NANO TECHNOLOGY

30 September 2002

The Discovery Channel recently came up with New Pyramids, the yet-to-solve puzzles of the centuries gone by. If anything the enigmas from the Nile to Nano have intensified, whatever are the claims of the likes of Somerset Maughms Mr Knowall, the pretenders of civilizations onward march.

It was Dr Shamim Ahmads idea that the IETE delve into Tofflerean Future Shock of building nano-Pyramids, molecule by molecule, atom by atom. Let me be candid with you that till then, even the nano was mathematically beyond me, let alone its philosophy. If centi means ten to the power of minus two, milli means ten to the power of minus three, micro means ten to the power of minus six, then nano is ten to the power of minus nine. That may not make much sense. Let me explain it another way. If the size of your shoe was one nanometer, then a meter would be the distance that you would cover round the world and to the sun and back. Imagine ordering lassi at a dhaba - mallai maar ke, a trillionth of litter that is a nanolitter would be less that what wets your moustache and decidedly contain more energy and calories than the two glasses that you imbibe today. Imagine also wearing a necklace of desk-grown solitaires with an engraved LAN of computers that change their glitter with your mood and are powered by your body heat. And now stretch your imagination further and order designers genes for your baby. Australian researchers have recorded a breakthrough in fertilization of human eggs using genetic material from any somatic cell in the body. The somatic cell contains two sets of chromosomes and the researchers have learnt to eliminate the extra set using chemical techniques. Somatic cell production may become a fashion, even a rage that does away the services of the male species. Clinics in posh colonies of Delhi, Punjab and Haryana, busy changing demographic ratio as they are, may switch over to male foeticide and restore the balance.

Nano scale science and technology or what I prefer to call as n-science and n-technology involve building devices and structures at nano scale the scale of atoms and single molecules. They can form gears, they can form bearings, they can form cantilevers, they can form switches, they can form machines, they can direct electrons along one path rather than another, deviating from their pattern, design and habit. Nano technology lends a capability not only to image and view atoms, but also to move them, creating nanobots, androids and automata that do the manual and the intelligent routines and chores; nano-wheels that rotate; processors that can be injected in the individuals blood stream as super-intelligent diagnostic probes, and devices of the size of a sugar cube that can store one-meter-resolution maps of the entire globe. And what are the instruments that would help manipulate atoms there is a plethora indeed, SPM: Scanning Probe Microscope, STM Scanning Tunneling Microscope, AFM: Atomic Force Microscope and plenty more evolving.

We may well have an army of n-warriors. Robotic Air Force is a reality, both the US and the UK having opted for its formation. With nano attributes this force may become impressive and redoubtable indeed. Sir William Perry wrote in 1640, Nor do I doubt if the formidable armies ever here upon earth is a sort of soldiers who for their smallness are not visible. Nanobomb is many measures ahead of nuclear bomb in destructive power, but only a thought away in imagination and a notch or two away in construction. With nanos, sinews of net-centric warfare will change and a new term would have to be coined for RMA (Revolution in Military Affairs).

In nano society, the growth of governmental power and terror that likes of Osama can unleash, would impact on the structures, tradition and logic of the organs of the state and security that we pride in. Eric Dexler in Engines of Creation gives possibilities, e.g. using an abundance of speech-understanding AI systems, they (the powers that be) could listen to everyone; using nanotechnology they could cheaply tranquilize, labotomize (sic), or otherwise modify entire populations; they could discard workers, replace scientists and engineers and do away with the artisans that built the Pyramids taking cue from Pharaohs.

Defending his hypothesis, Drexler says, Genetic evolution has limited life to a system based on DNA, RNA and ribosomes, but memetic evolution will create life-like machines based on nanocomputers and assemblers. Assemblers will be able to build all that ribosomes can and more, assembler-based replicators will be able to do all that life can. This then is the shape of things to come. Machine doing almost anything that the man does including self-replication, is the mantra and the man playing Brahma, the Creator is the anti-mantra that challenge us.

What was science fiction yesterday is a distinct possibility today, tomorrow a lush reality. Arthur Clarkes Rama Revealed in which human characters interact with an advanced civilization, obtaining roti, kapra and makan from a nanofactory, Dexlers Engines of Creation, which opens a door to the future with thinking machines, holding the promise of banishing disease, of healing, of long life in an open world, and the world beyond and Von Neuman with his multifaceted treatise, Computer and the Brain, Theory of Self-producing Automata, and Recent Theories of Turbulence and many others who have looked beyond the horizons and depths too, bear testimony to the point that I make.

Every day that passes is a harbinger of fresh tidings and break-throughs. A new society is in the making. It would change the material and the moral, the kernel and the keg, the norm and the form. The e-prefixed civilization touted by e- business, e-learning, e-governance, e-services may undergo an across-the-board transmutation and join the antique a la Indus and Nile valley and give way to n-prefixed model.

The ideas that are now hyped are of universality, e.g. Universal Assembler, Universal Computer, Universal Constructer and the Universal Replicator, that portray possibilities, myth or reality, to which Dexlers posers and my addenda become relevant. What will happen to the global order when assemblers and automated engineering eliminate the need for most international order? What would be the fate of the WTO? How about Kaveri Vivad when each state, more appropriate each farmer, can produce water for own requirement? How will the society change when individuals can live indefinitely? Would that be true of Osama bin Laden and Veerappan too? What will we do if replicating assemblers can make almost anything without human labour? What will we do when AI (artificial intelligence) systems can think faster than humans? Playing chess may not be fun and playing politics, though very much in vogue, neither draw crowds, nor lend lever-pressing, stone-laying opportunities.

Let me now put across the philosophy that debunks this philosophy, taking inspiration from Nanotechnology without Genies. The author maintains that nanotechnology will progress at the same rate as the technology in general, there would be no such thing as a microscopic self-contained universal assembler, secondly, automated systems always exist in a larger context which is not automated and their products are not free; thirdly, whatever capability AI has at any given time, humans assisted by computers would have already reached that point and moved ahead; and fourthly, making things with atomic positioners would be as expensive as making them with biotechnology and bulk technology. In short there would be no nano-utopia and worse the human will still be victim of a capitalist order, where purse-wielders will continue to call the shots and Standard and Poors give India junk rating.

There is no dead-end in science, there is no dead-end in technology. One may question the thesis that molecular manufacturing culled with artificial intelligence will lead to cornucopia and that our cells can be perfected. These are nanotech memes and illusions, I do not believe in, endorsing Lyle Burkheads line in Nanotechnology without Genies. I have described what meme is in a piece on Psychotronic Warfare on the Web, in nutshell it is a virus of the mind.

The IETE cannot be moribund. It must prepare for the times ahead and start crystal gazing now. The first idea that comes to my mind is the cross-discipline nature of the nano. They permeate all known and not yet known fields of human knowledge and activity, mathematics, physics, chemistry, computation, bio, genetics, material and cognitive sciences. Therefore the varna segregation that we now apply to the membership limiting it to the electronics, telecommunications, and information technology has become archaic. The disciplines are merging and converging, besides elitism may lie elsewhere. Let us therefore open our doors wider.

The second idea concerns spreading nano-literacy. This seminar may not break new ground, but it would have served its purpose, if it prompts studies, lab initiatives, and general awareness of what would happen a decade and two hence.

The third idea concerns the strangulating rigidity that characterizes our education and examination system. We are slaves of rules, uniformity and mugging-up, and any reforms contemplated inevitably end up in zero-sum game. We neither follow the modern system of the like of Massachusetts Institute of Technology where a student himself determines choice of papers and syllabi, nor the madrassa and gurukul culture where the teacher is the true guide, philosopher and well-wisher and the complexity of the future is explained by the evolutionary example of the past. Let us change the system, lock, stock and barrel, and make it lab-based rather than class-room based.

The fourth idea is rooted in our belief systems. Cornucopia is an illusion and perfection is His attribute the Brahmas, the Tri-shaktis;

This then ought to be our manifesto what the Hedonistic Imperative Web site calls paradise engineering and a true Muslim path to jannat. It is the strategy to eradicate suffering in all sentient life. Nanotechnology and genetic-engineering allow Homo sapiens to discard the legacy-wetware of our evolutionary past. And have faith that post-humans will rewrite the vertebrate genome, redesign the global ecosystem, and abolish suffering throughout the living world. It will be highly rewarding if we can change the neural architecture and banish pain and malaise, so that our descendants may live in a civilization of well-motivated high-achievers, animated by gradients of bliss. The prospect of removing mental pain and fear and supplanting it by eternal bliss is integral to mauksha, now technologically feasible and realizable. Let no issue of political policy, religious edict or ethical choice impede it

And finally let us not sit content that we occupy a ring-side view but be part of the show itself. I urge you Sir, to extricate the Research and Development from the clutches and doltishness of the Indian officialdom and the hackneyed, do-nothing fund-gurglers. You require thinkers to give direction and the IETE prides itself that it has a fair share of them. We need the paradigm shifter of think-tanks in as much as the shape shifter. of the new matter, leading us from conception to the contemporary; from the contemporary (state-of-the-art) to the futuristic (the sukshma, the sthool).

Let the search - the quest of the Supreme continue: