The New Future

Nov 15, 2001
Fortune

Once upon a time we committed ourselves to putting a man on the moon. What kind of similar commitment should we make now? What's the "moon shot" of the 21st century?

Nanotech Assembler by 2025 (to set a stretch goal).

In the near term (next five years), nanotechnology will extend and transcend Moore's Law with advances in molecular electronics, and it will dramatically enhance the capabilities of biotech researchers in their analysis and manipulation of DNA, protein and cells.

In the long term, nanotechnology research could ultimately enable miniaturization to a magnitude never before previously seen, and could restructure and digitize the basis of manufacturing such that matter becomes code. Like the digitization of music, the importance is not just in the fidelity of reproduction, but in the decoupling of content from distribution. New opportunities arise once a product is digitized, such as online music swapping--transforming an industry.

With physical goods, the basis of manufacturing governs inventory planning and logistics, and the optimal distribution and retail supply chain has undergone little radical change for many decades. Flexible, low-cost manufacturing near the point of consumption could transform the physical goods economy.

Nanotechnology is more than a linear improvement with scale; it crosses over to a new digital era that transforms business models and economies of scale and scope. Additionally, miniaturization to the nano-scale is fundamentally different as a variety of quantum mechanical phenomena govern physical interactions in a powerful discontinuous digression from Newtonian physics. Quantum dot lasers, band-gap crystals, and qubits capable of spontaneous computation have all been demonstrated in research labs around the world.

Whether conceptualized as a universal assembler, a nanoforge, or a matter compiler, I think the moon-shot goal for 2025 should be the realization of the digital control of matter, and all of the ancillary industries, capabilities, and learning that would engender.

As the world heads down its current path, what should we fear most?

We should fear the gap between our rapidly advancing technological capabilities to reengineer biology and nanotechnology, and our relatively limited understanding of complex systems (in particular, the "path dependence" of early work in complex systems Development).

For example, of the myriad developmental pathways to nanotech, some engage the self-replication of biology, in advance of our full understanding of biological systems. The basic substrate for the nanotech industry may be heavily influenced by the early building blocks--whether they be a "seed" architecture (a bottom-up biological approach), a "feed" architecture (a mechanistic top-down assembly-line approach like the MEMS to NEMS transition), or a hybrid broadcast architecture with a number of systemic safety nets.

Part of the problem is that the developmental paths and timing are driven by information-age economics rather than the systemic checks and balances of co-evolution. Consider the biological virus-host balance, for example. In evolution, pathogens do not become overly-lethal to their host for that limits their own propagation to a geographically-bound quarantine zone (in a world that historically lacked planetary transport). A custom-engineered pathogen may not observe that delicate balance, nor the strictures of evolutionary time scales, and could engender extinction level events with a rapidity never before seen on Earth.

We have little experience with the long-term effects of the artificial evolution of complex systems. Early subsystem work can be deterministic of emergent and higher-level capabilities, as with the neuron (witness the Cambrian explosion of structural complexity and intelligence in biological systems once the neuron enabled something other than nearest-neighbor inter-cellular communication. Prior to the neuron, most multi-cellular organisms were small blobs). Recent breakthroughs in robotics were inspired by the "subsumption architecture" of biological evolution--using a layered approach to assembling reactive rules into complete control systems from the bottom up. The low-level reflexes are developed early on, and remain unchanged as complexity builds. Early subsystem work in any subsumptive system can have profound effects on its higher order constructs. We may not have a predictive model of these downstream effects as we are developing the architectural equivalent of the neuron.

Also, consider the impact of the evolutionary process itself on the development of complex systems, for example, in the area of machine intelligence. Is the desire for "self-preservation" inherent to intelligence or derived from evolution? Self-preservation may be some low-level reflex that emerges in the evolutionary environment of biological reproduction. It may be uncoupled from intelligence. But it may emerge within any intelligence that we grow through evolutionary algorithms. The path to machine intelligence will have a huge effect on outcomes--whether we end up with HAL from 2001 or a selfless sentience that strives for higher order, considering intelligence to be a counter-entropy force.

The problem is that we are embarking on this great adventure and picking paths at a time when we possess minimal understanding of the biological systems that surround us, and much less about the developmental pathways and processes for building new complex systems.

Within risk lies opportunity. We are entering a period of a profound learning and expansion of our capabilities in both molecular engineering and information processing. By expanding these capabilities, we further expand our ability to learn. It is a period of exponential growth in the learning-doing cycle where the power of biology, IT and nanotech compounds the advances in each formerly discrete domain.

What issue or issues will most define our future?

Much of our future context will be defined by the accelerating proliferation of information technology--as it innervates society and begins to subsume matter into code.

We are entering an era of exponential growth in our capabilities in biotech, molecular engineering and computing. The cross-fertilization of these formerly discrete domains compounds our rate of learning and our engineering capabilities across the spectrum.

Lab science, from biotech to nanotech, is becoming information science designed on a computer, not at a lab bench. With replicating molecular machines, physical production itself migrates to the rapid innovation cycle of information technology. Matter becomes code.