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Nanotechnology without Genies --
closing thoughts
I bought Engines of Creation on September
4, 1986, as soon as I saw it on the New Books table at the Stanford
bookstore, and read it straight through. This was one of the
great conversion experiences of my life. I believed that the
world as we know it would come to an end within a couple of decades,
to be replaced with "a world made new." I was the kind
of person who gave copies of Engines to my friends and
family, and talked about it to anyone who would listen. (In other
contexts such people are known as evangelists, cult zombies,
pests, etc., but of course none of that applies here ;-)
At this point I need to interrupt myself.
When I first published this site, I wrote the following two paragraphs:
I joined the Foresight Institute as soon as
I heard about it. My collection of Foresight Updates goes all
the way back to issue #1. I was one of the first to buy into
Eric Drexler's vision, and in the late 1980s and early 90s I
spent much of my time thinking about how to make it happen. At
the beginning of 1993, I signed up as Senior Associate #2 at
Foresight. However, the turning point came about that time. I
had already started coming to my senses in the fall of 1992.
The starting point was the observation
that robotics at the nano level can't progress any faster than
robotics in general. That was the
first step towards 'calibration.' At the open mike session on
the last day of the 1992 Foresight Conference, I made some remarks
that were the germ of the arguments I am going to present here.
Over the course of the next year I deprogrammed myself. By the
fall of 1993, I was no longer a believer. The arguments presented
here are based on notes written in 1992-3. They didn't start
coming together into their present form until December of 1998,
and I didn't fully appreciate the central importance of the interface
problem until February of 1999, just a few weeks ago. It took
a long time to think this through.
A few weeks after writing the above, I reviewed
my notebooks from the late 80s and early 90s, and found that
the truth is more complex. (Writing history from memory is generally
not a good idea.) Apparently I never did believe in molecular
manufacturing, except maybe in the first few months after I read
Engines. I started "coming to my senses" a long
time before 1992. There is a page dated November 10, 1988, which
is almost an outline of Geniebusters. Most of the basic arguments
against molecular manufacturing were already there, on that page
(but not the arguments about AI). And yet I still drove to Palo
Alto (400 miles) on several occasions to attend meetings, and
I wrote checks for more than $2,000 over a period of years. I
didn't believe, but I also did believe.
I also found things like this in the 1988
notebook:
You could have entire regions of zero entropy,
spreading, crystallizing everything... You could have nanocreatures,
robotic fish, that communicate with each other and are programmed
to do parallel processing. They keep spawning more robotic fish,
and connecting with each other... Trillions of robotic fish all
linked together would be a supermind capable of anything.
This stuff goes on for many pages. In recent
years I have come to think of myself as a nanocritic, and I tend
to forget about my own nanofollies of 1988-92.
It was in 1993 that I started questioning
AI. In January of that year I wrote:
The problem of creating an artificial intelligence
is the same as the problem of creating an intelligence. Of any
kind. Period. Teaching a robot is not going to be any easier
than teaching a human being. And as for having trillions of robotic
fish communicating with each other, that is the same problem
as human beings communicating with each other. Ultraintelligence
has to start with us. It is not something outside of us. It is
something that proceeds from us. It is an extension of us.
At that point the pieces of the puzzle were
all there in plain view, and I should have been able to put them
together and draw a conclusion. Nevertheless just a few days
later I wrote a letter to Bob Boyer in which I talked about nanotechnology
leading to the end of the world. I didn't use the word "singularity,"
but that was the idea.
Even now, that idea is still seductive. It's
easy enough to make fun of the Singularitarians, but at the same
time it's almost impossible not to believe that we are
headed for some kind of cosmic cataclysm in the near future.
I already believed that when I was seven years old.
Belief systems are very strange. Getting rid
of them is not easy.
Second Thoughts
June 29, 2000
In fact, I'm still open to the idea that we
are in the midst of a great transformation or metamorphosis.
A couple of days ago I saw an article in Nature,
which treated Engines of Creation with contempt. The article
says there is usually no such thing as bad publicity, but Engines
is so bad it has been an embarrassment to many people in the
field. I quoted this at the end of section 28. Of course when
I first read these remarks, I smiled with satisfaction. But on
second thought, I think the author of this article is just a
journalist who would sneer at any new idea. I don't want to be
associated with such people. Engines of Creation is wrong,
but it's not trivially wrong. It deserves to be taken seriously.
I have more in common with Eric Drexler than with philistines
who dismiss his ideas without coming to grips with them.
Tonight I was surfing and by a circuitous
route I found myself reading the Encyclopedia Britannica article
about the history of Iran. You have the Hellenistic period, the
rise of the Parthians, the Sasanian period, and so on, century
after century. Is history going to go on from our present situation,
century after century, one period giving way to another? Two
thousand years from now, will there be an encyclopedia article
that describes our own time as just one period in a long series?
I don't think so. As Vinge says,
Perhaps it was the science-fiction writers
who felt the first concrete impact... More and more, these writers
felt an opaque wall across the future. Once, they could put such
fantasies millions of years in the future. Now they saw that
their most diligent extrapolations resulted in the unknowable...
soon.
There certainly is a "wall" in front
of us. Science is rushing toward some kind of climax.
In the last seven or eight years I have typecast
myself as a nanocritic. It's time to break out of that role.
I am not repudiating anything I wrote on the
original geniebusters site. I still think Eric Drexler and Vernor
Vinge are totally wrong about what's happening, and what's going
to happen. They aren't even looking in the right direction. They
both think that the singularity will emerge from Marvin Minsky's
AI lab. This is an illusion.
The 20 - 30 year time frame is probably also
an illusion. It seems to be a moving frame.
But the question is not whether some
momentous change is happening, the question is what is
happening. What kind of situation are we in? The worst thing
you can do is to have a belief about this. I am in danger
of getting locked into a "steady state" belief, which
is no better than believing in the Singularity. We have to stay
open to events as they unfold.
We should also remember the Merkle Maxim (originally
due to Alan Kay): the best way to predict the future is to create
it.
The operative question is, which research
agenda is going to bear fruit?
Let's stop arguing and get back to work.
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