proceeds to think of ways gamers can be used to do things (which plays well with the users at TED). While I give her props for thinking about ways to generate ideas on how to fix global problems, she entirely misses the big idea.

Here is the big idea. For active online gamers, real life is broken. It doesn’t make any sense. Effort isn’t connected to reward. The path forward is confused, convoluted, and contradictory. Worse, there’s a growing sense that the entire game is being corrupted to ensure failure. So why play it?

They don’t. They retreat to online games. Why? Online games provide an environment that connects what you do (work, problem solving, effort, motivation level, merit) in the game to rewards (status, capabilities, etc.). These games also make it simple to get better (learn, skill up, etc.) through an intuitive just-in-time training system. The problem is that this is virtual fantasy.

So the really big idea isn’t figuring out how to USE online gamers for real world purposes (as in the dirty word: crowdsourcing—the act of other people to do work for you for FREE—blech!). Instead, it’s about finding a way to use online games to make real life better for the gamers. In short, turn games into economic darknets that work in parallel and better than the broken status quo systems. As in: economic games that connect effort with reward. Economic games with transparent rules that tangibly improve the lives of all of the players in the REAL WORLD.

This isn’t tech utopian. It’s reality. The global electronic marketplace and the political system that currently dominates our lives is at root a game but with hidden rule sets. As a result, it’s a game that being run for the benefit of the game designers to the detriment of the players. The reason we keep playing is that we don’t have any choice. Let’s invent something better and compete with it. Let’s provide people with a choice.

A key element in making a character inhuman, particularly scary robots, seems to be a single, red, cycloptic eye. HAL 9000, the grandfather of the Evil Red Eye, gave us the cylon, the Terminator’s exposed eye, and the aforementioned navigator from Wall-E, among a host of other, lesser progeny. But there are three notable exceptions to this rule that demonstrate how good characterization can overcome a trope.

Half-Life 2’s Dog, Caprica’s Serge, and Star Wars’ R2-D2 are robots that are almost immediately endearing, despite having single glowing eye (a la HAL) and an inhuman construction. Dog is a towering, immensely-strong, home-built hulk, Serge is a svelte, iPod-inspired, teardrop robot with a very classy demeanor, and R2 is basically a mailbox. None are recognizably human, though Dog is arguably mammalian (his knuckle lope is a mix of gorilla/chimp and giraffe locomotion). What is critical is that none have a face per se. Dog and R2 lack a voice, but are extremely expressive with their sounds (much like Wall-E and Luxo). Alternatively, Serge is utterly stoic, but has a weird lilt to his voice that makes him strangely likable. What is it that makes these characters work?

First, let’s take a quick look at humanoid lovable robots. Two examples that spring to mind are Mr. Butlertron from Clone High and Data from Star Trek: TNG. Both combine tropes of robots with human features. In terms of appearance, Data is fully human (and fully functional: WINK) in appearance, but has stark yellow eyes and inhumanely pale skin. Mr. Butlertron moves around on wheels, is visibly metal, has an antenna, and pincer hands, but also a mustache. Both wear clothing. Both Data and Mr. Butlertron have a robotic manner of speaking, with Mr. Butlertron being a bit auto-tuned and Data being stilted. It is all the more striking, then, that both are highly altruistic and affectionate. Mr. Butlertron gives great relationship advice and is loved by high schoolers, while Data demonstrates unwavering loyalty, selflessness, and kindness. Their lack of humanity is compensated by their immense interest in and love of humans and the human condition. They are easy to identify with and see as being essentially human.

Part of the reason we can understand Data and Mr. Butlertron at that level is because they can speak. Interestingly, the ability to speak actually reduces the visceral level of connection we have with the robotic character. In between the speaking androids (Data, Mr. Butlertron) and the one-eye non-hominids (Dog, R2, Serge) are non-speaking hominids like H.E.L.P.eR, the Iron Giant, and Wall-E. Ok, so the Iron Giant and Wall-E have like ten words in their combined vocabulary, but you get my point.

The weird aspect of this is that the immediate emotional bond to these characters is increased by their simple form of communication. Because they are not appealing to our higher thought processes but instead to more rudimentary levels of communication – voice tone, body language, and direct action. When the Iron Giant picks up Hogarth mistaking him for dead, or when H.E.L.P.eR hugs Brock in forgiveness, or when Wall-E goes still after being electrocuted, the impact is in the gut. Did cry watching The Iron Giant or Wall-E? I bet you did. The ability to elicit empathy shows powerful characterization, despite a lack of speech. Ultimately, however, these characters are still humanoid, with distinguishable faces and humanish body shape. They’re still too easy to love; we requirest a little lower layer.

And thus we return to Dog, R2, and Serge. What is it that makes them so endearing? Not quite pets, for they are clearly independent and higher functioning, certainly not human, or even full persons. Yet Dog saves Gordon and Alyx and shows distress, much in the way R2 helps the rebels, antagonizes C-3po, and screams in pain. Serge, alternatively, is impossibly proper, a spoof on the reserved-to-the-point-of-repressed butler, his very construction echoing the stiff, arms-at-the-sides, up-right, stance. They look the way they act. Most importantly, unlike the other robots, from Data to Wall-E, Dog, R2, and Serge lack faces. In fact, each only has one eye, which, if we stretch “eye is the window to the soul” the metaphor a bit, might be said that the self of each of these robots lack the depth of their binocular brethren.

What we see in these characters are the artifices of humanity stripped away, and movement into the core of personhood. Each character’s styling as a robot, that is, as entities of pure function, is a very direct reflection of that character’s personality and level of personhood. All three levels of robots that I’ve discussed here, ranging from human-personhood androids, to complex-personhood hominid robots, to limited-personhood non-hominid robots, reflect that our society already understands the different levels at which an entity can have a sense of self, and that we visualized that through the amount of humanness portrayed in a given robot. While I haven’t finished the series yet, I’d be willing to make the guess that Cylons in the new BattleStar Galactica look fully human because they have absolute, full personhood, to the point of having a complex culture representing extended, external personhood.

Robots, as I’ve shown, are one of the best symbols our culture has for representing the degrees of personhood because they are pure function and pure construction.

The statement above might not be true. But then again it might.

We can never know what that fetus who was aborted or miscarried yesterday in Shanghai—or somewhere else in the world—would have done had he or she lived.

The contingent nature of history, both staggeringly complex and mystifyingly simple, is nicely illustrated in this familiar rhyme:

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

Upon seemingly the smallest of events, the whole course of future development may hinge.

I’m currently reading a thought-provoking book called What If?: The World’s Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been:

What if Hitler had not attacked Russia when he did? He might have moved into the Middle East and secured the oil supplies the Third Reich so badly needed, helping it retain its power in Europe. What if D-Day had been a failure? The Soviet Union might have controlled all of Europe. What if Sennacherib had pressed the siege of Jerusalem in 701 B.C.? Then the nascent, monotheistic Jewish religion might never have taken hold among the people of Judah—and the daughter religions of Christianity and Islam would never have been born.

So suggest some of the many first-rate contributors to this essay collection. One of them is classicist Josiah Ober, who suggests that if Alexander the Great had died at the age of 21 instead of 32, Greece would have been swallowed up by Persia and Rome, and the modern Western world would have a much different sensibility—and probably little idea of democratic government.

Still other contributors are Stephen E. Ambrose, Caleb Carr, John Keegan, David McCullough, and James McPherson, who examine a range of scenarios populated by dozens of historical figures, including Sir Walter Raleigh, Chiang Kai-shek, Robert E. Lee, Benito Mussolini, and Themistocles. The result is a fascinating exercise in historical speculation, one that emphasizes the importance of accident and of roads not taken in the evolution of human societies across time.

This brilliant book makes clear how uncertain the direction of history really is. Flukes, accidents, and surprises—completely unpredictable events—repeatedly have influenced the outcome of important military confrontations that shaped the world we live in to an unimaginably large extent.

It is thus compellingly obvious that predicting the future course of events from the standpoint of an analyst in 700 BC or 700 AD (or, for that matter, 1930 AD) would have been a pathetically futile effort.

That being the case, how can we have any confidence that predictions about our own future will have any more value?

For example, what if Al Gore had been granted the election he won in 2000? How might that have affected the military and economic history we have recently experienced?

Which events of the year 2010 or 2015 or 2020 will radically influence the world we will inherit in 2040 or 2050?

The startling and humbling conclusion we must draw is that we cannot now predict the most important events to come. The best we can hope for is to develop a roughly vague set of future probabilities that might be most likely to occur.

What that means for us here at the IEET is the importance of focusing on resilience in selecting the policies we propose and support. Since we, along with everyone else, are demonstrably unable to plan for specific outcomes, our best bet is to emphasize choices that will provide society with the largest range of responsive actions depending on how things actually turn out.

History is contingent. The future, therefore, demands effective contingency planning.

But it’s often more useful to think of compassion on the level of patterns.

The pattern of “losing one’s wife” exists in both Bob and Jim. Its instance in Bob and its instance in Jim have an intrinsic commonality, and when these two instances of the same pattern come to interact with each other, a certain amount of joy ensues—a certain amount of increasing unity.

Compassion is about the minds containing patterns, adopting dynamics that allow these patterns to unify with other patterns that are “external” to the containing mind.

It is about individual minds not standing in the way of pattern-dynamics that seek unity and joy.

The tricky thing here is that individual minds want to retain their individuality and integrity—and if the patterns they contain grow too much unity with “outside” patterns, this isolated individuality may be threatened.

The dangers of too much compassion are well portrayed by Dostoevsky in The Idiot, via the tale of the protagonist Prince Myshkin.

There seem to be limits to the amount of compassion that a mind can possess and still retain its individuality and integrity. However, it seems that (unlike Myshkin) mighty few humans are pushing up against these limits in their actual lives!

And of course, transhuman minds will likely be capable of greater compassion than human minds. If they have more robust methods of maintaining their own integrity, then they will be able to give their patterns more freedom in growing unity with external patterns.

Should Compassion Be Maximized?

Should compassion be maximized? This is a subtle issue.

From the point of view of the individual, maximization of compassion would lead to the dissolution of the individual.

From the point of view of the cosmos, maximization of compassion would cause a huge burst of joy, as all the patterns inside various minds gained cross-mind unity.

But joy is about increase of patternment. The question is whether, after every mind wholly opened up to every other mind and experienced this burst of compassion, there would still be a situation where new patterns and new unities would get created.

Perhaps some level of noncompassionateness, some level of separation and disunity, is needed in order to create a situation where new patterns can grow, so that the “unity gain” innate to joy can occur?

The Practical Upshot

We should be compassionate. We should open ourselves up to the world.

We should do this as much as we can without losing the internal unities that allow our minds to operate, to generate new patterns and new unities.

Our selves and our theaters of reflective, deliberative consciousness are frustrating and even self-deluding in some regards—but they are part of our mind architecture, they are part of what makes us us. At this stage in our development, they are what let us grow and generate new patterns. We can’t get rid of them thoroughly without giving up our humanity.

Perhaps as transhumanist technology advances many of us will choose to give up our humanity, via various routes. Perhaps in doing so we will achieve greater levels of compassion and joy than any human can. But until that time, we have to play the dialectical game of allowing ourselves as much joy and compassion as we can while keeping our selves and our internal conscious theaters intact enough to allow us to function.

While this may sound like a frustrating conclusion, the fact is that nearly no one pushes this limit. As I said above, outside of fiction I’ve met very few individuals who experience so much compassion it impairs their ability to function!

This brief article is part of the overall Cosmist Manifesto.

As previous readers understand, when I say “nanotechnology” I mean all nanoscale technologies, of which there are thousands today and millions on the technological horizon.

In late 2009, I presented several thought-leaders with the same question that I had asked in years past. “If you had the attention of the entire world, what would you say about nanoscale technologies?”

The answers that I received bring us a step closer to realizing that there continues to be an urgent need for society to pay attention to the mind-boggling rapid growth in our understanding and implementation of nanoscale technologies. Let me put it another way: We are learning more about (and more really important stuff about) why things are different at the nanoscale.

There are maybe a few hundred individuals who understand advanced technologies and can articulate their impact as well as these contributors. (Full disclosure: these folks are long-time, long distance, global-connectivity friends and associates. I seriously respect their individual and collective understanding of and opinions regarding advanced technologies. Mike Treder, Robert A. Freitas Jr., Neil Gordon, Jack Uldrich, and Vic Peña are just some of the world-class minds who you should spend a small part of your time listening to, if you do not do so already.)

From the Futurist

From the futurist, we learn that nanoscale technologies are simply another set of new technologies that we need to understand and prepare for. How important are they? They are important on the order of: today and every day that follows, we will be introduced to another of thousands of new products that owe their technological and market leadership to “nanotechnology.” Today and every day that follows we will be confronted by decisions regarding whether or not to allow a nanotech-enabled product into the market; whether or not to pull an existing product from the market because it is simply connected to “nanotech” (or is in fact faulty in some way, thereby tarnishing with the same brush every other nano-enable product). As sure as the day after today is tomorrow, nanotech-enabled products will create a huge stir within society. How well we adapt to those products depends on how much we pay attention, today.

From the Medical Scientist

From the medical scientist, we learn that “Medical nanorobotics holds the greatest promise for curing disease and extending the human healthspan.” Cool! Count me in! Nanotech-enabled machines roving around in my body, repairing cellular damage, detecting disease and malfunction, and generally keeping me a fit old son, yeah, count me in. Make me smarter, you say?! COUNT ME IN!

From the Economists / Business Analysts

And from the economists and business analysts we learn that critically important dollars are not being spent on nanoscale technologies, but are instead being squandered on “business as usual” and politics. Why, oh why, do we sit ineffectively by and watch as our leaders, of both parties, waste our dollars and squander both our future and our grandchildren’s heritage?

We also learn to have a sense of excitement regarding the short- and long-term potential of nanoscale technologies (in spite of our leader’s ineptitude, short-term-gains mindset and back-room dealings).

No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. - Winston Churchill, November 1947

What can we learn from this? Depends on who you are. Average citizens may feel a bit overwhelmed by the exceeding complexity of the science, the enormous potential for societal change, and/or the continued nonsensical meddling in the markets by our elected officials. Scientists, economists, innovators, inventors, investors, and savvy business folk know without a doubt that nano-enabled technologies, followed by the inevitable advanced products, will create massive shock-waves in each of their respective areas. By the way, that means if you can answer “Yes” to “Do you live on Planet Earth?” then count on the fact that the future is going to present us with an increasingly complex and exuberantly abundant supply of new technologies that will change our lifestyles and force us sit up and pay attention.

Of course, that is just my take; the futurist, the medical scientist, and the economists/business people may hit you from a totally divergent P.O.V., and yet I bet we all agree that “May you live in interesting times” never meant as much as it does right here, right now (are you paying attention yet?).

If you had the attention of the entire world, what would you say about nanoscale technologies?

Mike Treder – Our Future Depends on Us / Technology is Only a Tool

Every technology—no matter how powerful—is never a solution in itself. It is only a tool, to be used by its owners for good or for ill. This is as true for nanotechnology as it was for electricity or for the printing press before it.

We should never fall into the trap of looking for or expecting our technologies to save us. Emerging technologies—whether nanotech or AI or synthetic biology—do not emerge into nor from a vacuum. They are always developed within a context of political reality, amidst the daily tussle over regulation, funding, and proper usage. They do not arise fully-grown and pristine, but are hammered out, molded, shaped, and modified through endless discussions in corporate boardrooms and the halls of government.

Thus, the color of our future depends much more on us—that is, on our political practices and choices—than on our technologies.

Robert A. Freitas Jr. – Molecular Manufacturing and Medical Nanorobotics

The ultimate tool of nanomedicine is the medical nanorobot – a robot the size of a bacterium, composed of molecule-size parts somewhat resembling macroscale gears, bearings, and ratchets. Like a regular robot, a nanorobot may be made of many thousands of mechanical parts, such as bearings and gears, composed of strong diamond-like material. A nanorobot will have motors to make things move, and perhaps manipulator arms or mechanical legs for mobility. It will have a power supply for energy, sensors to guide its actions, and an onboard computer to control its behavior. Medical nanorobotics holds the greatest promise for curing disease and extending the human healthspan.

To build medical nanorobots, we need to create a new technology called molecular manufacturing. Molecular manufacturing is the production of complex atomically precise structures using positionally controlled fabrication and assembly of nanoparts inside a nanofactory. We’ve published the first description of a complete set of tools and positionally controlled reactions that should enable building small bits of perfect diamond crystal, based on extensive analysis and quantum chemistry simulations of a large number of potential tooltips and reaction sequences.

Ralph Merkle and I founded the Nanofactory Collaboration to coordinate a combined experimental and theoretical R&D program to design and build the first working diamondoid nanofactory. This long-term effort is developing the initial technology of positionally controlled mechanosynthesis of diamondoid structures using engineered tooltips and simple molecular feedstock. One of our international colleagues is undertaking direct experiments to build and validate several of our proposed mechanosynthesis tooltips.

Neil Gordon – 2009 Was a Bad Year for Nanotechnology

The financial demise of long established nanotechnology companies such as Nanogen, Evident Technologies, Luna Innovations, and NanoDynamics may be an expected fall-out of the economic downturn. However, the real impact of the financial crisis to nanotechnology is more pronounced.

Technology ventures need funding to develop and commercialize new products. Greater investments are required for advanced offerings employing nanotechnology because of the long time horizon for adopting nanotech into end user products or processes. Not only do nano-enabled products offer the potential for better, faster, cheaper and more environmentally-friendly applications, they also bring high tech R&D and manufacturing jobs that will be in demand for decades to come. So with unprecedented government stimulus spending one might expect a boom time for nanotech companies on the cusp of commercialization.

However, what we are seeing is completely different. Money is being used:

• to reward financiers for bad investment decisions instead of infusing capital to early stage ventures and Series A venture capitalists.
• to create government programs that will increase the cost of health care instead of new technologies for lowering the cost of health care.
• for preventing the spread of a flu strain that killed less than 10% of the infected people from a typical seasonal flu rather than funding new technologies for treating more virulent diseases.
• for deploying under-effective counter-terrorism activities instead of new surveillance technologies for the early detection of explosives, illegal drugs, infected people, toxic food, and contaminated water.
• to finance bankrupt automobile companies to manufacture the same cars that caused the bankruptcies rather than funding disruptive production and performance innovations that will be competitive against low cost cars from China and India.
• for middlemen to manage and extract fees from carbon cap-and-trade schemes rather acquiring prototypes employing breakthrough energy technologies. So where does nanotechnology stand at the end of 2009? Apparently at the bottom of the 2009 priority list. 2010 appears to be an equally disappointing year.

Jack Uldrich – The Impact of Nanotechnology is Going To Be Huge

To those who don’t believe nanotechnology will change the world in the near future just because it hasn’t accomplished much in the last 20 years, consider this little quiz: If a single lily pad began doubling on a pond on the first day of June and doubled each day thereafter until the entire pond was covered by the end of the month, on Day 20 what percentage of the pond would be covered with lily pads?

The answer is one-tenth of one percent. That’s right, .1%! What happens over the next 10 days is a little short of amazing—the entire pond gets covered. Such is the nature of exponential growth.

Now, advances in nanotechnology aren’t quite experiencing exponential growth but they are close and over the course of the next decade nanotechnology’s impact on material sciences, medicine, and energy are—like the lily pads’ spread over pond in the last few days—going to be extraordinary.

Vic Peña – The Future is Here and Achievable!

About five years ago, I responded to a similar question. Like this. At that time I was firmly convinced that we had reached an historic milestone in the evolution of science, namely the foundation for the research and development of nanoscale technologies. I still have this conviction. In fact, I am more enthusiastic of the possibilities open to the human experience through nanoscale technologies. “The future is here and achievable.”

The future is here. We are achieving it (especially during the last decade) by accelerating, building, and evolving the principles upon which nanoscale technologies research and development thrive. We have created myriad nano-applications for development and commercialization not generally known or available in the past. We have brought the future to the present and are progressing towards greater achievement.

At the same time, we can say we are not the yet. Achievement in nanoscale technologies is an evolutionary process integrating all disciplines of science. And, we recognize that nanoscale achievement is critically dependent on education and funding. In the United States, the National Nanotechnology Initiative is at the forefront in promoting these. Admittedly, these are subject to the vagaries of societal and economic factors, but consider the advances made in nanoscale technologies.

Imagine what is achievable in our now and present future.

So, what do I say about nanoscale technologies? The future is here and achievable!

In Closing

I would like to close with the response from Ray Kurzweil from a previous Q&A. Why am I closing with this quote? Because it best illustrates the immediacy of the need for us to start paying attention (with graphs and charts and things that even I can understand!):

When we have full molecular manufacturing, we will be able to create any physical products we need from information files just as we can create music, movies, and books from pure information today. In about twenty years, the original goals of communism (“from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”) will be achieved not through forced collectivism but through the information technologies of nanotechnology and artificial intelligence.

When will we have full molecular manufacturing? About 10 years after people stop laughing about the difficulty of building the first nanofactory. Let me put it another way: sometime within the next 15 years, possibly a lot sooner. Does that give us enough time to prepare? Certainly, but only if we start now.

May you live in interesting times!