Discovering Nanotechnology
Reading and Resources List
Beyond Nanotech
Coming Soon: Fiction Reading List
Richard Feynman is usually credited with first conceiving of the idea of Nanotechnology. Here is the speech he made about it In 1959, to a meeting of the American Physical Society at Cal Tech.
K. Eric Drexler is one
of the first researchers to study and develop the concepts of nanotechnology,
and his name remains synonymous with the field. His first book, Engines
of Creation published in 1986 is available online. This book had quite a
quite a controversial impact on the scientific world, and is still the book
mentioned as the starting point for any study of Nanotechnology.
Also by Eric Drexler is Unbounding the Future (1991, with Chris Peterson
and Gayle Pergamit), that describes the prospects ahead and some strategies
for dealing with them. His most recent book, Nanosystems:
Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing and Computation (1992), describes the
principles and mechanisms of molecular Nanotechnology.
The Foresight Institute was founded by Eric Drexler and others as a forum for spreading awareness and guiding the development of emerging technologies. Their web site is a vast treasure trove of information, papers, speeches, articles, images and links about Nanotechnology. All the above links are within the Foresight Institute sight. A particularly interesting page is Nanotechnology: the Coming Revolution in Molecular Manufacturing, which contains an exhaustive reading list, FAQs, and links to other resources.
The rest of this list is dedicated to links that are not found at the nano revolution page just mentioned, or ones that I thought important enough to mention here rather than leaving you to dig through the tons of stuff at Foresight.
The newsgroup for Nanotechnology is sci.nanotech, and here is a FAQ from the newsgroup. To read the newsgroup, you will need to use a news reader program such as Outlook Express or Netscape, and you must have an ISP which includes access to a newsgroup server. Please contact your ISP or your system administrator about how to set it up.
There's also a Yahoo! Nanotechnology Club, similar to a newsgroup, but easier to use for those accustomed to the Web. The discussion here is not so technical as at sci.nanotech.
http://www.nanoindustries.com/ A news letter.
Institute for Molecular Manufacturing
http://www.ioppublishing.com/Journals/na Another Nanotechnology journal.
http://nanozine.com A Nanotech magazine on the Web.
http://www.zyvex.com/nano/ A site with many links to Nano resources. (Makes me wonder why I'm creating yet another one.)
Sean Morgan's Nanotechnology Pages
The Golem Project
Not quite nanotech, but related. Robotics.
Beyond the "tech" of Nanotechnology
Nanotechnology is not a science by itself. The prerequisite to understanding why its so revolutionary is understanding many diverse fields of science and emerging technologies, including: chemistry, quantum physics, molecular biology, genetics, robotics. Then, a good understanding of advanced computer science concepts: artificial intelligence and artificial life, virtual reality and neural networks. Not the least thing you need is a vivid imagination, a knack for seeing all the inovatative new ways to do things given the tools that Nanotech will make available. Also Fractal Geometry and Chaos theory comes into it, evolutionary theories get involved and finally the whole thing turns into a rowdy philosophical/theological debate about the nature of consciousness and life itself, and whether men were meant to wot of such things.
About the year 2000 I started looking for signs of connections between all the above topics. Searching the Internet, posting questions on newsgroups, etc...What I found was that most people, when they were interested at all, were interested in one narrow aspect of it, but few were interested in the phenomenon as a whole. I found no stories which offered a summary of the Big Picture that I was looking for. Until finally about November of 2000, (only about 2 months ago as I write this) I found:
In 1999, Ray Kurzweil, a well-known researcher and author in the field of computers and artificial intelligence, published a book entitled Age of the Spiritual Machines. This book really shook up a lot of people with its predictions of how artificial intelligence, neural-networks, virtual reality, nanotechnology, genetic engineering and robotics would play out in the 21st Century. To sum it up all too briefly, Kurzweil predicts that machines will become more human-like, and humans will become more machine-like. Biotech/nanotech innovations will proliferate, such as direct neural links to computers, artificial limbs and organs, computer augmented thought/comumnications, and virtual reality experiences. Meanwhile, computers and robotics will advance far into the realm of humanlike intelligence. The convergence of the two trends will so blur the line between man and machine that it becomes impossible to distinguish between humans and machines. The two essentially become one. (Darth Vader? The Borg? Max Headroom?) He predicts this change to take place well within the next 100 years, and he makes some very strong arguments with evidence in support of his projection.
Sun Microsystems executive Bill Joy was so disturbed by Kurzweil's predictions,
and their seeming inevitability, that he wrote a 13 page response article in
Wired Magazine, entitled Why
the Future Doesn't Need Us, in which he tries to explain and warn people
about the coming risks. Bill Joy's assumption is that most people will certainly
not want this future to become real. But actually, reading the newsgroups and
surfing the web, I find that a lot of people are quite looking forward to the
whole thing: cant wait to get their new silicon bodies. Some of them think their
conscienceness will simply be uploaded into memory and live inside the machine.
A few months later, Jaron Lanier wrote another lengthy response to Kurzweil
entitled Why
stupid software will save the future from neo-Darwinian machines, in which
he accuses the group he calls "cybernetic totalists" of being intoxicated
with the dreams of the nanotech revolution, and argues that it will never happen
because technology has not proven itself capable of achieving that level of
reliability. He cites what he refers to as a "Reverse Moore's Law"
wherein as processor speed and power increases, the software becomes more bloated
and unreliable.
To get a feel for the group that Lanier calls "cybernetic totalists", take a look at TransHuman.Org and the Extropy Institute. How far out can you get?