IEET Director Giulio Prisco reports on his talk on nanotechnology at the In Nano Veritas round table of the THINK BIG - MEDEF Summer University, on August 28 in Paris.
The participants were:
Claude Birraux, deputy of Haute-Savoie, President of the Parliamentary Office for the evaluation of scientific and technological choices
Jean-Frederic Clerc, director of CEA-DPSE
Christian Colette, director of R & D of Arkéma
Benedict Croguennec, project manager at AFNOR
Alain Fontaine, director of the NEEL institute, director of research at CNRS Grenoble
Alain Grimfeld, president of the National Consultative Ethics Committee
Paul Jacquet, director general of INP France
Paul Lannoye, co-founder of Grappe ASBL
Jean-Claude Mialocq, researcher in molecular chemistry, CEA
Giulio Prisco, director of metafuturing SL
Moderator: Jacques Hebert, journalist and communications consultant.
The round table was very interesting, and I was very pleased when I heard the T word mentioned by a senior policy officer (Mr. Birraux) in reference to proposals for nano augmentation of the brain. Transhumanism, the T word, was “in the air”: most of the participants were cautious (the public was more open and we had many interesting questions), but it was evident that the transhumanist worldview cannot be ignored in today’s policy debate. So I decided to focus more on transhumanism and less on practical nanotech than I had originally planned. The program that had been distributed to the audience had a list of issues:
1. What if one of the solutions to see big lays in the infinitely small?
2. What is nanotechnology? Which areas, which applications? What costs? What risks?
3. Between science and fiction, where is our future?
4. Does Europe have the will and the means to become a leader in this area?
5. In the quest for the Grail, are patents sufficient?
6. From the lab to the table, will nanotechnology invade the food industry?
7. What about cosmetics, computers, medicine, military?
8. Will nanotechnology change the rules of the economy?
9. Privilege of large enterprises or fertile ground for SMEs?
10. After the digital divide, the nanotechnology gap?
11. After the nuclear deterrence, the invention of nanotechnology deterrence?
12. Should we trivialize the use of nanotechnology? What about ethics?
13. How to manage the development of artificial intelligence?
14. Will synthetic brains ensure they survival of the human species?
15. Are we sorcerer’s apprentices?
So I decided to structure my 10 min intervention as a set of answers to questions selected from the list above. Here is my interventiom, translated and expanded from the notes I had prepared:
Are we sorcerer’s apprentices? Yes, since thousands of years - we have been sorcerer’s apprentices who learn hho to understand and manipulate nature since the dawn of history.
Should we trivialize the use of nanotechnology? What about ethics? Yes, of course we should trivialize the use of nanotechnology! The vocation of technology is to be trivialized: at some point technology descends into the fabric of life and society and is not even called technology anymore. When I first experienced the Internet I thought it was something magic, and now it is daily routine for our kids. Ethics? What does that mean? To me ethics is about improving the life of concrete persons - if something can improve our lives (in the sense of improving someone’s life without making someone else’s life worse) then it is good and must be done. On the contrary, what makes our lives worse is no good and must not be done.
Does Europe have the will and the means to become a leader in this area? Means (brains and money) yes. The will, I am not sure. Sometimes when I listen to administrators and politicians I don’t think so. I preferred not to mention explicitly the over-involved and over-over-byzantine over-mess of European regulations at both EU and national level, that may seem designed in order to prevent any real development.
Will nanotechnology change the rules of the economy? I don’t think so, the rules of the economy are too fundamental to be changed by mere nano. They say there are two unavoidable things, death and taxes. I do not think nano will change the rules of the economy and permit avoiding taxes. But perhaps, just perhaps: will nano permit avoiding death? Maybe it will.
So we come to the “sci-fi-like” issues (3, 13, 14) in the list above. We, our bodies and our minds, are biological machines, actually biological nanomachines that depend on nanoscale physics and chemistry. Nanotechnology will permit repairing and improving biological nanomachines, so it will permit repairing and improving US. This will cause a deep change in our nature as a species. Radical life extension? Immortality? Perhaps.
Back to today’s world: Privilege of large enterprises or fertile ground for SMEs? Big nano projects are a privilege of large enterprises. But fabbing, an open source version of industrial rapid prototyping and 3D printing technologies, is building a huge momentum and will converge with nanotechnology. The fabbing revolution, open to global individuals and small companies, is the subject of my article Fabbing and RepRapping to Matter Compiling.