While designers are going deeper into nanometrics with what critics say the utopia of Moore’s Law continuation, a dystopian vision is emerging, with nanotechnology potential of going beyond chip fabrication to bio-fabrication raking up ontological and axiological issues.
Designers are on the way to acquiring nature’s power to design from the smallest scale enabling them create materials not existing in nature. In the book The Natural and the Artifactual: The Implications of Deep Science and Deep Technology for Environmental Philosophy, Keekok Lee of the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, University of Lancaster, talks about the loss of “primary values” such as “the very nature of nature as an ontological kind,” with the advance of nanotechnology. The “ontological value” of nature’s independence to maintain an appropriate sense of where living and non-living entities fit in nature is being challenged. Nanotechnology is all set to replace nature by artifacts that Lee calls “material embodiments of human intentionality.” A large number of things unknown to nature will come into being. What will be its impact upon nature, and biological and ecological systems?
NATURE-CONSTRUCTED-BY-HUMAN
Hitherto nature evolved through nature-constructed-by-nature processes. But nanotechnology will usher in the age of nature-constructed-by-human processes. Even though nanotechnology is natural, and not disruptive, in the sense that it builds products bottom-up like nature, and not top-down, it alters the process of natural selection, and does not respect nature’s autonomy in relationship with humanity.
This situation is different from technology making synthetic chemicals or genetically engineered crops or animals. These creations come by manipulating things made by nature. But nanometrics artifacts will replace nature. To what extent? The sky is the limit. The independence of nature is being threatened for the first time.
Sun Microsystems co-founder and chief scientist Bill Joy envisages a danger more than Lee. He fears nanotechnology is leading to a combination of technologies known as GNR (Genetics, Nanotechnology, and Robotics) that has a deadly potential for the human race. GNR will allow “replicating and evolving processes that have been confined to the natural world . . . to become realms of human endeavor.” Robots or nanobots with the capability to reproduce themselves and nourish themselves is a GNR possibility. If these replicators turn omnivorous, Grey goo becomes real. (Grey goo is a hypothetical end-of-the-world scenario involving molecular nanotechnology in which out-of-control self-replicating robots consume all living matter on earth while building more of themselves, a scenario known as ecophagy.) The term grey goo was first used by molecular technology pioneer Eric Drexler in his book Engines of Creation, and has been a subject of science fiction. Science fiction ideas do become realities; so ecophagy is not impossible.
The American environmentalist and writer Bill McKibben has called for a technology-halting “Enough” to “post-humanism through nanotechnology.” Canada’s ETC Group wants a halt to nanomaterials till further tests.
CHANGING ‘BEING HUMAN’
However, the Los Angeles-based Extropy Institute, which brings together thinkers in AI, nanotechnology, genetic engineering, life extension, etc., discourages us to remain “slaves to our evolutionary history.” In nanotechnology, it sees possibilities of “trans-humanism,” and wants to “change the rules of the game called ‘being human.’” Its mission statement says “. . . many of us passively accept or stridently defend the inevitability of human stupidity, malice, conflict, ageing, and death . . . . The primitive parts of our brain spur us to envy, hate, despair, and kill. Our philosophies and religions attempt to express our highest values, yet we use them to oppress and control.” It sees huge possibilities of human enhancement through nanotechnology.
I think nanotechnology has reached an unknown crossroad. Discussions are called for to study it in all its aspects to curb any Frankenstein Monster that might be lurking in the garb of technological advancement.
