Nano Future 2030

The human race is in a precarious situation.  The TV shows get a lot of mileage out of our nightmares of doomsday.  Global warming, astroids, war, terrorists, infrastructure failure, famine, pollution, disease.

At the moment we don’t have a lot of resources to handle a disaster.  I mean a real disaster, not the sort of small event that affects a city or a region, but one that affects the world and the lives of millions of people.

If we can last another 30 years without serious damage to our infrastructure, I think we will be able to handle almost anything.

Nanotechnology is an enabling technology.  It creates a distributed infrastructure rather than the concentrated, high cost one we have now.  Instead of being dependent on foreign factories to produce a pair of shoes, it builds them on the floor of your closet while consuming the old pair that is showing wear.

Give me a backpack of nano and I and my family can survive many situations that would seem hopeless today.  Say a terrorists sets off a dirty bomb or even a high yield device in an American city. Now we lose millions of people, most of them from famine, crime, and lack of medical care instead of directly from the bomb.   What would be in the backpack to allow a few people to survive in harsh conditions?

Obviously we need food, clean water and shelter.  Medical drugs would be nice. In fact, a smart first aid kit is possible and worth the effort. Communication. Fuel or heat sources.

How do you produce shelter? In most cases we only need fabric or sheets of material. Like a tent. But if a printer is part of the backpack it can produce complex sheets of material that expand and stiffen after production.  This allows air cell insulation of walls, sleeping bags and clothes.  The sheets are precut and preglued so they assemble into useful items.

Simple AI built into a computerized medical kit can lead a victim to describe a medical condition and then the kit suggests therapies.  When combined with a drug synthesizer, the kit could perform limited medication or dispense water treatment drugs.

Food is the hard one.  A nano water filter is easy, but the actual assembly of organic compounds into edible food is probably the hardest assembly task we have and will occur last.  But simple food may be possible at first.  Sugar is simple.  Perhaps oil is another.  A bland gruel is most likely the first product. Something to keep you alive.

Of course it will absorb solar energy to power itself. And filter and use any fuel you can acquire. Fuel cells should be common by then, which means small containers of liquid fuel will be everywhere.  The power also powers a satellite phone.

In summary, once we get nano functioning at a level to be expected by 2030, we can give every person a survival tool that lets them feed and care for themselves in almost any environment.  In an advanced model, it can reproduce itself and contains enough AI to assist humans with rational questions that may not occur to people in crisis or shock.

Another idea I’ve been wanting to write about is, how did consciousness or self awareness start? It seems a rather complex and specialized function to evolve just so it would be there to contemplate itself.  V.S. Ramachandran has suggested that consciousness may have come from observing others and trying to understand their behavior and feelings.   He thinks we may have then applied those skills to ourselves.  It seems like a reasonable possibility.

As an alternative, it intrigues me that dreams could be a precursor to self aware consciousness because dreams appear to be necessary to the basic functioning of any higher brain.  Therefore, dreams are a fundamental housekeeping function of all brains – we go crazy in about 3 weeks when deprived of our dream time.  And the consciousness in dreams – at least in my own dreams – is a rudimentary form of consciousness, defined by its lack of awareness of the big picture.  Dreams seem to be aware mainly of the stored contents of the mind, that is, old experiences rather than incoming new experiences.  But loud sounds can intrude and be incorporated into a dream.  So, there is bleeding of one into the other.

Could that limited form of consciousness in dreams be the forerunner of our wakeful consciousness?  Dreams are required.  Self awareness is not.  And self awareness seems to be the highest form of consciousness.  So as early mammals, we start off with dreams to handle the experiences of the day and evolve to apply the dream skills to the outside world.  And the skills develop more fully in the waking experience due to the social experience of the day.  Also the dreams perform their job very well at only a certain level of awareness. It seems clear that dreams do not need to create full awareness to do their job. But waking experience highly rewards greater awareness.   

An article from Edge,com  THE NEUROLOGY OF SELF-AWARENESS  By V.S. Ramachandran   gives a different slant on consciousness by pointing out that monkeys have brain cells called "mirror cells" that may have something to do with self awareness.  He describes how these may be required for empathy and ultimately for consciousness. His point seems to be that social needs may have used the mirror cells to predict the motives and experience of other people and then turned around and gave us consciousness as a by-product.

I find it amazing to see how this supports my own idea of a mirror like function that creates our consciousness. See an earlier post in which I describe our consciousness as a mirror of our experience.   I had not heard of any physical features before that would support that idea. 

He makes a comment that "… our discovery that autistic children have deficient mirror neurons and correspondingly deficient TOM ( Theory of Mind "  implies that "we would predict that they would have a deficient sense of self (TMM) and difficulty with introspection."

I believe our theory of the mind is becoming much clearer.

John

The last post was a negative viewpoint. Let’s see if I can balance this out.  I’m very interested in the future for what good might come to pass. With great power goes great responsibility.  And there are those who are working hard toward a beneficial future with nanotechnology. 

The guys at  Responsible Nanotechnology are strongly focused on the problems and what we can do to insure a good outcome.  I hope their organization will have a positive effect on the world.

I’ve painted a bleak picture before due to my own lack of confidence in humans to work things out, but we did survive the Second World War, the Cold War and many other smaller events that could have changed the world into a Nazi death camp or worse.   So, we will see good things come into existence. The challenge is to make the ratio of good to bad be large in our favor.

We will do the positive things in a world context of struggle between societies over values, over resources and over conflicting goals.  The positive things will come about due to the expected commercial and scientific efforts, but I believe there will be an open source effort as well. 

In the last few years we have seen a tremendous outpouring of effort into software projects that are free for anyone to take and use.  Blender 3D, Joomla, WordPress, and hundreds of others. The impulse to contribute something to society in exchange for what may be only a meaningful relationship with a group of users is a beautiful thing to see.  And I believe that will continue as the tools become more powerful.  A small group can build something and give it to the world where another group transforms it into something better.  I honestly think this is the way it will happen – freedom, I mean.  There is little motivation for a business to put itself out of business, but an open source effort could produce food and shelter for an individual and set them free.  An entire society could grow up around the technology.

The hippy generation can remember when young people wanted to set up communes in every empty farm house within 20 miles of a university town.  The impulse to create your own society was strong and could be again if the tools were there to feed, clothe and shelter yourself.  We all had to get jobs.  Too bad, or maybe for the good.  You could not create much above a solar hot water system on the old farms.  Maybe with a nanofactory in the barn, you could cure cancer.

I like the idea of people scattering and building unique worlds.  In outer space, on the floor of the ocean, below ground, far below the teaming surface. But tied together by the world wide web.  It lets us diversify, find our own homes.

I think an extensive underground will develop.  Due to the restrictions of society, the man on the street will get hot technology the same way they get drugs now.  And you see how well we stop drugs at the border.  It just depends on the motivation of the users and their willingness to pay cash for the good stuff.  

Does that mean we will have a lot of good things to fix our bodies?  Yes, at a price.  The only way the economic system will get off our backs is to develop open source technologies that support life.  Food, clothing, basic medicine and shelter. Give us that in a suitcase and we are good to go.  Then the economy – that is, all the business people who can’t conceive of a world without buying and selling of even the most basic necessities – will have to pull back and concentrate on the fringe needs of people.  That would be just as lucrative since we always value what we don’t have.

In summary, in the turmoil, there will be new toys, new tools, tighter groups, more defined groups.  The distribution of good and evil is wider, but still averages out to neutral.