Nano Technology - Optimism, Pessimism, and Implementation
First huge impact was Ray Kurzweil's Singularity Is Near, he suggests technological growth is accelerating and the velocity of the acceleration is also getting faster. Short after Steve Job's death, another computer genius John McCarthy also passed away. He created Lisp in MIT and this one of the most primitive kind of programming language has been still used and remained powerful, as competitive programmer like Paul Graham suggests in his book Hackers and Painters. Short after McCarthy's death, I was exploring his HP. He also mentioned about two important people among tech-people, Ray Kurzweil as optimist and Bill Joy as pessimist.
Optimism
Kurzweil has been one of the best person who makes ideas into reality because of his huge influence in the industry. His intellectual and imaginative excellence invite anyone into some sort of faith - to the world of unseen, but everyone has imagine at least once, robots exceed human intelligence, nano robots solve almost all problems we have, we can communicate by telepathy and so on. He describes himself as a pattern recognitionist. By understanding neurological pattern of human intelligence, reverse engineering gets more proximity to its aim - to manufacture human beings. Reverse engineering and many more projects will be incredibly boosted after the invention and application of nanobots because they can enter inside the brain and instantly recognize neurological patterns, which no instrument can not do now. This function of pattern recognition can be applied into so many ways. For example, if the thinking patterns of successful comedians came under the spotlight of nanobots, the analysis will be extremely accurate and also almost replicative. Although the rarity of the original talent remain, more people will be capable of making jokes in such a high precision. If we scan multilingual's brain, it can result in the invention of extreme language learning tool, or it could be something too quick to call it 'learning'.
Pessimism
One major argument might be that if nano technology is used for weapons, how can we recollect the weapons? Can nano weapons attack specific target? Don't they malfunction and destroy human civilization? Before these, real use of nano-weaponry could be something like this - an attacking party secretly got genetic information of their target and input the information to nano-weapon which is a tiny particle and duplicate itself once it's spread on the ground. Input finished and the programmed weapon was spread on suspected land. It quickly increased to hundreds and millions, and many of them put themselves in underground water, which everyone in the region drinks. Then it easily reached into the target's body, and recognized identical characteristics of his gene, the program fired and destroyed target's brain, or heart. Mission complete. Other weapons are safe for drink because it doesn't harm anybody unless genetic characteristics exactly match to the target's. They naturally get excreted and then break short after. The first one needs to have its maximum limit of its replication, and the material used for it must be ecological.
Second possible pessimistic view on nano-tech is that if nano machines or weapons leaked from where it's stored and fired in the wild. The same concern is shared with bio-technology, once a virus came out of the lab by accident, it could be pandemic and cause a number of deaths. The approach might be also similar, by using anti-virus, in the case of nano-machines anti-nano, we can prevent pandemic situation.
Implementation
Some pessimists of nano technology fear that the technique can be used for violent action which endanger human beings, but I think it's not highly possible. Since nano technology inevitably requires nano-tech tools to deal with ultra tiny materials, the knowledge and financial obstacles will be huge enough to prevent these concerns as many people cannot create atomic bomb now. So if anything should be feared, the scary implementation would be the invention of cheap nano-tools.
Reference
Ray Kurzweil - Singularity Is Near
Bill Joy - Why the future doesn't need us
Paul Graham - Hackers and Painters
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