Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!julius.cs.uiuc.edu!psuvax1!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!nanotech From: dmocsny@minerva.che.uc.edu (Daniel Mocsny) Newsgroups: sci.nanotech Subject: Re: Nanotech Economy Message-ID: Date: 6 Nov 90 17:16:43 GMT Sender: nanotech@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: University of Cincinnati, Cin'ti., OH Lines: 129 Approved: nanotech@aramis.rutgers.edu In article dmocsny@minerva.che.uc.edu (Daniel Mocsny) writes: >So the real barrier to widespread use of nanotechnology will probably >not be energy, laws, raw materials, or whatever, but rather, how >simple it can be made to use. > >[99.9% of the people who drive cars couldn't fix them if they had > the tools and parts, much less could they be said to understand the > engineering that went into the design. People were reproducing > themselves long before Crick and Watson discovered the structure of > DNA. There's really no need for people to be able to understand > a technology in order to use it. It is simply the responsibility > of the designer to build a system that not only works, but that > can be used. Any successful technology has by definition accomplished > just that. I see no reason why nanotech should be different. > --JoSH] The difference, if one exists, might be the open-endedness of nanotechnology. After all, we are talking about giving the consumer the ability to manufacture every item that (s)he now buys from a whole economy of vendors. It stands to reason, then, that if the nanotechnological "universal fabricator" is going to be as easy to use as, say, a shopping mall (and all the industrial infrastructure that hides behind it), then the fabricator is going to have to embed all the information-processing power that the industrial economy embeds now. Some of this information-processing power is embedded in the physical plant that "decides", by virtue of its design, how to process incoming atoms or raw materials into more valuable materials. The rest of the information-processing power is embedded in the know-how of all the people without whom the economy would collapse. This know-how is only partially available in abstract form (such as books) today. A product like the telephone, the automobile, or even DNA is usable because its functional interface to the user is so highly constrained. Consider how much engineering goes into an automobile, and how many minds and computers participate actively in fabricating it and bringing it to the consumer. Compared to the technology behind the automobile, what you can do with it is nearly trivial. It sells because it does something enough customers want. But it only works because that function itself is *inherently* simple. Nanotechnology, on the other hand, seems to be about removing all constraints. Set the user free of the industrial infrastructure and the division of labor. However, division of labor does not arise because of the need to allocate material. Rather, it arises from the need to allocate scarce information-processing power. Since people take a long time to get good at anything, and are usually very bad at doing things they haven't practiced, the only way we can get rich today is to partition knowledge up into tiny sub-domains and let everyone focus most of their effort at mastering a different slice. Our inability to master all the skills necessary to satisfy our wants is the primary reason we trade. The people who get the most out of a technology are those people who put the most into it. In contrast, a successful consumer product must necessarily reduce the number of options available to the consumer. Bob Moog (the inventor of the Moog electronic music synthesizer) said it best: "What you can control, you MUST control." Products which have the most flexibility and power are nearly always the hardest to use, because they confront you with more choices that you HAVE to make. This is not solely an accident or a symptom of poor product design (although poor product design can certainly aggravate it). Power and ease of use are fundamentally at odds. I have no doubt that nanotechnological products can be packaged in some form(s) usable to the consumer. But this automatically guarantees that not all consumers will be equal. A constrained nanotechnological product will necessarily not do *something* which will be possible for the consumer with more skill, knowledge, patience, etc. For complex technologies that solve a straightforward problem, like the need to move from one place to another, piling on the constraints isn't too intolerable. But for complex technologies without any obvious simple function, developing successful consumer-product abstractions is difficult. A case in point is the computer. Its main strength AND weakness is its generality. By being able to do so many things, it earns its keep, but it also rules out the possibility of being simple to exploit fully. No matter how many layers of makeup you pile on top of it, you still have to keep track of a lot of things, including all the tools you need to keep track of your tools, etc. Nanotechnology is probably going to be more related to the computer than to the automobile, because it isn't starting off with any obvious functional constraint. Automobiles became pretty standardized within about 10 years of the start of mass production. On the other hand, computers are probably becoming less standardized all the time. (The "standards" movement makes certain aspects of computers somewhat more uniform, at least by the time they sink into obsolescence, but computers are not becoming inherently simpler. The minute we rid ourselves of one form of fragmentation, e.g., on the systems level, immediately fragmentation appears on another level, e.g., applications, peripherals, languages, etc.) I suspect we may find that the only way for us to "package" nanotechnology without crippling it will be to increase the level of complexity the consumer can handle. I.e., we will probably need to repackage the consumer! Of course, augmenting human mental powers directly is a possibility often bandied about in this forum. But once we gain the ability to do that, we immediately lose our present frame of reference, which revolves completely around the abilities, desires, motivations, and limitations of our biological brains. Once we can reprogram them, nothing can be predictable any more. We may know what we want to change ourselves into now, but can we know what those people (?) will want to do? (This is not an idle point. If we can change our abilities to satisfy our motivations, why don't we also tinker with our motivations?) -- Dan Mocsny Snail: Internet: dmocsny@minerva.che.uc.edu Dept. of Chemical Engng. M.L. 171 dmocsny@uceng.uc.edu University of Cincinnati 513/751-6824 (home) 513/556-2007 (lab) Cincinnati, Ohio 45221-0171 [This is quite an insightful analysis. I do think it is more applicable to a point of view spanning a few centuries than a few decades; in the short term one can imagine a host of what we might call "single-button black boxes" that could revolutionize society without going beyond the abilities of almost anyone to use: a box that accepts garbage and produces food; one that turns lawn clippings into clothing; self-driving cars; self-repairing houses; trees with a gasoline spigot. Intelligence augmentation has been with us since the invention of writing; it will continue to accelerate--but we have never been able to know where we were going in that sense anyway. --JoSH]