In 2000, Bill Joy, the co-founder and chief scientist of the computer company Sun Microsystems, sounded an alarm about technology. In an article in Wired titled ‘Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us’, Joy wrote that we should ‘limit development of the technologies that are too dangerous, by limiting our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge.’ He feared a future in which our inventions casually wipe us from the face of the planet.
The concerns expressed in Joy’s article, which prompted accusations of Luddism from tech advocates, sound remarkably similar to those now being voiced by some leaders in Silicon Valley that artificial intelligence might soon surpass us in intelligence and decide we humans are expendable. However, while ‘sentient robots’ were a part of what had spooked Joy, his main worry was about another technology that he figured might make that prospect imminently possible. He was troubled by nanotechnology: the engineering of matter at the scale of nanometres, comparable to the size of molecules.
In fact, it would be more accurate to say Joy was troubled by the version of nanotechnology that he had read about in the book Engines of Creation (1986) by the engineer K Eric Drexler, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At the close of the 20th century, it was nanotechnology, not AI (which didn’t seem to be getting very far), that loomed large as the enabler of utopias and dystopias. Drexler’s book described a vision of nanotech that could work wonders, promising, in Joy’s words, ‘incredibly low-cost solar power, cures for cancer and the common cold’ as well as ‘[low-cost] spaceflight … and restoration of extinct species.’
Thirty years ago, zeppelins promised to change the world. Let’s not fall into this “flight” hype trap again.
It’s absolutely stupid to think that because people couldn’t do it in the past that we can’t do it now.
The flaw in this logic is that it’s not like nanotech has been shown to be fundamentally impossible at a physical level.
like if someone predicted human flight in 100 BC and in 60 BC they were denounced for their foolish writings.
it’s the long term that matters, not 40 years.
Citation please? I’m happy to believe you if you pass me a peer reviewed paper saying so.
For mano tech working?
It does in the cell? For example?
No need for some peer reviewed paper to show it works, IMO.
Absolutely. Hence my skepticism.
I believe the person I replied was trying to state that nanotech was fundamentally impossible, not the other way around. But now that I reread their comment it’s a bit unclear… I think they are missing a word in the comment or I just misunderstood.
And I might have misunderstood your comment 😅.
I wonder where the nano tech stuff/APM is right now, they seemed so close like in or around 2014…
You’re right we should believe the tech billionaires every time they say they’ve figured out a revolutionary technology just in case they’re not lying this time.
I’m dismissing it because a select few people are making ungodly amounts of money off the backs of millions of hard working creative people, I want nothing to do with it, it’s shit technology made for shitty people.
That’s not what I said. You don’t have to believe the hype bubble but dismissing new technology off hand just because the tech bros championed it is silly.
Dismissing it because tech bros championed it is silly, but believing them when they are serial liars and have given no reason to believe them is more silly. Why should i consider a thing they say until there is proof they’re not full of shit again?
Watch the peer reviewed research papers and you’ll find a better baseline of truth.
Of course. You can always find counterexamples. What matters is that you understand that certain sources of information have higher trustworthiness than others.
Have you ever actually sat down and read through a journal paper in enough depth to understand it enough to understand the direction the research is going and of it’s making progress? It takes like 2 hours to go through one when you’re already well-versed in the field. It’s basically impossible for a laymen to do that legwork. It’s a lot of work for someone in an adjacent field.
We really, really need to have honest, trustworthy science journalism instead of freaking out whenever tech bros tweet or lie to investors, and telling laymen to read journals so they know what’s going on is asking the impossible.
I mean I have, but I know I’m an anomaly. Still, even reading abstracts is a pretty good way to figure out what’s going on.
A good flow I think a lot of people could do is:
- See a post on social media
- Read the article
- Read the abstract of the paper the article is about
More often than not, the clickbait headline is directly refuted by the abstract and you don’t need to dive in deeper.
You can’t even trust abstracts without looking at details of the methods these days unless it’s in one of the more reputable journals.
I remember the 2000’s and nanotech was never a thing being seriously talked about or implemented in any way. Lets be clear that machine learning and the foundations for black box type ai applications has been going on (ironically given the context of the article) for about 30 years and is maturing into a concern. I see its usefulness but also its limitations and I am concerned about its effect but also recognize the inevitability of the usage.
