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the_promise_and_the_peril.docxRay Kurzweil on Nanotechnology
Inventor, entrepreneur, author, and futurist, Ray Kurzweil is one of the leading thinkers about contemporary and future technology and its impact on society.
In this reading, he argues that the pace of technological change is exponential rather than linear, as many people implicitly believe, and that the twenty-first century will witness a major technological revolution springing from the convergence of the sciences of genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics ( GNR) and artificial intelligence. However, like all new technologies, GNR is a double- edged sword that holds great promise and great peril for human civilization.
One worry, is that self-replicating nanobots will escape into the environment and cause severe and irreparable damage to the natural world. Although he takes such threats seriously, Kurzweil believes that the development and introduction of GNR is inevitable and that broad relinquishment of these technologies is not feasible, but that it is possible to develop ethical guidelines for fine-grained relinquishment of certain kinds of particularly dangerous GNR applications. While continuing to be optimistic about the promise of these technologies, he believes that it is possible for society to control them so as to enjoy their benefits while avoiding the dangers they pose.
Our rapidly growing scientific and technological ability to manipulate matter and energy at ever smaller scales promises to transform virtually every sector of society, a phenomenon that presents man-ifest ethical responsibilities. There will be increasing overlap between nanotechnology and other technologies, such as biotechnology.
Promise and Peril
An Essay by Ray Kurzweil
Science and technology have always been double-edged swords, bringing us longer and healthier life spans, freedom from physical and mental drudgery, and many new creative possibilities, while at the same time introducing new and salient dangers. We will need to adopt strategies to encourage the benefits while ameliorating the risks. Relinquishing broad areas of technology, as some critics have proposed, is not feasible, and attempts to do so will only drive technology development underground, which will exacerbate the dangers. As technology accelerates toward the full realization of biotechnology, nanotechnology and strong AI ( artificial intelligence at or above human levels), we will see the same inter-twined potentials: a feast of creativity resulting from greater human intelligence combined with many new dangers.
Nanobot technology requires billions or trillions of such intelligent devices to be useful. The most cost-effective way to scale up to such levels is through self-replication. A defect in the mechanism curtailing nanobot self-replication could be disastrous. There are steps available now to mitigate this risk, but we cannot have complete assurance in any strategy that we devise today. Other primary concerns include Who is controlling the nanobots? and Who are the nanobots talking to?
Organizations or individuals could put undetectable nanobots in water or food supplies. These spies could monitor and even control thoughts and actions. Existing nanobots could be influenced through software viruses and other software hacking techniques. My own expectation is that the creative and constructive applications of this technology will dominate, as they do today. But we need to invest more heavily in developing specific defensive technologies.
There are usually three stages in examining the impact of future technology: ...awe at its potential to overcome problems; then a sense of dread at a new set of dangers; followed by the realization that the only viable and responsible path is to set a careful course that can realize the promise while managing the peril.
Bill Joy, cofounder of Sun Microsystems, has warned of the impending dangers from the emergence of self-replicating technologies in the fields of genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics, or GNR. His concerns include genetically altered designer pathogens, self-replicating entities created through nanotechnology, and robots whose intelligence will rival and ultimately exceed our own. Who s to say we will be able to count on such robots to remain friendly to humans?
Although I am often cast as the technology optimist who counters Joy s pessimism, I do share his concerns regarding self-replicating technologies. Many people have interpreted Joy s article as an advocacy of broad relinquishment, not of all technology, but of the dangerous ones like nanotechnology. Joy, who is now working as a venture capitalist with the legendary Silicon Valley firm of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers; investing in technologies such as nanotechnology applied to renewable energy and other natural resources, says that broad relinquishment is a misinterpretation of his position and was never his intent. He has recently said that the emphasis should be to limit development of the technologies that are too dangerous, not on complete prohibition. He suggests, for example, a prohibition against self-replicating nanotechnology, which is similar to the guidelines advocated by the Foresight Institute. Others, such as Bill McKibben, the environmentalist who was one of the first to warn against global warming, have advocated relinquishment of broad areas such as biotechnology and nanotechnology, or even of all technology. However, relinquishing broad fields would be impossible to achieve without essentially relinquishing all technical development.
There are real dangers associated with new self-replicating technologies. But technological advances, such as antibiotics and improved sanitation, have freed us from the prevalence of such plagues in the past. We may romanticize the past, but until fairly recently, most of humanity lived extremely fragile lives. Many people still live in this precarious way, which is one reason to continue technological progress and the economic enhancement that accompanies it. Should we tell the millions of people afflicted with devastating conditions that we are canceling the development of all bioengineered treatments because there is a risk that these same technologies may someday be used for malevolent purposes? Most people would agree that such broad based relinquishment is not the answer.
