Never Say Die: Nanotechnology

That’s not exactly true. You might get hit by a hovercraft or drop a household appliance like a Fusion-o-matic into your bathtub or maybe you’ll put a ray gun in your mouth after your significantly older significant other passes away, but you won’t die of natural causes. Not according to Ray Kurzweil.

Ray Kurzweil is the co-author of Fantastic Voyage, Live Long Enough To Live Forever and more recently, The Singularity is Near, When Humans Transcend Biology, an awesome/terrifying treatise on life in the near future when nanobots become self-designing and self-replicating members of our society and help us out with everything from hair loss to talking out the garbage.

‘Within a quarter century, non-biological intelligence will match the range and subtlety of human intelligence,’ says Kurzweil. ‘It will then soar past it because of the continuing acceleration of information-based technologies, as well as the ability of machines to instantly share their knowledge. Intelligent nanorobots will be deeply integrated in our bodies, our brains, and our environment, overcoming pollution and poverty, providing vastly extended longevity, full-immersion virtual reality incorporating all of the senses (like The Matrix), “experience beaming” (like Being John Malkovich), and enhancing human intelligence. The result will be an intimate merger between the technology-creating species and the technological evolutionary process it spawned.’

Perhaps the most titillating aspect of Kurzweil’s theory is the possibility of ‘radical life extension’. Like the Iraq war or the insane mood swings of Tom Cruise, genetics (or ‘biotechnology’) is a controversial subject. Stem cell research is debated for its scientific and moral ramifications in courts and churches around the world. The ultimate goal of stem cell research is transdifferentiation, the ability to create new cells from a person’s DNA to replace damaged or old cells – for example, using skin cells to replace a faulty lung or heart.

‘Biotechnology is providing the means to actually change your genes,’ says Kurzweil. ‘Not just designer babies but designer baby boomers. We’ll also be able to rejuvenate all of your body’s tissues and organs by transforming your skin cells into youthful versions of every other cell type. Already, new drug development is precisely targeting key steps in the process of atherosclerosis (the cause of heart disease), cancerous tumor formation, and the metabolic processes underlying each major disease and aging process. The biotechnology revolution is already in its early stages and will reach its peak in the second decade of this century, at which point we’ll be able to overcome most major diseases and dramatically slow down the aging process.’

But genetics is just the beginning. If Kurzweil’s timeline is accurate, by the mid-2020s, we will be on the verge of a nanotechnology revolution. The soldiers of this revolution are the nanobots, blood cell sized robots that can travel through our bloodstream destroying pathogens, removing debris, correcting DNA errors, and reversing the aging processes.

‘We’re already in the early stages of augmenting and replacing each of our organs, including portions of our brains with neural implants, the most recent versions of which allow patients to download new software to their neural implants from outside their bodies. With nanotechnology, we will be able to go beyond the limits of biology, and replace your current ‘human body version 1.0’ with a dramatically upgraded version 2.0, providing radical life extension.’

Another application is gene reprogramming. Don’t like your eye color? Want bigger breasts? By the time the revolution hits, you may be doddering around a nursing home, too hopped up on meds to care, but your children will benefit from the medical effects.
‘We now have a powerful new tool called RNA interference (RNAi), which is capable of turning specific genes off. It blocks the messenger RNA of specific genes, preventing them from creating proteins. Since viral diseases, cancer, and many other diseases use gene expression at some crucial point in their life cycle, this promises to be a breakthrough technology. One gene we’d like to turn off is the fat insulin receptor gene, which tells the fat cells to hold on to every calorie. When that gene was blocked in mice, those mice ate a lot but remained thin and healthy, and actually lived 20 per cent longer.’

Biotechnology elicits passionate debate on all sides of the issue. On the right, you have the Church and the Moral Majority, who claim that science should never meddle in God’s divine design. Alan Goldstein raises ethical issues in his essay, ‘I, Nanobot’.

‘Let’s take a simple example. Plans are currently underway to create medical [nanobots] that will use our own metabolic energy (for example, glucose oxidation) as a source of power. That means these devices could remain operational as long as we are alive – or longer if they manage to get into human egg or sperm cells. Any [nanobot] that develops the ability to propagate in this or any other manner across even one human generation has fulfilled the definition of a non-biological life form. A true alien. And it can happen.’

On the left, you have environmental groups up in arms about the negative global impact of nanotech. Where do you get the resources for an ever-growing population? What do you do with the waste? The virtual worlds of Second Life and World of Warcraft have been attacked multiple times by self-replicating worms called Grey Goo, which clutter the environments and, in some cases, destroy the players’ avatars. The name Grey Goo is itself a reference to the threat of nanotechnology: hypothetically, a self-replicating nanobot could consume the Earth’s resources, transforming our planet into a giant blob of grey goo.

Then, there’s the military application. The technology that could knock out cancer, heart disease, and other diseases could also be employed by an army or bioterrorist to create an engineered biological virus that combines ease of transmission, stealth and deadliness.

Kurzweil counters each of these arguments. To the Moral Majority, he contends that nature is far from optimal, and could use a few improvements. ‘Our interneuronal connections compute at about 200 transactions per second, at least a million times slower than electronics. As another example, a nanotechnology theorist, Rob Freitas, has a conceptual design for nanobots that replace our red blood cells. A conservative analysis shows that if you replaced 10 per cent of your red blood cells with Freitas’ ‘respirocytes,’ you could sit at the bottom of a pool for four hours without taking a breath.’

To the environmentalists, he points out the folly of believing that life expectancy will change while everything else remains constant. ‘Nanotechnology will enable us to create virtually any physical product from information and very inexpensive raw materials, leading to radical wealth creation. We’ll have the means to meet the material needs of any conceivable size population of biological humans. Nanotechnology will also provide the means of cleaning up environmental damage from earlier stages of industrialisation.’

As for the military effect, Kurzweil advises caution. ‘The overall message is that we need to give a higher priority to preparing protective strategies and systems. One strategy would be to use RNAi, which has been shown to be effective against viral diseases. We would set up a system that could quickly sequence a new virus, prepare RNA interference medication, and rapidly gear up production. We need to have something like this in place before it’s needed.’

So will the future look like The Matrix? Blade Runner? Gattaca? So far, nobody is promising universal sexiness, but progress is being made. In April 2007, scientists at the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh unveiled a robotic ‘caterpillar’ which can perform open heart surgery without opening the chest cavity. At 20 mm long, the prototype nanobot is being hailed as a medical breakthrough. According to Kurzweil, a future filled with such nanobots is unavoidable, but the scientific community is more skeptical.

‘The scary thing is, the technology is already there for nanobots,’ says Jason Lemkin, the co-founder of NanoGram Devices, a company at the forefront of nanotechnology. ‘The only challenge at the moment is power source. The AIBO (Sony’s Artificial Intelligence roBOt, also means ‘love’ or ‘attachment’ in Japanese, can also mean ‘partner’) never could charge itself properly. How do you power these nanoscale or microscale artificial ‘creatures’? Power and battery technology tends to lag information technology by ten to twenty years or more ... There still is no working model, for example, of the lead acid battery. But it is coming. With the combination of advances in thin-film solar cells and nanomaterial-based power sources, nanobots will in the not dramatically distant future not only be able to ‘think’ in groups, and leverage the collective intelligence of swarms, but be self-powered. Then, the genie really is out of the bottle.’