This week’s conferrence (which I’ll shortly finish writing up for the Reg) was organized by the Center for Responsible Technology, which was set up five years ago to consider the dangers of nanotechnology - by which the founders mean molecular manufacturing. There is plenty of research going on into nanoscale stuff (the researchers whose work I saw in Basel in June were careful to say they were doing “nanoscience”, in an effort to differentiate themselves from what I guess they think of as the lunatic fringe), but the people who believe that molecular manufacturing, automated nanofactories, and so on will inevitably happen still feel that they are underappreciated, underestimated, and underfunded.

One problem they face in the quest to be taken seriously is that - especially in the conference site, Arizona, home of Alcor and the setting where Ed Regis explored extropians and transhumanists for his 1992 book Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition - the idea of being able to create tiny robots to manipulate molecules directly appeals to people science is *really* happy to dismiss as crazy. (I’m not sure what it is about the Arizona desert, but by the end of the third day it all began to seem quite reasonable. I think the thing is that in the desert, so much of which is completely empty, it’s easy to believe that *anything* can happen. The nearby Sonoran Desert Museum has desert fish. If fish can survive in the desert…)

The thing about this is that if CRN is wrong they have done no damage other than to spend their own lives studying shibboleths. If they are right, the work they are doing to try to understand the consequences of the technology in time to ensure it can be harnessed rather than allowed to destroy us all could be really important.

No government can study every possible risk of every technology that might ever be developed, of course.

wg