The smaller the better: the limitless promise of nanotechnology--and the growing peril of a moratorium.
Reason › Vol. 35 Nbr. 7, December 2003
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The smaller the better: the limitless promise of nanotechnology--and the growing peril of a moratorium.
"THE BEST WAY I can describe it is if you close your eyes and dream. You could never be hungry, never be sick, have all the energy you need, all the water, all the food and no diseases. There is no aspect in the world economy or your personal life that is not assumed to be transformed by this new technology."
The amazing development that is supposed to usher in this utopia is nanotechnology, the manipulation of matter at the molecular and atomic level. But the man who made these wild-eyed, pie-in-the-sky claims was not nanotech prophet Eric Drexler, author of The Engines of Creation, the 1986 book that popularized the concept, and founder of the Foresight Institute, dedicated to working out its implications. Nor was it Neal Stephenson, the visionary science fiction writer who imagined a future transformed by nanotechnology in his 1995 novel The Diamond Age. And it wasn't Richard Smalley, winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize in chemistry, director of the Rice University Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology, and co-discoverer of the novel carbon molecules called nanotubes and fullerenes, whose strength and electronic properties are at the heart of future nanotech applications. No, the speaker expounding on the wonders of nanotechnology was Roy Pat Mooney, a longtime anti-globalization activist who directs the Action Group on Erosion, Technology, and Concentration (ETC Group). His nanotech vision was part of a talk he gave at a November 2002 conference in the Philippines. The funny thing is that Mooney and his allies want to impose an immediate, comprehensive global moratorium on the development of nanotechnology. That's right: Mooney wants, at a minimum, to delay the arrival of technologies he himself believes could banish hunger, disease, and material want forever. The ETC Group, which issued its call for a moratorium in a January 2003 report, wants to stop nanotech until "civil society" has a chance to catch up. "In the future," its report declares, "molecular manufacturing poses enorm...See the full content of this document
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