The negative effects that public overexcitement can have
A cautionary tale of history (wiki-TODO: History page needs improvement).
Some multy branch stories come with a quite a bit of incompressible complexity.
This is one such story. So please bear with it and read the whole thing.
The back story in brief sequential summary:
- The book Engines of Creations gets published presenting early ideas of molecular assemblers, exciting visions, and grey goo
- Note that: Most of the excited folks know little to nothing about the technical details but are very loud.
(they did not read Nanosystems or it was just not released yet) - public hype and over-excitement ensued amplified by public writers and authors
- – Consequence1: Excitement leads to public awareness and government funding for the label "nanotechnology" ~> eventual founding of the NNI
- – Consequence2: Public writers and SciFi authors both jump on the grey-goo scenario (Why The Future Does Not Need Us; Prey)
- Researchers …
- – fear their mundane work being associated with grey-goo and
- – fear their grey-goo scenarios lead to public outcry against their mundane work (akin to outcries against gene editing, which is a completely different context)
- – fear their funding being culled ultimately
- Researchers trace back => molecular assemblers => Engines of Creation => Eric Drexler
- Researchers only hear the insufficiently or ill-informed overexcited folks not actual technical details =>
making Eric Drexler a target for intentional discreditation efforts
Meanwhile (overlappingly sequential with the back story):
- Before 2000: Molecular assemblers have become outdated and nanosystems with technical details gets released, not mentioning molecular assemblers once.
- Researcher are not aware of that but only of the fantasy of the loud overexcited fanboys. Plus they see the mind-virus of the grey-goo-idea as significant threat. Thus …
- Around 2000 the direct public attack: The infamous Dtexler-Smalley debate. (Richard Smalley being head of the NNI and nobel price carrier.)
- Active removal of everything and anything mentioning direct manipulation of atoms in the NNI research plans. (there is evidence)
- Attempts to redefine/bend the therm "nanotechnology" further to not include things like manipulation of individual atoms (mechanochemistry and mechanosynthesis).
- A long winter of no relevant R&D towards advanced atomically precise manufacturing ensued.
So the moral of the story:
Be careful with over-excitement and put fundamentals first.
Contents
Current situation – may be better
The situation may be better now with technology progressing making it slowly more obvious that things are possible viable and desirable. Still there's a lot of lack of understanding and opposition around. Especially in the US where the whole story happened.
Some tips for defense and keeping discussions productive
Better don't try to debunk debunkerism preemptively.
Better do that only reactively when forced to.
No need to lure out sleeping dragons.
Only defend when being forced to because e.g.:
– the situation is heavily public opinion damaging
– the situation blocks productive work
Be careful with with pro arguments. Make sure you understand them sufficiently to use them. Rather than instantly trying to shut down con arguments, look if you may not just have used the wrong pro argument for the given context to begin with. The coming back con arguments may be perfectly fine in case the wrong pro argument was used. And in case you encounter a con argument that generally may have merit, then bingo we've learned something new that we need to look into. Tell me.
Be aware that some pro arguments are just not good.
Like e.g. that biological nanomachinery demonstrates the feasibility of gemstone based nanomachinery. It does not!
It just demonstrates that something is possible. And it even may corroborate the (misled) belief
that nature would have done diamondoid APM if it were feasible. See: Nature does it differently
For one very concrete point:
One should be able to explain why friction is not showstopper due to the scaling law for surface area:
This is especially critical and nontrivial to explain thus I am pointing you there now.
See: Why larger bearing area of smaller machinery is not a problem
If you want a general guide in how to understand common critique and defend against it smartly then you may read:
How to deal with common critique towards diamondoid atomically precise manufacturing and technology
Related
External links
See: 1:14:50 in this video where Eric K. Drexler presents/discusses his (back then) new book Radical abundance
Youtube => Oxford Marin School => Radical abundance: how a revolution in nanotechnology will change civilization
