Testimony of Ray Kurzweil on the Societal Implications of Nanotechnology

Despite calls to relinquish research in nanotechnology, we will have no choice but to confront the challenge of guiding nanotechnology in a constructive direction. Advances in nanotechnology and related advanced technologies are inevitable. Any broad attempt to relinquish nanotechnology will only push it underground, which would interfere with the benefits while actually making the dangers worse.

Testimony presented April 9, 2003 at the Committee on Science, U.S. House of Representatives Hearing to examine the societal implications of nanotechnology and consider H.R. 766, The Nanotechnology Research and Development Act of 2003.

Summary of Testimony:

The size of technology is itself inexorably shrinking. According to my models, both electronic and mechanical technologies are shrinking at a rate of 5.6 per linear dimension per decade. At this rate, most of technology will be "nanotechnology" by the 2020s.

We are immeasurably better off as a result of technology, but there is still a lot of suffering in the world to overcome. We have a moral imperative, therefore, to continue the pursuit of knowledge and advanced technologies, such as nanotechnology, that can continue to overcome human affliction. There is also an economic imperative to continue due to the pervasive acceleration of technology, including miniaturization, in the competitive economy.

Nanotechnology is not a separate field of study that we can simply relinquish. We will have no choice but to confront the challenge of guiding nanotechnology in a constructive direction. There are strategies we can deploy, but there will need to be continual development of defensive strategies.

We can take some level of comfort from our relative success in dealing with one new form of fully non-biological, self-replicating pathogen: the software virus.

The most immediate danger is not self-replicating nanotechnology, but rather self-replicating biotechnology. We need to place a much higher priority on developing vitally needed defensive technologies such as antiviral medications. Keep in mind that a bioterrorist does not need to put his "innovations" through the FDA.

Any broad attempt to relinquish nanotechnology will only push it underground, which would interfere with the benefits while actually making the dangers worse.

Existing regulations on the safety of foods, drugs, and other materials in the environment are sufficient to deal with the near-term applications of nanotechnology, such as nanoparticles.

Full Verbal Testimony:

Chairman Boehlert, distinguished members of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, and other distinguished guests, I appreciate this opportunity to respond to your questions and concerns on the vital issue of the societal implications of nanotechnology. Our rapidly growing ability to manipulate matter and energy at ever smaller scales promises to transform virtually every sector of society, including health and medicine, manufacturing, electronics and computers, energy, travel, and defense. There will be increasing overlap between nanotechnology and other technologies of increasing influence, such as biotechnology and artificial intelligence. As with any other technological transformation, we will be faced with deeply intertwined promise and peril.

In my brief verbal remarks, I only have time to summarize my conclusions on this complex subject, and I am providing the Committee with an expanded written response that attempts to explain the reasoning behind my views.

Eric Drexler's 1986 thesis developed the concept of building molecule-scale devices using molecular assemblers that would precisely guide chemical reactions. Without going through the history of the controversy surrounding feasibility, it is fair to say that the consensus today is that nano-assembly is indeed feasible, although the most dramatic capabilities are still a couple of decades away.

The concept of nanotechnology today has been expanded to include essentially any technology where the key features are measured in a modest number of nanometers (under 100 by some definitions). By this standard, contemporary electronics has already passed this threshold.

For the past two decades, I have studied technology trends, along with a team of researchers who have assisted me in gathering critical measures of technology in different areas, and I have been developing mathematical models of how technology evolves. Several conclusions from this study have a direct bearing on the issues before this hearing. Technologies, particularly those related to information, develop at an exponential pace, generally doubling in capability and price-performance every year. This observation includes the power of computation, communication – both wired and wireless, DNA sequencing, brain scanning, brain reverse engineering, and the size and scope of human knowledge in general. Of particular relevance to this hearing, the size of technology is itself inexorably shrinking. According to my models, both electronic and mechanical technologies are shrinking at a rate of 5.6 per linear dimension per decade. At this rate, most of technology will be "nanotechnology" by the 2020s.

The golden age of nanotechnology is, therefore, a couple of decades away. This era will bring us the ability to essentially convert software, i.e., information, directly into physical products. We will be able to produce virtually any product for pennies per pound. Computers will have greater computational capacity than the human brain, and we will be completing the reverse engineering of the human brain to reveal the software design of human intelligence. We are already placing devices with narrow intelligence in our bodies for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. With the advent of nanotechnology, we will be able to keep our bodies and brains in a healthy, optimal state indefinitely. We will have technologies to reverse environmental pollution. Nanotechnology and related advanced technologies of the 2020s will bring us the opportunity to overcome age-old problems, including pollution, poverty, disease, and aging.

We hear increasingly strident voices that object to the intermingling of the so-called natural world with the products of our technology. The increasing intimacy of our human lives with our technology is not a new story, and I would remind the committee that had it not been for the technological advances of the past two centuries, most of us here today would not be here today. Human life expectancy was 37 years in 1800. Most humans at that time lived lives dominated by poverty, intense labor, disease, and misfortune. We are immeasurably better off as a result of technology, but there is still a lot of suffering in the world to overcome. We have a moral imperative, therefore, to continue the pursuit of knowledge and of advanced technologies that can continue to overcome human affliction.

There is also an economic imperative to continue. Nanotechnology is not a single field of study that we can simply relinquish, as suggested by Bill Joy's essay, "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us." Nanotechnology is advancing on hundreds of fronts, and is an extremely diverse activity. We cannot relinquish its pursuit without essentially relinquishing all of technology, which would require a Brave New World totalitarian scenario, which is inconsistent with the values of our society.

Technology has always been a double-edged sword, and that is certainly true of nanotechnology. The same technology that promises to advance human health and wealth also has the potential for destructive applications. We can see that duality today in biotechnology. The same techniques that could save millions of lives from cancer and disease may also empower a bioterrorist to create a bioengineered pathogen.

A lot of attention has been paid to the problem of self-replicating nanotechnology entities that could essentially form a nonbiological cancer that would threaten the planet. I discuss in my written testimony steps we can take now and in the future to ameliorate these dangers. However, the primary point I would like to make is that we will have no choice but to confront the challenge of guiding nanotechnology in a constructive direction. Any broad attempt to relinquish nanotechnology will only push it underground, which would interfere with the benefits while actually making the dangers worse.

As a test case, we can take a small measure of comfort from how we have dealt with one recent technological challenge. There exists today a new form of fully nonbiological self-replicating entity that didn't exist just a few decades ago: the computer virus. When this form of destructive intruder first appeared, strong concerns were voiced that as they became more sophisticated, software pathogens had the potential to destroy the computer network medium they live in. Yet the "immune system" that has evolved in response to this challenge has been largely effective. Although destructive self-replicating software entities do cause damage from time to time, the injury is but a small fraction of the benefit we receive from the computers and communication links that harbor them. No one would suggest we do away with computers, local area networks, and the Internet because of software viruses.

One might counter that computer viruses do not have the lethal potential of biological viruses or of destructive nanotechnology. This is not always the case: we rely on software to monitor patients in critical care units, to fly and land airplanes, to guide intelligent weapons in our current campaign in Iraq, and other "mission critical" tasks. To the extent that this is true, however, this observation only strengthens my argument. The fact that computer viruses are not usually deadly to humans only means that more people are willing to create and release them. It also means that our response to the danger is that much less intense. Conversely, when it comes to self-replicating entities that are potentially lethal on a large scale, our response on all levels will be vastly more serious, as we have seen since 9-11.

I would describe our response to software pathogens as effective and successful. Although they remain (and always will remain) a concern, the danger remains at a nuisance level. Keep in mind that this success is in an industry in which there is no regulation, and no certification for practitioners. This largely unregulated industry is also enormously productive. One could argue that it has contributed more to our technological and economic progress than any other enterprise in human history.

Some of the concerns that have been raised, such as Bill Joy's article, are effective because they paint a picture of future dangers as if they were released on today's unprepared world. The reality is that the sophistication and power of our defensive technologies and knowledge will grow along with the dangers.

The challenge most immediately in front of us is not self-replicating nanotechnology, but rather self-replicating biotechnology. The next two decades will be the golden age of biotechnology, whereas the comparable era for nanotechnology will follow in the 2020s and beyond. We are now in the early stages of a transforming technology based on the intersection of biology and information science. We are learning the "software" methods of life and disease processes. By reprogramming the information processes that lead to and encourage disease and aging, we will have the ability to overcome these afflictions. However, the same knowledge can also empower a terrorist to create a bioengineered pathogen.

As we compare the success we have had in controlling engineered software viruses to the coming challenge of controlling engineered biological viruses, we are struck with one salient difference. As I noted, the software industry is almost completely unregulated. The same is obviously not the case for biotechnology. A bioterrorist does not need to put his "innovations" through the FDA. However, we do require the scientists developing the defensive technologies to follow the existing regulations, which slow down the innovation process at every step. Moreover, it is impossible, under existing regulations and ethical standards, to test defenses to bioterrorist agents on humans. There is already extensive discussion to modify these regulations to allow for animal models and simulations to replace infeasible human trials. This will be necessary, but I believe we will need to go beyond these steps to accelerate the development of vitally needed defensive technologies.

With the human genome project, 3 to 5 percent of the budgets were devoted to the ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) of the technology. A similar commitment for nanotechnology would be appropriate and constructive.

Near-term applications of nanotechnology are far more limited in their benefits as well as more benign in their potential dangers. These include developments in the materials area involving the addition of particles with multi-nanometer features to plastics, textiles, and other products. These have perhaps the greatest potential in the area of pharmaceutical development by allowing new strategies for highly targeted drugs that perform their intended function and reach the appropriate tissues, while minimizing side effects. This development is not qualitatively different than what we have been doing for decades in that many new materials involve constituent particles that are novel and of a similar physical scale. The emerging nanoparticle technology provides more precise control, but the idea of introducing new nonbiological materials into the environment is hardly a new phenomenon. We cannot say a priori that all nanoengineered particles are safe, nor would it be appropriate to deem them necessarily unsafe. Environmental tests thus far have not shown reasons for undue concern, and it is my view that existing regulations on the safety of foods, drugs, and other materials in the environment are sufficient to deal with these near-term applications.

The voices that are expressing concern about nanotechnology are the same voices that have expressed undue levels of concern about genetically modified organisms. As with nanoparticles, GMO's are neither inherently safe nor unsafe, and reasonable levels of regulation for safety are appropriate. However, none of the dire warnings about GMO's have come to pass. Already, African nations, such as Zambia and Zimbabwe, have rejected vitally needed food aid under pressure from European anti-GMO activists. The reflexive anti-technology stance that has been reflected in the GMO controversy will not be helpful in balancing the benefits and risks of nanoparticle technology.

In summary, I believe that existing regulatory mechanisms are sufficient to handle near-term applications of nanotechnology. As for the long term, we need to appreciate that a myriad of nanoscale technologies are inevitable. The current examinations and dialogues on achieving the promise while ameliorating the peril are appropriate and will deserve sharply increased attention as we get closer to realizing these revolutionary technologies.

Written Testimony

I am pleased to provide a more detailed written response to the issues raised by the committee. In this written portion of my response, I address the following issues:

Models of Technology Trends

A diverse technology such as nanotechnology progresses on many fronts and is comprised of hundreds of small steps forward, each benign in itself. An examination of these trends shows that technology in which the key features are measured in a small number of nanometers is inevitable. I hereby provide some examples of my study of technology trends.

The motivation for this study came from my interest in inventing. As an inventor in the 1970s, I came to realize that my inventions needed to make sense in terms of the enabling technologies and market forces that would exist when the invention was introduced, which would represent a very different world than when it was conceived. I began to develop models of how distinct technologies – electronics, communications, computer processors, memory, magnetic storage, and the size of technology – developed and how these changes rippled through markets and ultimately our social institutions. I realized that most inventions fail not because they never work, but because their timing is wrong. Inventing is a lot like surfing, you have to anticipate and catch the wave at just the right moment.

In the 1980s, my interest in technology trends and implications took on a life of its own, and I began to use my models of technology trends to project and anticipate the technologies of future times, such as the year 2000, 2010, 2020, and beyond. This enabled me to invent with the capabilities of the future. In the late 1980s, I wrote my first book, The Age of Intelligent Machines, which ended with the specter of machine intelligence becoming indistinguishable from its human progenitors. This book included hundreds of predictions about the 1990s and early 2000 years, and my track record of prediction has held up well.

During the 1990s I gathered empirical data on the apparent acceleration of all information-related technologies and sought to refine the mathematical models underlying these observations. In The Age of Spiritual Machines (ASM), which I wrote in 1998, I introduced refined models of technology, and a theory I called "the law of accelerating returns," which explained why technology evolves in an exponential fashion.

The Intuitive Linear View versus the Historical Exponential View

The future is widely misunderstood. Our forebears expected the future to be pretty much like their present, which had been pretty much like their past. Although exponential trends did exist a thousand years ago, they were at that very early stage where an exponential trend is so flat and so slow that it looks like no trend at all. So their lack of expectations was largely fulfilled. Today, in accordance with the common wisdom, everyone expects continuous technological progress and the social repercussions that follow. But the future will nonetheless be far more surprising than most observers realize because few have truly internalized the implications of the fact that the rate of change itself is accelerating.

Most long-range forecasts of technical feasibility in future time periods dramatically underestimate the power of future developments because they are based on what I call the "intuitive linear" view of history rather than the "historical exponential view." To express this another way, it is not the case that we will experience a hundred years of progress in the twenty-first century; rather we will witness on the order of twenty thousand years of progress (at today's rate of progress, that is).

When people think of a future period, they intuitively assume that the current rate of progress will continue for future periods. Even for those who have been around long enough to experience how the pace increases over time, an unexamined intuition nonetheless provides the impression that progress changes at the rate that we have experienced recently. From the mathematician's perspective, a primary reason for this is that an exponential curve approximates a straight line when viewed for a brief duration. It is typical, therefore, that even sophisticated commentators, when considering the future, extrapolate the current pace of change over the next 10 years or 100 years to determine their expectations. This is why I call this way of looking at the future the "intuitive linear" view.

But a serious assessment of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential. In exponential growth, we find that a key measurement such as computational power is multiplied by a constant factor for each unit of time (e.g., doubling every year) rather than just being added to incrementally. Exponential growth is a feature of any evolutionary process, of which technology is a primary example. One can examine the data in different ways, on different time scales, and for a wide variety of technologies ranging from electronic to biological, as well as social implications ranging from the size of the economy to human life span, and the acceleration of progress and growth applies. Indeed, we find not just simple exponential growth, but "double" exponential growth, meaning that the rate of exponential growth is itself growing exponentially. These observations do not rely merely on an assumption of the continuation of Moore's law (i.e., the exponential shrinking of transistor sizes on an integrated circuit), but is based on a rich model of diverse technological processes. What it clearly shows is that technology, particularly the pace of technological change, advances (at least) exponentially, not linearly, and has been doing so since the advent of technology, indeed since the advent of evolution on Earth.

Many scientists and engineers have what my colleague Lucas Hendrich calls "engineer's pessimism." Often an engineer or scientist who is so immersed in the difficulties and intricate details of a contemporary challenge fails to appreciate the ultimate long-term implications of their own work, and, in particular, the larger field of work that they operate in. Consider the biochemists in 1985 who were skeptical of the announcement of the goal of transcribing the entire genome in a mere 15 years. These scientists had just spent an entire year transcribing a mere one ten-thousandth of the genome, so even with reasonable anticipated advances, it seemed to them like it would be hundreds of years, if not longer, before the entire genome could be sequenced. Or consider the skepticism expressed in the mid 1980s that the Internet would ever be a significant phenomenon, given that it included only tens of thousands of nodes. The fact that the number of nodes was doubling every year and there were, therefore, likely to be tens of millions of nodes ten years later was not appreciated by those who struggled with "state of the art" technology in 1985, which permitted adding only a few thousand nodes throughout the world in a year.

I emphasize this point because it is the most important failure that would-be prognosticators make in considering future trends. The vast majority of technology forecasts and forecasters ignore altogether this "historical exponential view" of technological progress. Indeed, almost everyone I meet has a linear view of the future. That is why people tend to overestimate what can be achieved in the short term (because we tend to leave out necessary details), but underestimate what can be achieved in the long term (because the exponential growth is ignored).

The Law of Accelerating Returns

If we examine the timing of these steps, we see that the process has continuously accelerated. The evolution of life forms required billions of years for the first steps (e.g., primitive cells); later on progress accelerated. During the Cambrian explosion, major paradigm shifts took only tens of millions of years. Later on, Humanoids developed over a period of millions of years, and Homo sapiens over a period of only hundreds of thousands of years.

With the advent of a technology-creating species, the exponential pace became too fast for evolution through DNA-guided protein synthesis and moved on to human-created technology. Technology goes beyond mere tool making; it is a process of creating ever more powerful technology using the tools from the previous round of innovation, and is, thereby, an evolutionary process. The first technological steps -- sharp edges, fire, the wheel – took tens of thousands of years. For people living in this era, there was little noticeable technological change in even a thousand years. By 1000 AD, progress was much faster and a paradigm shift required only a century or two. In the nineteenth century, we saw more technological change than in the nine centuries preceding it. Then in the first twenty years of the twentieth century, we saw more advancement than in all of the nineteenth century. Now, paradigm shifts occur in only a few years time. The World Wide Web did not exist in anything like its present form just a few years ago; it didn't exist at all a decade ago.

The paradigm shift rate (i.e., the overall rate of technical progress) is currently doubling (approximately) every decade; that is, paradigm shift times are halving every decade (and the rate of acceleration is itself growing exponentially). So, the technological progress in the twenty-first century will be equivalent to what would require (in the linear view) on the order of 200 centuries. In contrast, the twentieth century saw only about 20 years of progress (again at today's rate of progress) since we have been speeding up to current rates. So the twenty-first century will see about a thousand times greater technological change than its predecessor.

Moore's Law and Beyond

There is a wide range of technologies that are subject to the law of accelerating returns. The exponential trend that has gained the greatest public recognition has become known as "Moore's Law." Gordon Moore, one of the inventors of integrated circuits, and then Chairman of Intel, noted in the mid-1970s that we could squeeze twice as many transistors on an integrated circuit every 24 months. Given that the electrons have less distance to travel, the circuits also run twice as fast, providing an overall quadrupling of computational power.

If we plot the speed (in instructions per second) per $1000 (in constant dollars) of 49 famous calculators and computers spanning the entire twentieth century, we note that there were four completely different paradigms that provided exponential growth in the price-performance of computing before the integrated circuits were invented. Therefore, Moore's Law was not the first, but the fifth paradigm to exponentially grow the power of computation. And it won't be the last. When Moore's Law reaches the end of its S-Curve, now expected before 2020, the exponential growth will continue with three-dimensional molecular computing, a prime example of the application of nanotechnology, which will constitute the sixth paradigm.

When I suggested in my book The Age of Spiritual Machines, published in 1999, that three-dimensional molecular computing, particularly an approach based on using carbon nanotubes, would become the dominant computing hardware technology in the teen years of this century, that was considered a radical notion. There has been so much progress in the past four years, with literally dozens of major milestones having been achieved, that this expectation is now a mainstream view.

The exponential growth of computing is a marvelous quantitative example of the exponentially growing returns from an evolutionary process. We can express the exponential growth of computing in terms of an accelerating pace: it took 90 years to achieve the first MIPS (million instructions per second) per thousand dollars; now we add one MIPS per thousand dollars every day.

Moore's Law narrowly refers to the number of transistors on an integrated circuit of fixed size, and sometimes has been expressed even more narrowly in terms of transistor feature size. But rather than feature size (which is only one contributing factor), or even number of transistors, I think the most appropriate measure to track is computational speed per unit cost. This takes into account many levels of "cleverness" (i.e., innovation, which is to say, technological evolution). In addition to all of the innovation in integrated circuits, there are multiple layers of innovation in computer design, e.g., pipelining, parallel processing, instruction look-ahead, instruction and memory caching, and many others.

The human brain uses a very inefficient electrochemical digital-controlled analog computational process. The bulk of the calculations are done in the interneuronal connections at a speed of only about 200 calculations per second (in each connection), which is about ten million times slower than contemporary electronic circuits. But the brain gains its prodigious powers from its extremely parallel organization in three dimensions. There are many technologies in the wings that build circuitry in three dimensions. Nanotubes, an example of nanotechnology, which is already working in laboratories, build circuits from pentagonal arrays of carbon atoms. One cubic inch of nanotube circuitry would be a million times more powerful than the human brain. There are more than enough new computing technologies now being researched, including three-dimensional silicon chips, optical and silicon spin computing, crystalline computing, DNA computing, and quantum computing, to keep the law of accelerating returns as applied to computation going for a long time.

As I discussed above, it is important to distinguish between the "S" curve (an "S" stretched to the right, comprising very slow, virtually unnoticeable growth – followed by very rapid growth – followed by a flattening out as the process approaches an asymptote) that is characteristic of any specific technological paradigm and the continuing exponential growth that is characteristic of the ongoing evolutionary process of technology. Specific paradigms, such as Moore's Law, do ultimately reach levels at which exponential growth is no longer feasible. That is why Moore's Law is an S curve. But the growth of computation is an ongoing exponential (at least until we "saturate" the Universe with the intelligence of our human-machine civilization, but that will not be a limit in this coming century). In accordance with the law of accelerating returns, paradigm shift, also called innovation, turns the S curve of any specific paradigm into a continuing exponential. A new paradigm (e.g., three-dimensional circuits) takes over when the old paradigm approaches its natural limit, which has already happened at least four times in the history of computation. This difference also distinguishes the tool making of non-human species, in which the mastery of a tool-making (or using) skill by each animal is characterized by an abruptly ending S shaped learning curve, versus human-created technology, which has followed an exponential pattern of growth and acceleration since its inception.

DNA Sequencing, Memory, Communications, the Internet, and Miniaturization

This "law of accelerating returns" applies to all of technology, indeed to any true evolutionary process, and can be measured with remarkable precision in information-based technologies. There are a great many examples of the exponential growth implied by the law of accelerating returns in technologies, as varied as DNA sequencing, communication speeds, brain scanning, electronics of all kinds, and even in the rapidly shrinking size of technology, which is directly relevant to the discussion at this hearing. The future nanotechnology age results not from the exponential explosion of computation alone, but rather from the interplay and myriad synergies that will result from manifold intertwined technological revolutions. Also, keep in mind that every point on the exponential growth curves underlying these panoply of technologies (see the graphs below) represents an intense human drama of innovation and competition. It is remarkable therefore that these chaotic processes result in such smooth and predictable exponential trends.

As I noted above, when the human genome scan started fourteen years ago, critics pointed out that given the speed with which the genome could then be scanned, it would take thousands of years to finish the project. Yet the fifteen year project was nonetheless completed slightly ahead of schedule.