WE’RE GETTING USED to converging technologies these days. Perhaps you can still call a spade a spade, but a phone, for example, is no longer just a phone. It also serves as camera, internet browser, answering machine, text communicator, tracking device, personal diary, calculator and alarm clock; and it’s shrinking.
From personal organisers to scanfax photocopiers, our modern technologies are being snapped together into smaller, lighter, all-in-one configurations that erase old functional boundaries. Driving this convergence is the ability to digitally encode and process data — whether visual, audio or text. By reducing diverse forms of information into a single language of zeroes and ones, technologists have established a basic unity that allows different devices to “talk” to each other via the ubiquitous computer processor.
In his acclaimed novel Snow Crash, the cyberculture writer Neal Stephenson compares this new digital unity to the biblical symbol of human hubris, the Tower of Babel. What made the construction of the Tower of Babel possible was that its builders spoke the same language. As God recognised, because people spoke a single language, “nothing that they (proposed) to do (would) be impossible for them”.
In early February, before a Los Angeles audience of high-tech scientists, government officials and corporate decision-makers, the Wall Street wünderkind Josh Wolfe, of the venture capitalists Lux Capital, again invoked the Tower of Babel — this time breathlessly describing the new terrain of nanotechnology.
Chemists, computer programmers, neuroscientists, biotechnologists and engineers, Wolfe explained, are finding a common language to realise a fundamental and powerful technological convergence that will dwarf today’s digital convergence. Wolfe believes that — unlike the Old Testament Tower of Babel — this convergence will last, and he isn’t the only one willing to bet big money on it.
Leading Fortune 100 companies, in partnership with the US Government, are actively accelerating this nano-enabled convergence — an event eagerly awaited by futurists yet viewed uneasily by a handful of scientists and civil society organisations.
The key insight about nanotechnology with respect to technological convergence is that it isn’t really a technology, it’s a scale — the nano-scale (one-billionth the size of a metre), at which atoms and molecules, the building blocks of all matter, operate. That simple fact — that all substances are qualitatively the same at the nano-scale, that life and non-life, mind and matter, are all made up of atoms arranged in different ways — has caught the imagination of some of the world’s most senior technologists and the world’s most powerful government.
Every big thinker on the coming convergence uses a different acronym for it. Bill Joy, founder of Sun Microsystems and known reverently in California’s Silicon Valley as “the other Bill”, worries about the coming together of GNR (genetics, nanotech and robotics). The corporate environmental consultant Douglas Mulhall enthuses about Grain (Genetics, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence and Nanotech). While Massachusetts Institute of Technology artificial intelligence guru Ray Kurzweil simply calls it “the singularity” — the point at which our technologies become the driving force in human evolution.
The US Government has come up with its own abbreviation. Dubbed NBIC (Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno), the goal of the 21st century’s version of the Apollo project is to wire together biotechnology, IT and cognitive neuroscience into one megatechnology by mastering nano-scale engineering. If successful, it will enhance massively the capabilities of existing technologies, ranging from genetic modification and nuclear weaponry to pharmaceutical drugs and brain implants, while also enhancing the technological capabilities of the US itself — a strategic bid to bolster military and commercial muscle through technological advantage.
Spearheading the NBIC initiative is Mihail Roco, of the National Science Foundation (NSF), and promoting it to industry is Newt Gingrich, the former Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives and honorary chairman of the industry research and lobbying association, the NanoBusiness Alliance. As head of the National Nanotechnology Initiative, Roco successfully secured the US’s biggest government commitment to technological research since the space programme, uniting the military, Nasa, leading high-tech companies and the NSF in a single vision.
As Roco emphasises, the logic of NBIC lies in “the material unity of the nano-scale”. Since everything operates from the bottom up (beginning with atoms that combine to form all larger structures), he argues, we can control events on the macro-scale if we can manipulate events at the nano-scale.
For example, at the nano-scale scientists can already synthesise DNA molecules. DNA controls the formation of proteins that may ultimately determine the health and behaviour of entire organisms. The behaviour of individual organisms largely determines collective behaviour and, hence, the behaviour of society.
According to this hierarchical view, every substance, and every natural or cultural system, is the working out of molecular processes at different levels. By seizing control of the molecular world through nanotechnology, we can affect every other realm of human experience, including natural phenomena. Neurons could be re-engineered so that our minds talk directly to computers or to artificial limbs. Viruses could be re-engineered to act as machines or, potentially, as weapons. Computer networks could be merged with biological networks to develop artificial intelligence or surveillance systems.
