In this essay I review the accuracy of my predictions going back a quarter of a century. Included herein is a discussion of my predictions from The Age of Intelligent Machines (which I wrote in the 1980s), all 147 predictions for 2009 in The Age of Spiritual Machines (which I wrote in the 1990s), plus others.

Perhaps my most important predictions are implicit in my exponential graphs. These trajectories have indeed continued on course and I discuss these updated graphs below.

My core thesis, which I call the law of accelerating returns, is that fundamental measures of information technology follow predictable and exponential trajectories, belying the conventional wisdom that — you can’t predict the future.

There are still many things — which project, company or technical standard will prevail in the marketplace, or when peace will come to the Middle East — that remain unpredictable, but the underlying price/performance and capacity of information is nonetheless remarkably predictable. Surprisingly, these trends are unperturbed by conditions such as war or peace and prosperity or recession.

— Ray Kurzweil

Please download Ray Kurzweil’s full paper “How My Predictions Are Faring” (pdf) here.

By examining these different forms of mind activity, Minsky says, we can explain why our thought sometimes takes the form of carefully reasoned analysis and at other times turns to emotion. He shows how our minds progress from simple, instinctive kinds of thought to more complex forms, such as consciousness or self-awareness. And he argues that because we tend to see our thinking as fragmented, we fail to appreciate what powerful thinkers we really are. Indeed, says Minsky, if thinking can be understood as the step-by-step process that it is, then we can build machines — artificial intelligences — that not only can assist with our thinking by thinking as we do but have the potential to be as conscious as we are.

Eloquently written, The Emotion Machine is an intriguing look into a future where more powerful artificial intelligences await.

Nanotechnology pioneer Eric Drexler and Rice University Professor and Nobelist Richard Smalley have engaged in a crucial debate on the feasibility of molecular assembly, which is the key to the most revolutionary capabilities of nanotechnology. Although Smalley was originally inspired by Drexler’s ground-breaking works and has himself become a champion of contemporary research initiatives in nanotechnology, he has also taken on the role of key critic of Drexler’s primary idea of precisely guided molecular manufacturing. This debate has picked up intensity with  publication of several rounds of this dialogue between these two pioneers. First some background:

Background: The Roots of Nanotechnology

Nanotechnology promises the tools to rebuild the physical world, our bodies and brains included, molecular fragment by molecular fragment, potentially atom by atom. We are shrinking the key feature size of technology, in accordance with what I call the “law of accelerating returns,” at the exponential rate of approximately a factor of 4 per linear dimension per decade. At this rate, the key feature sizes for most electronic and many mechanical technologies will be in the nanotechnology range, generally considered to be under 100 nanometers, by the 2020s (electronics has already dipped below this threshold, albeit not yet in three-dimensional structures and not self-assembling). Meanwhile, there has been rapid progress, particularly in the last several years, in preparing the conceptual framework and design ideas for the coming age of nanotechnology.

Most nanotechnology historians date the conceptual birth of nanotechnology to physicist Richard Feynman’s seminal speech in 1959, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” in which he described the profound implications and the inevitability of engineering machines at the level of atoms:

“The principles of physics, as far as I can see, do not speak against the possibility of maneuvering things atom by atom. It would be, in principle, possible. . . .for a physicist to synthesize any chemical substance that the chemist writes down. . .How? Put the atoms down where the chemist says, and so you make the substance. The problems of chemistry and biology can be greatly helped if our ability to see what we are doing, and to do things on an atomic level, is ultimately developed – a development which I think cannot be avoided.”

An even earlier conceptual root for nanotechnology was formulated by the information theorist John Von Neumann in the early 1950s with his model of a self-replicating system based on a universal constructor combined with a universal computer. In this proposal, the computer runs a program that directs the constructor, which in turn constructs a copy of both the computer (including its self-replication program) and the constructor. At this level of description, Von Neumann’s proposal is quite abstract — the computer and constructor could be made in a great variety of ways, as well as from diverse materials, and could even be a theoretical mathematical construction. He took the concept one step further and proposed a “kinematic constructor,” a robot with at least one manipulator (arm) that would build a replica of itself from a “sea of parts” in its midst.

It was left to Eric Drexler to found the modern field of nanotechnology, with a draft of his seminal Ph.D. thesis in the mid 1980s, by essentially combining these two intriguing suggestions. Drexler described a Von Neumann Kinematic Constructor, which for its “sea of parts” used atoms and molecular fragments, as suggested in Feynman’s speech. Drexler’s vision cut across many disciplinary boundaries, and was so far reaching, that no one was daring enough to be his thesis advisor, except for my own mentor, Marvin Minsky. Drexler’s doctoral thesis (premiered in his book, Engines of Creation in 1986 and articulated technically in his 1992 book Nanosystems) laid out the foundation of nanotechnology and provided the road map still being pursued today.

Von Neumann’s Universal Constructor, as applied to atoms and molecular fragments, was now called a “universal assembler.” Drexler’s assembler was universal because it could essentially make almost anything in the world. A caveat is in order here. The products of a universal assembler necessarily have to follow the laws of physics and chemistry, so only atomically stable structures would be viable. Furthermore, any specific assembler would be restricted to building products from its sea of parts, although the feasibility of using individual atoms has been repeatedly demonstrated.

Although Drexler did not provide a detailed design of an assembler, and such a design has still not been fully specified, his thesis did provide extensive existence proofs for each of the principal components of a universal assembler, which include the following subsystems:

• The computer: to provide the intelligence to control the assembly process. As with all of the subsystems, the computer needs to be small and simple. Drexler described an intriguing mechanical computer with molecular “locks” instead of transistor gates. Each lock required only 5 cubic nanometers of space and could switch 20 billion times a second. This proposal remains more competitive than any known electronic technology, although electronic computers built from three-dimensional arrays of carbon nanotubes may be a suitable alternative.
• The instruction architecture: Drexler and his colleague Ralph Merkle have proposed a “SIMD” (Single Instruction Multiple Data”) architecture in which a single data store would record the instructions and transmit them to trillions of molecular-sized assemblers (each with their own simple computer) simultaneously. Thus each assembler would not have to store the entire program for creating the desired product. This “broadcast” architecture also addresses a key safety concern by shutting down the self-replication process if it got out of control by terminating the centralized source of the replication instructions. However, as Drexler points out[1], a nanoscale assembler does not necessarily have to be self-replicating. Given the inherent dangers in self-replication, the ethical standards proposed by the Foresight Institute contain prohibitions against unrestricted self-replication, especially in a natural environment.
• Instruction transmission: transmission of the instructions from the centralized data store to each of the many assemblers would be accomplished electronically if the computer is electronic or through mechanical vibrations if Drexler’s concept of a mechanical computer were used.
• The construction robot: the constructor would be a simple molecular robot with a single arm, similar to Von Neumann’s kinematic constructor, but on a tiny scale. The feasibility of building molecular-based robot arms, gears, rotors, and motors has been demonstrated in the years since Drexler’s thesis, as I discuss below.
• The robot arm tip: Drexler’s follow-up book in 1992, Nanosystems: molecular machinery, manufacturing, and computation, provided a number of feasible chemistries for the tip of the robot arm that would be capable of grasping (using appropriate atomic force fields) a molecular fragment, or even a single atom, and then depositing it in a desired location. We know from the chemical vapor deposition process used to construct artificial diamonds that it is feasible to remove individual carbon atoms, as well as molecular fragments that include carbon, and then place them in another location through precisely controlled chemical reactions at the tip. The process to build artificial diamond is a chaotic process involving trillions of atoms, but the underlying process has been harnessed to design a robot arm tip that can remove hydrogen atoms from a source material and deposit it at desired location in a molecular machine being constructed. In this proposal, the tiny machines are built out of a diamond-like (called “diamondoid”) material. In addition to having great strength, the material can be doped with impurities in a precise fashion to create electronic components such as transistors. Simulations have shown that gears, levers, motors, and other mechanical systems can also be constructed from these carbon arrays. Additional proposals have been made in the years since, including several innovative designs by Ralph Merkle name=”_ednref2″>[2]. In recent years, there has been a great deal of attention on carbon nanotubes, comprised of hexagonal arrays of carbon atoms assembled in three dimensions, which are also capable of providing both mechanical and electronic functions at the molecular level.
• The assembler’s internal environment needs to prevent environmental impurities from interfering with the delicate assembly process. Drexler’s proposal is to maintain a near vacuum and build the assembler walls out of the same diamondoid material that the assembler itself is capable of making.
• The energy required for the assembly process can be provided either through electricity or through chemical energy. Drexler proposed a chemical process with the fuel interlaced with the raw building material. More recent proposals utilize nanoengineered fuel cells incorporating hydrogen and oxygen or glucose and oxygen.

Although many configurations have been proposed, the typical assembler has been described as a tabletop unit that can manufacture any physically possible product for which we have a software description. Products can range from computers, clothes, and works of art to cooked meals. Larger products, such as furniture, cars, or even houses, can be built in a modular fashion, or using larger assemblers. Of particular importance, an assembler can create copies of itself. The incremental cost of creating any physical product, including the assemblers themselves, would be pennies per pound, basically the cost of the raw materials. The real cost, of course, would be the value of the information describing each type of product, that is the software that controls the assembly process. Thus everything of value in the world, including physical objects, would be comprised essentially of information. We are not that far from this situation today, since the “information content” of products is rapidly asymptoting to 100 percent of their value.

In operation, the centralized data store sends out commands simultaneously to all of the assembly robots. There would be trillions of robots in an assembler, each executing the same instruction at the same time. The assembler creates these molecular robots by starting with a small number and then using these robots to create additional ones in an iterative fashion, until the requisite number of robots has been created.

Each local robot has a local data storage that specifies the type of mechanism it is building. This local data storage is used to mask the global instructions being sent from the centralized data store so that certain instructions are blocked and local parameters are filled in. In this way, even though all of the assemblers are receiving the same sequence of instructions, there is a level of customization to the part being built by each molecular robot. Each robot extracts the raw materials it needs, which includes individual carbon atoms and molecular fragments, from the source material. This source material also includes the requisite chemical fuel. All of the requisite design requirements, including routing the instructions and the source material, were described in detail in Drexler’s two classic works.

The Biological Assembler

Nature shows that molecules can serve as machines because living things work by means of such machinery. Enzymes are molecular machines that make, break, and rearrange the bonds holding other molecules together. Muscles are driven by molecular machines that haul fibers past one another. DNA serves as a data-storage system, transmitting digital instructions to molecular machines, the ribosomes, that manufacture protein molecules. And these protein molecules, in turn, make up most of the molecular machinery.

– Eric Drexler

The ultimate existence proof of the feasibility of a molecular assembler is life itself. Indeed, as we deepen out understanding of the information basis of life processes, we are discovering specific ideas to address the design requirements of a generalized molecular assembler. For example, proposals have been made to use a molecular energy source of glucose and ATP similar to that used by biological cells.

Consider how biology solves each of the design challenges of a Drexler assembler. The ribosome represents both the computer and the construction robot. Life does not use centralized data storage, but provides the entire code to every cell. The ability to restrict the local data storage of a nanoengineered robot to only a small part of the assembly code (using the “broadcast” architecture), particularly when doing self-replication, is one critical way nanotechnology can be engineered to be safer than biology.

With the advent of full-scale nanotechnology in the 2020s, we will have the potential to replace biology’s genetic information repository in the cell nucleus with a nanoengineered system that would maintain the genetic code and simulate the actions of RNA, the ribosome, and other elements of the computer in biology’s assembler. There would be significant benefits in doing this. We could eliminate the accumulation of DNA transcription errors, one major source of the aging process. We could introduce DNA changes to essentially reprogram our genes (something we’ll be able to do long before this scenario, using gene-therapy techniques).

With such a nanoengineered system, the recommended broadcast architecture could enable us to turn off unwanted replication, thereby defeating cancer, autoimmune reactions, and other disease processes. Although most of these disease processes will have already been defeated by genetic engineering, reengineering the computer of life using nanotechnology could eliminate any remaining obstacles and create a level of durability and flexibility that goes vastly beyond the inherent capabilities of biology.

Life’s local data storage is, of course, the DNA strands, broken into specific genes on the chromosomes. The task of instruction-masking (blocking genes that do not contribute to a particular cell type) is controlled by the short RNA molecules and peptides that govern gene expression. The internal environment the ribosome is able to function in is the particular chemical environment maintained inside the cell, which includes a particular acid-alkaline equilibrium (pH between 6.8 and 7.1 in human cells) and other chemical balances needed for the delicate operations of the ribosome. The cell wall is responsible for protecting this internal cellular environment from disturbance by the outside world.

The robot arm tip would use the ribosome’s ability to implement enzymatic reactions to break off each amino acid, each bound to a specific transfer RNA, and to connect it to its adjoining amino acid using a peptide bond.

However, the goal of molecular manufacturing is not merely to replicate the molecular assembly capabilities of biology. Biological systems are limited to building systems from protein, which has profound limitations in strength and speed. Nanobots built from diamondoid gears and rotors can be thousands of times faster and stronger than biological cells. The comparison is even more dramatic with regard to computation: the switching speed of nanotube-based computation would be millions of times faster than the extremely slow transaction speed of the electrochemical switching used in mammalian interneuronal connections (typically around 200 transactions per second, although the nonlinear transactions that take place in the dendrites and synapses are more complex than single computations).

The concept of a diamondoid assembler described above uses a consistent input material (for construction and fuel). This is one of several protections against molecule-scale replication of robots in an uncontrolled fashion in the outside world. Biology’s replication robot, the ribosome, also requires carefully controlled source and fuel materials, which are provided by our digestive system. As nano-based replicators become more sophisticated, more capable of extracting carbon atoms and carbon-based molecular fragments from less well-controlled source materials, and able to operate outside of controlled replicator enclosures such as in the biological world, they will have the potential to present a grave threat to that world, particularly in view of the vastly greater strength and speed of nano-based replicators over any biological system. This is, of course, the source of great controversy, which is alluded to in the Drexler-Smalley debate article and letters.

In the decade since publication of Drexler’s Nanosystems, each aspect of Drexler’s conceptual designs has been strengthened through additional design proposals, supercomputer simulations, and, most importantly, actual construction of molecular machines. Boston College chemistry professor T. Ross Kelly reported in the journal Nature that his construction of a chemically-powered nanomotor was built from 78 atoms.[3] A biomolecular research group headed by C. D. Montemagno created an ATP-fueled nanomotor.[4] Another molecule-sized motor fueled by solar energy was created by Ben Feringa at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands out of 58 atoms.[5] Similar progress has been made on other molecular-scale mechanical components such as gears, rotors, and levers. Systems demonstrating the use of chemical energy and acoustic energy (as originally described by Drexler) have been designed, simulated, and, in many cases, actually constructed. Substantial progress has been made in developing various types of electronic components from molecule-scale devices, particularly in the area of carbon nanotubes, an area that Smalley has pioneered.

Fat and Sticky Fingers

In the wake of rapidly expanding development of each facet of future nanotechnology systems, no serious flaw to Drexler’s universal assembler concept has been discovered or described. Smalley’s highly publicized objection in Scientific American [6] was based on a distorted description of the Drexler proposal; it ignored the extensive body of work in the past decade. As a pioneer of carbon nanotubes, Smalley has gone back and forth between enthusiasm and skepticism, having written that “nanotechnology holds the answer, to the extent there are answers, to most of our pressing material needs in energy, health, communication, transportation, food, water ….”

Smalley describes Drexler’s assembler as consisting of five to ten “fingers” (manipulator arms) to hold, move, and place each atom in the machine being constructed. He then goes on to point out that there isn’t room for so many fingers in the cramped space that a nanobot assembly robot has to work (which he calls the “fat fingers” problem) and that these fingers would have difficulty letting go of their atomic cargo because of molecular attraction forces (the “sticky fingers” problem). Smalley describes the “intricate three-dimensional waltz that is carried out” by five to fifteen atoms in a typical chemical reaction. Drexler’s proposal doesn’t look anything like the straw man description that Smalley criticizes. Drexler’s proposal, and most of those that have followed, have a single probe, or “finger.”

Moreover, there have been extensive description and analyses of viable tip chemistries that do not involve grasping and placing atoms as if they were mechanical pieces to be deposited in place. For example, the feasibility of moving hydrogen atoms using Drexler’s “propynyl hydrogen abstraction” tip title=”">[7] has been extensively confirmed in the intervening years. name=”_ednref8″>[8] The ability of the scanning probe microscope (SPM), developed at IBM in 1981, and the more sophisticated atomic force microscope to place individual atoms through specific reactions of a tip with a molecular-scale structure provide additional existence proofs. Indeed, if Smalley’s critique were valid, none of us would be here to discuss it because life itself would be impossible.

Smalley also objects that despite “working furiously . . . generating even a tiny amount of a product would take [a nanobot] … millions of years.” Smalley is correct, of course, that an assembler with only one nanobot wouldn’t produce any appreciable quantities of a product. However, the basic concept of nanotechnology is that we will need trillions of nanobots to accomplish meaningful results. This is also the source of the safety concerns that have received ample attention. Creating trillions of nanobots at reasonable cost will require the nanobots to make themselves. This self-replication solves the economic issue while introducing grave dangers. Biology used the same solution to create organisms with trillions of cells, and indeed we find that virtually all diseases derive from biology’s self-replication process gone awry.

Earlier challenges to the concepts underlying nanotechnology have also been effectively addressed. Critics pointed out that nanobots would be subject to bombardment by thermal vibration of nuclei, atoms, and molecules. This is one reason conceptual designers of nanotechnology have emphasized building structural components from diamondoid or carbon nanotubes. Increasing the strength or stiffness of a system reduces its susceptibility to thermal effects. Analysis of these designs have shown them to be thousands of times more stable in the presence of thermal effects than biological systems, so they can operate in a far wider temperature range[9].

Similar challenges were made regarding positional uncertainty from quantum effects, based on the extremely small feature size of nanoengineered devices. Quantum effects are significant for an electron, but a single carbon atom nucleus is more than 20,000 times more massive than an electron. A nanobot will be constructed from hundreds of thousands to millions of carbon and other atoms, so a nanobot will be billions of times more massive than an electron. Plugging this ratio in the fundamental equation for quantum positional uncertainty shows this to be an insignificant factor.

Power has represented another challenge. Drexler’s original proposals involved glucose-oxygen fuel cells, which have held up well in feasibility studies. An advantage of the glucose-oxygen approach is that nanomedicine applications can harness the glucose, oxygen, and ATP resources already provided by the human digestive system. A nanoscale motor was recently created using propellers made of nickel and powered by an ATP-based enzyme. title=”">[10]

However, recent progress in implementing MEMS-scale and even nanoscale hydrogen-oxygen fuel cells have provided an alternative approach. Hydrogen-oxygen fuel cells, with hydrogen provided by safe methanol fuel, have made substantial progress in recent years. A small company in Massachusetts, Integrated Fuel Cell Technologies, Inc.[11] has demonstrated a MEMS-based fuel cell. Each postage-stamp- sized device contains thousands of microscopic fuel cells and includes the fuel lines and electronic controls. NEC plans to introduce fuel cells based on nanotubes in 2004 for notebook computers and other portable electronics. They claim their small power sources will power devices for up to 40 hours before the user needs to change the methanol canister.

The Debate Heats Up

On April 16, 2003, Drexler responded to Smalley’s Scientific American article with an open letter. He cited 20 years of research by himself and others and responded specifically to the fat and sticky fingers objection. As I discussed above, molecular assemblers were never described as having fingers at all, but rather precise positioning of reactive molecules. Drexler cited biological enzymes and ribosomes as examples of precise molecular assembly in the natural world. Drexler closes by quoting Smalley’s own observation that “when a scientist says something is possible, they’re probably underestimating how long it will take. But if they say it’s impossible, they’re probably wrong.”

Three more rounds of this debate were published today. Smalley responds to Drexler’s open letter by backing off of his fat and sticky fingers objection and acknowledging that enzymes and ribosomes do indeed engage in the precise molecular assembly that Smalley had earlier indicated was impossible. Smalley says biological enzymes only work in water and that such water-based chemistry is limited to biological structures such as “wood, flesh and bone.” As Drexler has stated[12], this is erroneous. Many enzymes, even those that ordinarily work in water, can also function in anhydrous organic solvents and some enzymes can operate on substrates in the vapor phase, with no liquid at all. name=”_ednref13″>[13].

Smalley goes on to state (without any derivation or citations) that enzymatic-like reactions can only take place with biological enzymes. This is also erroneous. It is easy to see why biological evolution adopted water-based chemistry. Water is the most abundant substance found on our planet. It also comprises 70 to 90 percent of our bodies, our food, and indeed of all organic matter. Most people think of water as fairly simple, but it is a far more complex phenomenon than conventional wisdom suggests.

As every grade school child knows, water is comprised of molecules, each containing two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen, the most commonly known chemical formula, H 2O. However, consider some of water’s complications and their implications. In a liquid state, the two hydrogen atoms make a 104.5° angle with the oxygen atom, which increases to 109.5° when water freezes. This is why water molecules are more spread out in the form of ice, providing it with a lower density than liquid water. This is why ice floats.

Although the overall water molecule is electrically neutral, the placement of the electrons creates polarization effects. The side with the hydrogen atoms is relatively positive in electrical charge, whereas the oxygen side is slightly negative. So water molecules do not exist in isolation, rather they combine with one another in small groups to assume, typically, pentagonal or hexagonal shapes name=”_ednref14″>[14]. These multi-molecule structures can change back and forth between hexagonal and pentagonal configurations 100 billion times a second. At room temperature, only about 3 percent of the clusters are hexagonal, but this increases to 100 percent as the water gets colder. This is why snowflakes are hexagonal.

These three-dimensional electrical properties of water are quite powerful and can break apart the strong chemical bonds of other compounds. Consider what happens when you put salt into water. Salt is quite stable when dry, but is quickly torn apart into its ionic components when placed in water. The negatively charged oxygen side of the water molecules attracts positively charged sodium ions (Na⁺), while the positively charged hydrogen side of the water molecules attracts the negatively charged chlorine ions (Cl^-). In the dry form of salt, the sodium and chlorine atoms are tightly bound together, but these bonds are easily broken by the electrical charge of the water molecules. Water is considered “the universal solvent” and is involved in most of the biochemical pathways in our bodies. So we can regard the chemistry of life on our planet primarily as water chemistry.

However, the primary thrust of our technology has been to develop systems that are not limited to the restrictions of biological evolution, which exclusively adopted water-based chemistry and proteins as its foundation. Biological systems can fly, but if you want to fly at 30,000 feet and at hundreds or thousands of miles per hour, you would use our modern technology, not proteins. Biological systems such as human brains can remember things and do calculations, but if you want to do data mining on billions of items of information, you would want to use our electronic technology, not unassisted human brains.

Smalley is ignoring the past decade of research on alternative means of positioning molecular fragments using precisely guided molecular reactions. Precisely controlled synthesis of diamondoid (diamond-like material formed into precise patterns) has been extensively studied, including the ability to remove a single hydrogen atom from a hydrogenated diamond surface. title=”">[15] Related research supporting the feasibility of hydrogen abstraction and precisely-guided diamondoid synthesis has been conducted at the Materials and Process Simulation Center at Caltech; the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at North Carolina State University; the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing, the University of Kentucky; the United States Naval Academy, and the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.[16]

Smalley is also ignoring the well-established scanning probe microscope mentioned above, which uses precisely controlled molecular reactions. Building on these concepts, Ralph Merkle has described tip reactions that can involve up to four reactants.[17] There is extensive literature on site-specific reactions that can be precisely guided and that would be feasible for the tip chemistry in a molecular assembler.[18] Smalley ignores this body of literature when he maintains that only biological enzymes in water can perform this type of reaction. Recently, many tools that go beyond SPMs are emerging that can reliably manipulate atoms and molecular fragments.

On September 3, 2003, Drexler responded to Smalley’s response by alluding once again to the extensive body of literature that Smalley ignores. He cites the analogy to a modern factory, only at a nano-scale. He cites analyses of transition state theory indicating that positional control would be feasible at megahertz frequencies for appropriately selected reactants.

The latest installment of this debate is a follow-up letter by Smalley. This letter is short on specifics and science and long on imprecise metaphors that avoid the key issues. He writes, for example, that “much like you can’t make a boy and a girl fall in love with each other simply by pushing them together, you cannot make precise chemistry occur as desired between two molecular objects with simple mechanical motion…cannot be done simply by mushing two molecular objects together.” He again acknowledges that enzymes do in fact accomplish this, but refuses to acknowledge that such reactions could take place outside of a biological-like system: “this is why I led you…..to talk about real chemistry with real enzymes….any such system will need a liquid medium. For the enzymes we know about, that liquid will have to be water, and the types of things that can be synthesized with water around cannot be much broader than meat and bone of biology.”

I can understand Drexler’s frustration in this debate because I have had many critics that do not bother to read or understand the data and arguments that I have presented for my own conceptions of future technologies. Smalley’s argument is of the form that “we don’t have ‘X’ today, therefore ‘X’ is impossible.” I encounter this class of argument repeatedly in the area of artificial intelligence. Critics will cite the limitations of today’s systems as proof that such limitations are inherent and can never be overcome. These critics ignore the extensive list of contemporary examples of AI (for example, airplanes and weapons that fly and guide themselves, automated diagnosis of electrocardiograms and blood cell images, automated detection of credit card fraud, automated investment programs that routinely outperform human analysts, telephone-based natural language response systems, and hundreds of others) that represent working systems that are commercially available today that were only research programs a decade ago.

Those of us who attempt to project into the future based on well-grounded methodologies are at a disadvantage. Certain future realities may be inevitable, but they are not yet manifest, so they are easy to deny. There was a small body of thought at the beginning of the 20^th century that heavier-than-air flight was feasible, but mainstream skeptics could simply point out that if it was so feasible, why had it never been demonstrated? In 1990, Kasparov scoffed at the idea that machine chess players could ever possibly defeat him. When it happened in 1997, observers were quick to dismiss the achievement by dismissing the importance of chess.

Smalley reveals at least part of his motives at the end of his most recent letter when he writes:

“A few weeks ago I gave a talk on nanotechnology and energy titled ‘Be a Scientist, Save the World’ to about 700 middle and high school students in the Spring Branch ISD, a large public school system here in the Houston area. Leading up to my visit the students were asked to ‘write an essay on ‘why I am a Nanogeek. Hundreds responded, and I had the privilege of reading the top 30 essays, picking my favorite top 5. Of the essays I read, nearly half assumed that self-replicating nanobots were possible, and most were deeply worried about what would happen in their future as these nanobots spread around the world. I did what I could to allay their fears, but there is no question that many of these youngsters have been told a bedtime story that is deeply troubling. You and people around you have scared our children.”

I would point out to Smalley that earlier critics also expressed skepticism that either world-wide communication networks or software viruses that would spread across them were feasible. Today, we have both the benefits and the damage from both of these capabilities. However, along with the danger of software viruses has also emerged a technological immune system. While it does not completely protect us, few people would advocate eliminating the Internet in order to eliminate software viruses. We are obtaining far more benefit than damage from this latest example of intertwined promise and peril.

Smalley’s approach to reassuring the public about the potential abuse of this future technology is not the right strategy. Denying the feasibility of both the promise and the peril of molecular assembly will ultimately backfire and fail to guide research in the needed constructive direction. By the 2020s, molecular assembly will provide tools to effectively combat poverty, clean up our environment, overcome disease, extend human longevity, and many other worthwhile pursuits.

Like every other technology that humankind has created, it can also be used to amplify and enable our destructive side. It is important that we approach this technology in a knowledgeable manner to gain the profound benefits it promises, while avoiding its dangers. Drexler and his colleagues at the Foresight Institute have been in the forefront of developing the ethical guidelines and design considerations needed to guide the technology in a safe and constructive direction.

Denying the feasibility of an impending technological transformation is a short-sighted strategy.

Notes

[1] Chemical & Engineering News, December 1, 2003

[2] Ralph C. Merkle, “A proposed ‘metabolism’ for a hydrocarbon assembler,” Nanotechnology 8 (1997): 149-162; http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/hydroCarbonMetabolism.html.

[3] T.R. Kelly, H. De Silva, R.A. Silva, “Unidirectional rotary motion in a molecular system,” Nature 401 (September 9, 1999): 150-152.

[4] C.D. Montemagno, G.D. Bachan, “Constructing nanomechanical devices powered by biomolecular motors,” Nanotechnology 10 (1999): 225-231; G. D. Bachand, C.D. Montemagno, “Constructing organic / inorganic NEMS devices powered by biomolecular motors,” Biomedical Microdevices 2 (2000): 179-184.

[5] N. Koumura, R.W. Zijlstra, R.A. van Delden, N. Harada, B.L. Feringa, “Light-driven monodirectional molecular rotor,” Nature 401 (September 9, 1999): 152-155.

[6] Richard E. Smalley, “Of chemistry, love, and nanobots,” Scientific American 285 (September, 2001): 76-77. http://smalley.rice.edu/rick’s%20publications/SA285-76.pdf.

[7] Nanosystems: molecular machinery, manufacturing, and computation, by K. Eric Drexler, Wiley 1992.

[8] See for example, Theoretical Studies of a Hydrogen Abstraction Tool for Nanotechnology, by Charles B. Musgrave, Jason K. Perry, Ralph C. Merkle, and William A. Goddard III, Nanotechnology 2, 1991 pages 187-195.

[9] See equation and explanation on page 3 of “That’s Impossible!” How good scientists reach bad conclusions by Ralph C. Merkle, http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/impossible.html.

[10] Montemagno, C., and Bachand G. 1999 Nanotechnology 10 225.

[11] By way of disclosure, the author is an advisor and investor in this company.

[12] Chemical & Engineering News, December 1, 2003

[13] A. Zaks and A.M. Klibanov in Science (1984, 224:1249-51)

[14] “The apparent simplicity of the water molecule belies the enormous complexity of its interactions with other molecules, including other water molecules” (A. Soper. 2002. “Water and ice.” Science 297: 1288-1289). There is much that is still up for debate, as shown by the numerous articles still being published about this most basic of molecules, H₂0. For example, D. Klug. 2001. “Glassy water.” Science 294:2305-2306; P. Geissler et al., 2001. “Autoionization in liquid water.” Science 291(5511):2121-2124; J.K. Gregory et al. 1997. “The water dipole moment in water clusters.” Science 275:814-817; and K. Liu et al. 1996. “Water clusters.” Science 271:929-933;

A water molecule has slightly negative and slightly positive ends, which means water molecules interact with other water molecules to form networks. The partially positive hydrogen atom on one molecule is attracted to the partially negative oxygen on a neighboring molecule (hydrogen bonding). Three-dimensional hexamers involving 6 molecules are thought to be particularly stable, though none of these clusters lasts longer than a few picoseconds.

The polarity of water results in a number of anomalous properties. One of the best known is that the solid phase (ice) is less dense than the liquid phase. This is because the volume of water varies with the temperature, and the volume increases by about 9% on freezing. Due to hydrogen bonding, water also has a higher-than-expected boiling point.

[15] http://www.foresight.org/SciAmDebate/SciAmResponse.html, http://www.imm.org/SciAmDebate2/smalley.html, http://www.rfreitas.com/Nano/DimerTool.htm.

[16] The analysis of the hydrogen abstraction tool has involved many people, including: Donald W. Brenner, Richard J. Colton, K. Eric Drexler, William A. Goddard, III, J. A. Harrison, Jason K. Perry, Ralph C. Merkle, Charles B. Musgrave, O. A. Shenderova, Susan B. Sinnott, and Carter T. White.

[17] Ralph C. Merkle, “A proposed ‘metabolism’ for a hydrocarbon assembler,” Nanotechnology 8(1997):149-162; http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/hydroCarbonMetabolism.html

[18] Wilson Ho, Hyojune Lee, “Single bond formation and characterization with a scanning tunneling microscope,” Science 286(26 November 1999):1719-1722; http://www.physics.uci.edu/~wilsonho/stm-iets.html.

K. Eric Drexler, Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation, John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1992, Chapter 8.

Ralph C. Merkle, “A proposed ‘metabolism’ for a hydrocarbon assembler,” Nanotechnology 8(1997):149-162; http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/hydroCarbonMetabolism.html.

Charles B. Musgrave, Jason K. Perry, Ralph C. Merkle, William A. Goddard III, “Theoretical studies of a hydrogen abstraction tool for nanotechnology,” Nanotechnology 2(1991):187-195; http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/Habs/Habs.html.

Michael Page, Donald W. Brenner, “Hydrogen abstraction from a diamond surface: Ab initio quantum chemical study using constrained isobutane as a model,” J. Am. Chem. Soc. 113(1991):3270-3274.

Susan B. Sinnott, Richard J. Colton, Carter T. White, Donald W. Brenner, “Surface patterning by atomically-controlled chemical forces: molecular dynamics simulations,” Surf. Sci. 316(1994):L1055-L1060.

D.W. Brenner, S.B. Sinnott, J.A. Harrison, O.A. Shenderova, “Simulated engineering of nanostructures,” Nanotechnology 7(1996):161-167; http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/nano4/brennerPaper.pdf

S.P. Walch, W.A. Goddard III, R.C. Merkle, “Theoretical studies of reactions on diamond surfaces,” Fifth Foresight Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology, 1997; http://www.foresight.org/Conferences/MNT05/Abstracts/Walcabst.html.

Stephen P. Walch, Ralph C. Merkle, “Theoretical studies of diamond mechanosynthesis reactions,” Nanotechnology 9(1998):285-296.

Fedor N. Dzegilenko, Deepak Srivastava, Subhash Saini, “Simulations of carbon nanotube tip assisted mechano-chemical reactions on a diamond surface,” Nanotechnology 9(December 1998):325-330.

J.W. Lyding, K. Hess, G.C. Abeln, D.S. Thompson, J.S. Moore, M.C. Hersam, E.T. Foley, J. Lee, Z. Chen, S.T. Hwang, H. Choi, P.H. Avouris, I.C. Kizilyalli, “UHV-STM nanofabrication and hydrogen/deuterium desorption from silicon surfaces: implications for CMOS technology,” Appl. Surf. Sci. 130(1998):221-230.

E.T. Foley, A.F. Kam, J.W. Lyding, P.H. Avouris, P. H. (1998), “Cryogenic UHV-STM study of hydrogen and deuterium desorption from Si(100),” Phys. Rev. Lett. 80(1998):1336-1339.

M.C. Hersam, G.C. Abeln, J.W. Lyding, “An approach for efficiently locating and electrically contacting nanostructures fabricated via UHV-STM lithography on Si(100),” Microelectronic Engineering 47(1999):235-.

L.J. Lauhon, W. Ho, “Inducing and observing the abstraction of a single hydrogen atom in bimolecular reaction with a scanning tunneling microscope,” J. Phys. Chem. 105(2000):3987-3992.

Ralph C. Merkle, Robert A. Freitas Jr., “Theoretical analysis of a carbon-carbon dimer placement tool for diamond mechanosynthesis,” J. Nanosci. Nanotechnol. 3(August 2003):319-324. http://www.rfreitas.com/Nano/JNNDimerTool.pdf

Jingping Peng, Robert A. Freitas Jr., Ralph C. Merkle, “Theoretical Analysis of Diamond Mechanosynthesis. Part I. Stability of C2 Mediated Growth of Nanocrystalline Diamond C(110) Surface,” J. Comp. Theor. Nanosci. 1(March 2004). In press.

David J. Mann, Jingping Peng, Robert A. Freitas Jr., Ralph C. Merkle, “Theoretical Analysis of Diamond Mechanosynthesis. Part II. C2 Mediated Growth of Diamond C(110) Surface via Si/Ge-Triadamantane Dimer Placement Tools,” J. Comp. Theor. Nanosci. 1(March 2004). In press.

© 2003 KurzweilAI.net

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All human knowledge proceeds out of experience; we cannot know anything except by experience. All our reasoning is based upon generalised experience, all our knowledge is but harmonised experience. Looking around us, what do we find? A continuous change. The plant comes out of the seed, grows into the tree, completes the circle, and comes back to the seed. The animal comes, lives a certain time, dies, and completes the circle. So does man. The mountains slowly but surely crumble away, the rivers slowly but surely dry up, rains come out of the sea, and go back to the sea. Everywhere circles are being completed, birth, growth, development, and decay following each other with mathematical precision. This is our everyday experience. Inside of it all, behind all this vast mass of what we call life, of millions of forms and shapes, millions upon millions of varieties, beginning from the lowest atom to the highest spiritualised man, we find existing a certain unity. Every day we find that the wall that was thought to be dividing one thing and another is being broken down, and all matter is coming to be recognised by modern science as one substance manifesting in different ways and in various forms; the one life that runs through all like a continuous chain, of which all these various forms represent the links, link after link, extending almost infinitely, but of the same one chain. This is what is called evolution. It is an old, old idea, as old as human society, only it is getting fresher and fresher as human knowledge is progressing. There is one thing more, which the ancients perceived, but which in modern times is not yet so clearly perceived, and that is involution. The seed is becoming the plant; a grain of sand never becomes a plant. It is the father that becomes a child; a lump of clay never becomes the child.

From what does this evolution come, is the question. What was the seed? It was the same as the tree. All the possibilities of a future tree are in that seed; all the possibilities of a future man are in the little baby; all the possibilities of any future life are in the germ. What is this? The ancient philosophers of India called it involution. We find then, that every evolution presupposes an involution. Nothing can be evolved which is not already there. Here, again, modern science comes to our help. You know by mathematical reasoning that the sum total of the energy that is displayed in the universe is the same throughout. You cannot take away one atom of matter or one foot-pound of force. You cannot add to the universe one atom of matter or one foot-pound of force. As such, evolution does not come out of zero; then, where does it come from? From previous involution. The child is the man involved, and the man is the child evolved. The seed is the tree involved, and the tree is the seed evolved. All the possibilities of life are in the germ.

The problem becomes a little clearer. Add to it the first idea of continuation of life. From the lowest protoplasm to the most perfect human being there is really but one life. Just as in one life we have so many various phases of expression, the protoplasm developing into the baby, the child, the young man, the old man, so, from that protoplasm up to the most perfect man we get one continuous life, one chain. This is evolution, but we have seen that each evolution presupposes an involution. The whole of this life which slowly manifests itself evolves itself from the protoplasm to the perfected human being, the Incarnation of God on earth–the whole of this series is but one life, and the whole of this manifestation must have been involved in that very protoplasm. This whole life, this very God on earth, was involved in it and slowly came out, manifesting itself slowly, slowly, slowly. The highest expression must have been there in the germ state in minute form; therefore this one force, this whole chain, is the involution of that cosmic life which is everywhere. It is this one mass of intelligence which, from the protoplasm up to the most perfected man, is slowly and slowly uncoiling itself. Not that it grows. Take off all ideas of growth from your mind. With the idea of growth is associated something coming from outside, something extraneous, which would give the lie to the truth that the Infinite which lies latent in every life is independent of all external conditions. It can never grow; It was always there, and only manifests Itself.

The effect is the cause manifested. There is no essential difference between the effect and the cause. Take this glass, for instance. There was the material, and that material plus the will of the manufacturer made the glass; and these two were its causes and are present in it. In what form is the will present? As adhesion. If the force were not here, each particle would fall away. What is the effect then? It is the same as the cause, only taking a different form, a different composition. When the cause is changed and limited for a time it becomes the effect. We must remember this. Applying it to our idea of life, the whole of the manifestation of this one series, from the protoplasm up to the most perfect man, must be the very same thing as cosmic life. First it got involved and became finer; and out of that fine something, which was the cause, it has gone on evolving, manifesting itself, and becoming grosser.

But the question of immortality is not yet settled. We have seen that everything in this universe is indestructible. There is nothing new; there will be nothing new. The same series of manifestations are presenting themselves alternately like a wheel, coming up and going down. All motion in this universe is in the form of waves, successively rising and falling. Systems after systems are coming out of fine forms, evolving themselves, and taking grosser forms, again melting down, as it were, and going back to the fine forms. Again they rise out of that, evolving for a certain period and slowly going back to the cause. So with all life. Each manifestation of life is coming up and then going back again. What goes down? The form. The form breaks to pieces, but it comes up again. In one sense bodies and forms even are eternal. How? Suppose we take a number of dice and throw them, and they fall in this ratio–6–5–3–4. We take the dice up and throw them again and again, there must be a time when the same numbers will come again; the same combination must come. Now each particle, each atom, that is in this universe, I take for such a die, and these are being thrown out and combined again and again. All these forms before you are one combination. Here are the forms of a glass, a table, a pitcher of water, and so forth. This is one combination; in time, it will all break. But there must come a time when exactly the same combination comes again, when you will be here, and this form will be here, this subject will be talked, and this pitcher will be here. An infinite number of times this has been, and an infinite number of times this will be repeated. Thus far with the physical forms. What do we find? That even the combination of physical forms is eternally repeated.

A most interesting conclusion that follows from this theory is the explanation of facts such as these: Some of you, perhaps, have seen a man who can read the past life of others and foretell the future. How is it possible for any one to see what the future will be, unless there is a regulated future? Effects of the past will recur in the future, and we see that it is so. You have seen the big Ferris Wheel¹ in Chicago. The wheel revolves, and the little rooms in the wheel are regularly coming one after another; one set of persons gets into these, and after they have gone round the circle, they get out, and a fresh batch of people gets in. Each one of these batches is like one of these manifestations, from the lowest animal to the highest man. Nature is like the chain of the Ferris Wheel, endless and infinite, and these little carriages are the bodies or forms in which fresh batches of souls are riding, going up higher and higher until they become perfect and come out of the wheel. But the wheel goes on. And so long as the bodies are in the wheel, it can be absolutely and mathematically foretold where they will go, but not so of the souls. Thus it is possible to read the past and the future of nature with precision. We see, then, that there is recurrence of the same material phenomena at certain periods, and that the same combinations have been taking place through eternity. But that is not the immortality of the soul. No force can die, no matter can be annihilated. What becomes of it? It goes on changing, backwards and forwards, until it returns to the source from which it came. There is no motion in a straight line. Everything moves in a circle; a straight line, infinitely produced, becomes a circle. If that is the case, there cannot be eternal degeneration for any soul. It cannot be. Everything must complete the circle, and come back to its source. What are you and I and all these souls? In our discussion of evolution and involution, we have seen that you and I must be part of the cosmic consciousness, cosmic life, cosmic mind, which got involved and we must complete the circle and go back to this cosmic intelligence which is God. This cosmic intelligence is what people call Lord, or God, or Christ, or Buddha, or Brahman, what the materialists perceive as force, and the agnostics as that infinite, inexpressible beyond; and we are all parts of that.

This is the second idea, yet this is not sufficient; there will be still more doubts. It is very good to say that there is no destruction for any force. But all the forces and forms that we see are combinations. This form before us is a composition of several component parts, and so every force that we see is similarly composite. If you take the scientific idea of force, and call it the sum total, the resultant of several forces, what becomes of your individuality? Everything that is a compound must sooner or later go back to its component parts. Whatever in this universe is the result of the combination of matter or force must sooner or later go back to its components. Whatever is the result of certain causes must die, must be destroyed. It gets broken up, dispersed, and resolved back into its components. Soul is not a force; neither is it thought. It is the manufacturer of thought, but not thought itself; it is the manufacturer of the body, but not the body. Why so? We see that the body cannot be the soul. Why not? Because it is not intelligent. A corpse is not intelligent, nor a piece of meat in a butcher’s shop. What do we mean by intelligence? Reactive power. We want to go a little more deeply into this. Here is a pitcher; I see it. How? Rays of light from the pitcher enter my eyes, and make a picture in my retina, which is carried to the brain. Yet there is no vision. What the physiologists call the sensory nerves carry this impression inwards. But up to this there is no reaction. The nerve centre in the brain carries the impression to the mind, and the mind reacts, and as soon as this reaction comes, the pitcher flashes before it. Take a more commonplace example. Suppose you are listening to me intently and a mosquito is sitting on the tip of your nose and giving you that pleasant sensation which mosquitoes can give; but you are so intent on hearing me that you do not feel the mosquito at all. What has happened? The mosquito has bitten a certain part of your skin, and certain nerves are there.

They have carried a certain sensation to the brain, and the impression is there, but the mind, being otherwise occupied, does not react, so you are not aware of the presence of the mosquito. When a new impression comes, if the mind does not react, we shall not be conscious of it, but when the reaction comes we feel, we see, we hear, and so forth. With this reaction comes illumination, as the Sankhya philosophers call it. We see that the body cannot illuminate, because in the absence of attention no sensation is possible. Cases have been known where, under peculiar conditions, a man who had never learnt a particular language was found able to speak it. Subsequent inquiries proved that the man had, when a child, lived among people who spoke that language and the impressions were left in his brain. These impressions remained stored up there, until through some cause the mind reacted, and illumination came, and then the man was able to speak the language. This shows that the mind alone is not sufficient, that the mind itself is an instrument in the hands of someone. In the case of that boy the mind contained that language, yet he did not know it, but later there came a time when he did. It shows that there is someone besides the mind; and when the boy was a baby, that someone did not use the power; but when the boy grew up, he took advantage of it, and used it. First, here is the body, second the mind; or instrument of thought, and third behind this mind is the Self of man. The Sanskrit word is atman. As modern philosophers have identified thought with molecular changes in the brain, they do not know how to explain such a case, and they generally deny it. The mind is intimately connected with the brain which dies every time the body changes.

The Self is the illuminator, and the mind is the instrument in Its hands, and through that instrument It gets hold of the external instrument, and thus comes perception. The external instruments get hold of the impressions and carry them to the organs, for you must remember always, that the eyes and ears are only receivers–it is the internal organs, the brain centres, which act. In Sanskrit these centres are called Indriyas, and they carry sensations to the mind, and the mind presents them further back to another state of the mind, which in Sanskrit is called Chitta, and there they are organised into will, and all these present them to the King of kings inside, the Ruler on His throne, the Self of man. He then sees and gives His orders. Then the mind immediately acts on the organs, and the organs on the external body. The real Perceiver, the real Ruler, the Governor, the Creator, the Manipulator of all this, is the Self of man.

We see, then, that the Self of man is not the body, neither is It thought. It cannot be a compound. Why not? Because everything that is a compound can be seen or imagined. That which we cannot imagine or perceive, which we cannot bind together, is not force or matter cause or effect, and cannot be a compound. The domain of compounds is only so far as our mental universe, our thought universe extends. Beyond this it does not hold good; it is as far as law reigns, and if there is anything beyond law, it cannot be a compound at all. The Self of man being beyond the law of causation, is not a compound. It is ever free and is the Ruler of everything that is within law. It will never die, because death means going back to the component, parts, and that which was never a compound can never die. It is sheer nonsense to say It dies.

We are now treading on finer and finer ground, and some of you, perhaps, will be frightened. We have seen that this Self, being beyond the little universe of matter and force and thought, is a simple; and as a simple It cannot die. That which does not die cannot live. For life and death are the obverse and reverse of the same coin. Life is another name for death, and death for life. One particular mode of manifestation is what we call life; another particular mode of manifestation of the same thing is what we call death. When the wave rises on the top it is life; and when it falls into the hollow it is death. If anything is beyond death, we naturally see it must also be beyond life. I must remind you of the first conclusion that the soul of man is part of the cosmic energy that exists, which is God. We now find that it is beyond life and death. You were never born, and you will never die. What is this birth and death that we see around us? This belongs to the body only, because the soul is omnipresent. “How can that be?” you may ask. “So many people are sitting here, and you say the soul is omnipresent?” What is there, I ask, to limit anything that is beyond law, beyond causation? This glass is limited; it is not omnipresent, because the surrounding matter forces it to take that form, does not allow it to expand. It is conditioned by everything around it, and is, therefore, limited. But that which is beyond law, where there is nothing to act upon it, how can that be limited? It must be omnipresent. You are everywhere in the universe. How is it then that I am born and I am going to die, and all that? That is the talk of ignorance, hallucination of the brain. You were neither born, nor will you die. You have had neither birth, nor will have rebirth, nor life, nor incarnation, nor anything. What do you mean by coming and going! All shallow nonsense. You are everywhere. Then what is this coming and going? It is the hallucination produced by the change of this fine body which you call the mind. That is going on. Just a little speck of cloud passing before the sky. As it moves on and on, it may create the delusion that the sky moves. Sometimes you see a cloud moving before the moon, and you think that the moon is moving. When you are in a train you think the land is flying, or when you are in a boat, you think the water moves. In reality you are neither going nor coming, you are not being born, nor going to be reborn; you are infinite, ever-present, beyond all causation, and ever-free. Such a question is out of place, it is arrant nonsense. How could there be mortality when there was no birth?

One step more we will have to take to come to a logical conclusion. There is no half-way house. You are metaphysicians, and there is no crying quarter. If then we are beyond all law, we must be omniscient, ever-blessed; all knowledge must be in us and all power and blessedness. Certainly. You are the omniscient, omnipresent being of the universe. But of such beings can there be many? Can there be a hundred thousand millions of omnipresent beings? Certainly not. Then what becomes of us all? You are only one; there is only one such Self, and that One Self is you. Standing behind this little nature is what we call the Soul. There is only One Being, One Existence, the ever-blessed, the omnipresent, the omniscient, the birthiess, the deathless. “Through His control the sky expands, through His control the air breathes, through His control the sun shines, and through His control all live. He is the Reality in nature, He is the Soul of your soul, nay, more, you are He, you are one with Him.” Wherever there are two, there is fear, there is danger, there is conflict, there is strife. When it is all One, who is there to hate, who is there to struggle with?

When it is all He, with whom can you fight? This explains the true nature of life; this explains the true nature of being. This is perfection, and this is God. As long as you see the many, you are under delusion. “In this world of many he who sees the One, in this ever-changing world he who sees Him who never changes, as the Soul of his own soul, as his own Self, he is free, he is blessed, he has reached the goal.” Therefore know that thou art He; thou art the God of this universe, “Tat Tvam Asi” (That thou art). All these various ideas that I am a man or a woman, or sick or healthy, or strong or weak, or that I hate or I love or have a little power, are but hallucinations. Away with them! What makes you weak? What makes you fear? You are the One Being in the universe. What frightens you? Stand up then and be free. Know that every thought and word that weakens you in this world is the only evil that exists. Whatever makes men weak and fear is the only evil that should be shunned. What can frighten you? If the suns come down, and the moons crumble into dust, and systems after systems are hurled into annihilation, what is that to you? Stand as a rock; you are indestructible. You are the Self, the God of the universe. Say–”I am Existence Absolute, Bliss Absolute, Knowledge Absolute, I am He,” and like a lion breaking its cage, break your chain and be free for ever. What frightens you, what holds you down? Only ignorance and delusion; nothing else can bind you. You are the Pure One, the Ever-blessed.

Silly fools tell you that you are sinners, and you sit down in a corner and weep. It is foolishness, wickedness, downright rascality to say that you are sinners! You are all God. See you not God and call Him man? Therefore, if you dare, stand on that–mould your whole life on that. If a man cuts your throat, do not say no, for you are cutting your own throat. When you help a poor man do not feel the least pride. That is worship for you, and not the cause of pride. Is not the whole universe you? Where is there any one that is not you? You are the Soul of this universe. You are the sun, moon, and stars, it is you that are shining everywhere. The whole universe is you. Whom are you going to hate or to fight? Know, then, that thou art He, and model your whole life accordingly; and he who knows this and models his life accordingly will no more grovel in darkness.

From JNANA-YOGA by Swami Vivekananda; published by the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center of New York; Copyright 1955 by Swami Nikhilananda, Trustee of the Estate of Swami Vivekananda; U.S. Paperback Edition 1982.

www.ramakrishna.org

Richard Feynman at Caltech giving his famous lecture he entitled "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom." (credit: California Institute of Technology)

This visionary speech that Richard Feynman gave on December 29th, 1959, at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society at the California Institute of Technology helped give birth to the now exploding field of nanotechnology.

I imagine experimental physicists must often look with envy at men like Kamerlingh Onnes, who discovered a field like low temperature, which seems to be bottomless and in which one can go down and down.

Such a man is then a leader and has some temporary monopoly in a scientific adventure. Percy Bridgman, in designing a way to obtain higher pressures, opened up another new field and was able to move into it and to lead us all along. The development of ever higher vacuum was a continuing development of the same kind.

I would like to describe a field, in which little has been done, but in which an enormous amount can be done in principle. This field is not quite the same as the others in that it will not tell us much of fundamental physics (in the sense of, “What are the strange particles?”) but it is more like solid-state physics in the sense that it might tell us much of great interest about the strange phenomena that occur in complex situations. Furthermore, a point that is most important is that it would have an enormous number of technical applications.

What I want to talk about is the problem of manipulating and controlling things on a small scale.

As soon as I mention this, people tell me about miniaturization, and how far it has progressed today. They tell me about electric motors that are the size of the nail on your small finger. And there is a device on the market, they tell me, by which you can write the Lord’s Prayer on the head of a pin. But that’s nothing; that’s the most primitive, halting step in the direction I intend to discuss. It is a staggeringly small world that is below. In the year 2000, when they look back at this age, they will wonder why it was not until the year 1960 that anybody began seriously to move in this direction.

Why cannot we write the entire 24 volumes of the Encyclopedia Brittanica on the head of a pin?

Let’s see what would be involved. The head of a pin is a sixteenth of an inch across. If you magnify it by 25,000 diameters, the area of the head of the pin is then equal to the area of all the pages of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica. Therefore, all it is necessary to do is to reduce in size all the writing in the Encyclopaedia by 25,000 times. Is that possible? The resolving power of the eye is about 1/120 of an inch–that is roughly the diameter of one of the little dots on the fine half-tone reproductions in the Encyclopaedia. This, when you demagnify it by 25,000 times, is still 80 angstroms in diameter–32 atoms across, in an ordinary metal. In other words, one of those dots still would contain in its area 1,000 atoms. So, each dot can easily be adjusted in size as required by the photoengraving, and there is no question that there is enough room on the head of a pin to put all of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica.

Furthermore, it can be read if it is so written. Let’s imagine that it is written in raised letters of metal; that is, where the black is in the Encyclopedia, we have raised letters of metal that are actually 1/25,000 of their ordinary size. How would we read it?

If we had something written in such a way, we could read it using techniques in common use today. (They will undoubtedly find a better way when we do actually have it written, but to make my point conservatively I shall just take techniques we know today.) We would press the metal into a plastic material and make a mold of it, then peel the plastic off very carefully, evaporate silica into the plastic to get a very thin film, then shadow it by evaporating gold at an angle against the silica so that all the little letters will appear clearly, dissolve the plastic away from the silica film, and then look through it with an electron microscope!

There is no question that if the thing were reduced by 25,000 times in the form of raised letters on the pin, it would be easy for us to read it today. Furthermore; there is no question that we would find it easy to make copies of the master; we would just need to press the same metal plate again into plastic and we would have another copy.

How do we write small?

The next question is: How do we write it? We have no standard technique to do this now. But let me argue that it is not as difficult as it first appears to be. We can reverse the lenses of the electron microscope in order to demagnify as well as magnify. A source of ions, sent through the microscope lenses in reverse, could be focused to a very small spot. We could write with that spot like we write in a TV cathode ray oscilloscope, by going across in lines, and having an adjustment which determines the amount of material which is going to be deposited as we scan in lines.

This method might be very slow because of space charge limitations. There will be more rapid methods. We could first make, perhaps by some photo process, a screen which has holes in it in the form of the letters. Then we would strike an arc behind the holes and draw metallic ions through the holes; then we could again use our system of lenses and make a small image in the form of ions, which would deposit the metal on the pin.

A simpler way might be this (though I am not sure it would work): We take light and, through an optical microscope running backward, we focus it onto a very small photoelectric screen. Then electrons come away from the screen where the light is shining. These electrons are focused down in size by the electron microscope lenses to impinge directly upon the surface of the metal. Will such a beam etch away the metal if it is run long enough? I don’t know. If it doesn’t work for a metal surface, it must be possible to find some surface with which to coat the original pin so that, where the electrons bombard, a change is made which we could recognize later.

There is no intensity problem in these devices–not what you are used to in magnification, where you have to take a few electrons and spread them over a bigger and bigger screen; it is just the opposite. The light which we get from a page is concentrated onto a very small area so it is very intense. The few electrons which come from the photoelectric screen are demagnified down to a very tiny area so that, again, they are very intense. I don’t know why this hasn’t been done yet!

That’s the Encyclopaedia Brittanica on the head of a pin, but let’s consider all the books in the world. The Library of Congress has approximately 9 million volumes; the British Museum Library has 5 million volumes; there are also 5 million volumes in the National Library in France. Undoubtedly there are duplications, so let us say that there are some 24 million volumes of interest in the world.

What would happen if I print all this down at the scale we have been discussing? How much space would it take? It would take, of course, the area of about a million pinheads because, instead of there being just the 24 volumes of the Encyclopaedia, there are 24 million volumes. The million pinheads can be put in a square of a thousand pins on a side, or an area of about 3 square yards. That is to say, the silica replica with the paper-thin backing of plastic, with which we have made the copies, with all this information, is on an area of approximately the size of 35 pages of the Encyclopaedia. That is about half as many pages as there are in this magazine. All of the information which all of mankind has every recorded in books can be carried around in a pamphlet in your hand–and not written in code, but a simple reproduction of the original pictures, engravings, and everything else on a small scale without loss of resolution.

What would our librarian at Caltech say, as she runs all over from one building to another, if I tell her that, ten years from now, all of the information that she is struggling to keep track of–120,000 volumes, stacked from the floor to the ceiling, drawers full of cards, storage rooms full of the older books–can be kept on just one library card! When the University of Brazil, for example, finds that their library is burned, we can send them a copy of every book in our library by striking off a copy from the master plate in a few hours and mailing it in an envelope no bigger or heavier than any other ordinary air mail letter.

Now, the name of this talk is “There is Plenty of Room at the Bottom”–not just “There is Room at the Bottom.” What I have demonstrated is that there is room–that you can decrease the size of things in a practical way. I now want to show that there is plenty of room. I will not now discuss how we are going to do it, but only what is possible in principle–in other words, what is possible according to the laws of physics. I am not inventing anti-gravity, which is possible someday only if the laws are not what we think. I am telling you what could be done if the laws are what we think; we are not doing it simply because we haven’t yet gotten around to it.

Information on a small scale

Suppose that, instead of trying to reproduce the pictures and all the information directly in its present form, we write only the information content in a code of dots and dashes, or something like that, to represent the various letters. Each letter represents six or seven “bits” of information; that is, you need only about six or seven dots or dashes for each letter. Now, instead of writing everything, as I did before, on the surface of the head of a pin, I am going to use the interior of the material as well.

Let us represent a dot by a small spot of one metal, the next dash, by an adjacent spot of another metal, and so on. Suppose, to be conservative, that a bit of information is going to require a little cube of atoms 5 times 5 times 5–that is 125 atoms. Perhaps we need a hundred and some odd atoms to make sure that the information is not lost through diffusion, or through some other process.

I have estimated how many letters there are in the Encyclopaedia, and I have assumed that each of my 24 million books is as big as an Encyclopaedia volume, and have calculated, then, how many bits of information there are (10^15). For each bit I allow 100 atoms. And it turns out that all of the information that man has carefully accumulated in all the books in the world can be written in this form in a cube of material one two-hundredth of an inch wide–which is the barest piece of dust that can be made out by the human eye. So there is plenty of room at the bottom! Don’t tell me about microfilm!

This fact–that enormous amounts of information can be carried in an exceedingly small space–is, of course, well known to the biologists, and resolves the mystery which existed before we understood all this clearly, of how it could be that, in the tiniest cell, all of the information for the organization of a complex creature such as ourselves can be stored. All this information–whether we have brown eyes, or whether we think at all, or that in the embryo the jawbone should first develop with a little hole in the side so that later a nerve can grow through it–all this information is contained in a very tiny fraction of the cell in the form of long-chain DNA molecules in which approximately 50 atoms are used for one bit of information about the cell.

Better electron microscopes

If I have written in a code, with 5 times 5 times 5 atoms to a bit, the question is: How could I read it today? The electron microscope is not quite good enough, with the greatest care and effort, it can only resolve about 10 angstroms. I would like to try and impress upon you while I am talking about all of these things on a small scale, the importance of improving the electron microscope by a hundred times. It is not impossible; it is not against the laws of diffraction of the electron. The wave length of the electron in such a microscope is only 1/20 of an angstrom. So it should be possible to see the individual atoms. What good would it be to see individual atoms distinctly?

We have friends in other fields–in biology, for instance. We physicists often look at them and say, “You know the reason you fellows are making so little progress?” (Actually I don’t know any field where they are making more rapid progress than they are in biology today.) “You should use more mathematics, like we do.” They could answer us–but they’re polite, so I’ll answer for them: “What you should do in order for us to make more rapid progress is to make the electron microscope 100 times better.”

What are the most central and fundamental problems of biology today? They are questions like: What is the sequence of bases in the DNA? What happens when you have a mutation? How is the base order in the DNA connected to the order of amino acids in the protein? What is the structure of the RNA; is it single-chain or double-chain, and how is it related in its order of bases to the DNA? What is the organization of the microsomes? How are proteins synthesized? Where does the RNA go? How does it sit? Where do the proteins sit? Where do the amino acids go in? In photosynthesis, where is the chlorophyll; how is it arranged; where are the carotenoids involved in this thing? What is the system of the conversion of light into chemical energy?

It is very easy to answer many of these fundamental biological questions; you just look at the thing! You will see the order of bases in the chain; you will see the structure of the microsome. Unfortunately, the present microscope sees at a scale which is just a bit too crude. Make the microscope one hundred times more powerful, and many problems of biology would be made very much easier. I exaggerate, of course, but the biologists would surely be very thankful to you–and they would prefer that to the criticism that they should use more mathematics.

The theory of chemical processes today is based on theoretical physics. In this sense, physics supplies the foundation of chemistry. But chemistry also has analysis. If you have a strange substance and you want to know what it is, you go through a long and complicated process of chemical analysis. You can analyze almost anything today, so I am a little late with my idea. But if the physicists wanted to, they could also dig under the chemists in the problem of chemical analysis. It would be very easy to make an analysis of any complicated chemical substance; all one would have to do would be to look at it and see where the atoms are. The only trouble is that the electron microscope is one hundred times too poor. (Later, I would like to ask the question: Can the physicists do something about the third problem of chemistry–namely, synthesis? Is there a physical way to synthesize any chemical substance?

The reason the electron microscope is so poor is that the f- value of the lenses is only 1 part to 1,000; you don’t have a big enough numerical aperture. And I know that there are theorems which prove that it is impossible, with axially symmetrical stationary field lenses, to produce an f-value any bigger than so and so; and therefore the resolving power at the present time is at its theoretical maximum. But in every theorem there are assumptions. Why must the field be symmetrical? I put this out as a challenge: Is there no way to make the electron microscope more powerful?

The marvelous biological system

The biological example of writing information on a small scale has inspired me to think of something that should be possible. Biology is not simply writing information; it is doing something about it. A biological system can be exceedingly small. Many of the cells are very tiny, but they are very active; they manufacture various substances; they walk around; they wiggle; and they do all kinds of marvelous things–all on a very small scale. Also, they store information. Consider the possibility that we too can make a thing very small which does what we want–that we can manufacture an object that maneuvers at that level!

There may even be an economic point to this business of making things very small. Let me remind you of some of the problems of computing machines. In computers we have to store an enormous amount of information. The kind of writing that I was mentioning before, in which I had everything down as a distribution of metal, is permanent. Much more interesting to a computer is a way of writing, erasing, and writing something else. (This is usually because we don’t want to waste the material on which we have just written. Yet if we could write it in a very small space, it wouldn’t make any difference; it could just be thrown away after it was read. It doesn’t cost very much for the material).

Miniaturizing the computer

I don’t know how to do this on a small scale in a practical way, but I do know that computing machines are very large; they fill rooms. Why can’t we make them very small, make them of little wires, little elements–and by little, I mean little. For instance, the wires should be 10 or 100 atoms in diameter, and the circuits should be a few thousand angstroms across. Everybody who has analyzed the logical theory of computers has come to the conclusion that the possibilities of computers are very interesting–if they could be made to be more complicated by several orders of magnitude. If they had millions of times as many elements, they could make judgments. They would have time to calculate what is the best way to make the calculation that they are about to make. They could select the method of analysis which, from their experience, is better than the one that we would give to them. And in many other ways, they would have new qualitative features.

If I look at your face I immediately recognize that I have seen it before. (Actually, my friends will say I have chosen an unfortunate example here for the subject of this illustration. At least I recognize that it is a man and not an apple.) Yet there is no machine which, with that speed, can take a picture of a face and say even that it is a man; and much less that it is the same man that you showed it before–unless it is exactly the same picture. If the face is changed; if I am closer to the face; if I am further from the face; if the light changes–I recognize it anyway. Now, this little computer I carry in my head is easily able to do that. The computers that we build are not able to do that. The number of elements in this bone box of mine are enormously greater than the number of elements in our “wonderful” computers. But our mechanical computers are too big; the elements in this box are microscopic. I want to make some that are submicroscopic.

If we wanted to make a computer that had all these marvelous extra qualitative abilities, we would have to make it, perhaps, the size of the Pentagon. This has several disadvantages. First, it requires too much material; there may not be enough germanium in the world for all the transistors which would have to be put into this enormous thing. There is also the problem of heat generation and power consumption; TVA would be needed to run the computer. But an even more practical difficulty is that the computer would be limited to a certain speed. Because of its large size, there is finite time required to get the information from one place to another. The information cannot go any faster than the speed of light–so, ultimately, when our computers get faster and faster and more and more elaborate, we will have to make them smaller and smaller.

But there is plenty of room to make them smaller. There is nothing that I can see in the physical laws that says the computer elements cannot be made enormously smaller than they are now. In fact, there may be certain advantages.

Miniaturization by evaporation

How can we make such a device? What kind of manufacturing processes would we use? One possibility we might consider, since we have talked about writing by putting atoms down in a certain arrangement, would be to evaporate the material, then evaporate the insulator next to it. Then, for the next layer, evaporate another position of a wire, another insulator, and so on. So, you simply evaporate until you have a block of stuff which has the elements–coils and condensers, transistors and so on–of exceedingly fine dimensions.

But I would like to discuss, just for amusement, that there are other possibilities. Why can’t we manufacture these small computers somewhat like we manufacture the big ones? Why can’t we drill holes, cut things, solder things, stamp things out, mold different shapes all at an infinitesimal level? What are the limitations as to how small a thing has to be before you can no longer mold it? How many times when you are working on something frustratingly tiny like your wife’s wrist watch, have you said to yourself, “If I could only train an ant to do this!” What I would like to suggest is the possibility of training an ant to train a mite to do this. What are the possibilities of small but movable machines? They may or may not be useful, but they surely would be fun to make.

Consider any machine–for example, an automobile–and ask about the problems of making an infinitesimal machine like it. Suppose, in the particular design of the automobile, we need a certain precision of the parts; we need an accuracy, let’s suppose, of 4/10,000 of an inch. If things are more inaccurate than that in the shape of the cylinder and so on, it isn’t going to work very well. If I make the thing too small, I have to worry about the size of the atoms; I can’t make a circle of “balls” so to speak, if the circle is too small. So, if I make the error, corresponding to 4/10,000 of an inch, correspond to an error of 10 atoms, it turns out that I can reduce the dimensions of an automobile 4,000 times, approximately–so that it is 1 mm. across. Obviously, if you redesign the car so that it would work with a much larger tolerance, which is not at all impossible, then you could make a much smaller device.

It is interesting to consider what the problems are in such small machines. Firstly, with parts stressed to the same degree, the forces go as the area you are reducing, so that things like weight and inertia are of relatively no importance. The strength of material, in other words, is very much greater in proportion. The stresses and expansion of the flywheel from centrifugal force, for example, would be the same proportion only if the rotational speed is increased in the same proportion as we decrease the size. On the other hand, the metals that we use have a grain structure, and this would be very annoying at small scale because the material is not homogeneous. Plastics and glass and things of this amorphous nature are very much more homogeneous, and so we would have to make our machines out of such materials.

There are problems associated with the electrical part of the system–with the copper wires and the magnetic parts. The magnetic properties on a very small scale are not the same as on a large scale; there is the “domain” problem involved. A big magnet made of millions of domains can only be made on a small scale with one domain. The electrical equipment won’t simply be scaled down; it has to be redesigned. But I can see no reason why it can’t be redesigned to work again.

Problems of lubrication

Lubrication involves some interesting points. The effective viscosity of oil would be higher and higher in proportion as we went down (and if we increase the speed as much as we can). If we don’t increase the speed so much, and change from oil to kerosene or some other fluid, the problem is not so bad. But actually we may not have to lubricate at all! We have a lot of extra force. Let the bearings run dry; they won’t run hot because the heat escapes away from such a small device very, very rapidly.

This rapid heat loss would prevent the gasoline from exploding, so an internal combustion engine is impossible. Other chemical reactions, liberating energy when cold, can be used. Probably an external supply of electrical power would be most convenient for such small machines.

What would be the utility of such machines? Who knows? Of course, a small automobile would only be useful for the mites to drive around in, and I suppose our Christian interests don’t go that far. However, we did note the possibility of the manufacture of small elements for computers in completely automatic factories, containing lathes and other machine tools at the very small level. The small lathe would not have to be exactly like our big lathe. I leave to your imagination the improvement of the design to take full advantage of the properties of things on a small scale, and in such a way that the fully automatic aspect would be easiest to manage.

A friend of mine (Albert R. Hibbs) suggests a very interesting possibility for relatively small machines. He says that, although it is a very wild idea, it would be interesting in surgery if you could swallow the surgeon. You put the mechanical surgeon inside the blood vessel and it goes into the heart and “looks” around. (Of course the information has to be fed out.) It finds out which valve is the faulty one and takes a little knife and slices it out. Other small machines might be permanently incorporated in the body to assist some inadequately-functioning organ.

Now comes the interesting question: How do we make such a tiny mechanism? I leave that to you. However, let me suggest one weird possibility. You know, in the atomic energy plants they have materials and machines that they can’t handle directly because they have become radioactive. To unscrew nuts and put on bolts and so on, they have a set of master and slave hands, so that by operating a set of levers here, you control the “hands” there, and can turn them this way and that so you can handle things quite nicely.

Most of these devices are actually made rather simply, in that there is a particular cable, like a marionette string, that goes directly from the controls to the “hands.” But, of course, things also have been made using servo motors, so that the connection between the one thing and the other is electrical rather than mechanical. When you turn the levers, they turn a servo motor, and it changes the electrical currents in the wires, which repositions a motor at the other end.

Now, I want to build much the same device–a master-slave system which operates electrically. But I want the slaves to be made especially carefully by modern large-scale machinists so that they are one-fourth the scale of the “hands” that you ordinarily maneuver. So you have a scheme by which you can do things at one- quarter scale anyway–the little servo motors with little hands play with little nuts and bolts; they drill little holes; they are four times smaller. Aha! So I manufacture a quarter-size lathe; I manufacture quarter-size tools; and I make, at the one-quarter scale, still another set of hands again relatively one-quarter size! This is one-sixteenth size, from my point of view. And after I finish doing this I wire directly from my large-scale system, through transformers perhaps, to the one-sixteenth-size servo motors. Thus I can now manipulate the one-sixteenth size hands.

Well, you get the principle from there on. It is rather a difficult program, but it is a possibility. You might say that one can go much farther in one step than from one to four. Of course, this has all to be designed very carefully and it is not necessary simply to make it like hands. If you thought of it very carefully, you could probably arrive at a much better system for doing such things.

If you work through a pantograph, even today, you can get much more than a factor of four in even one step. But you can’t work directly through a pantograph which makes a smaller pantograph which then makes a smaller pantograph–because of the looseness of the holes and the irregularities of construction. The end of the pantograph wiggles with a relatively greater irregularity than the irregularity with which you move your hands. In going down this scale, I would find the end of the pantograph on the end of the pantograph on the end of the pantograph shaking so badly that it wasn’t doing anything sensible at all.

At each stage, it is necessary to improve the precision of the apparatus. If, for instance, having made a small lathe with a pantograph, we find its lead screw irregular–more irregular than the large-scale one–we could lap the lead screw against breakable nuts that you can reverse in the usual way back and forth until this lead screw is, at its scale, as accurate as our original lead screws, at our scale.

We can make flats by rubbing unflat surfaces in triplicates together–in three pairs–and the flats then become flatter than the thing you started with. Thus, it is not impossible to improve precision on a small scale by the correct operations. So, when we build this stuff, it is necessary at each step to improve the accuracy of the equipment by working for awhile down there, making accurate lead screws, Johansen blocks, and all the other materials which we use in accurate machine work at the higher level. We have to stop at each level and manufacture all the stuff to go to the next level–a very long and very difficult program. Perhaps you can figure a better way than that to get down to small scale more rapidly.

Yet, after all this, you have just got one little baby lathe four thousand times smaller than usual. But we were thinking of making an enormous computer, which we were going to build by drilling holes on this lathe to make little washers for the computer. How many washers can you manufacture on this one lathe?

A hundred tiny hands

When I make my first set of slave “hands” at one-fourth scale, I am going to make ten sets. I make ten sets of “hands,” and I wire them to my original levers so they each do exactly the same thing at the same time in parallel. Now, when I am making my new devices one-quarter again as small, I let each one manufacture ten copies, so that I would have a hundred “hands” at the 1/16th size.

Where am I going to put the million lathes that I am going to have? Why, there is nothing to it; the volume is much less than that of even one full-scale lathe. For instance, if I made a billion little lathes, each 1/4000 of the scale of a regular lathe, there are plenty of materials and space available because in the billion little ones there is less than 2 percent of the materials in one big lathe.

It doesn’t cost anything for materials, you see. So I want to build a billion tiny factories, models of each other, which are manufacturing simultaneously, drilling holes, stamping parts, and so on.

As we go down in size, there are a number of interesting problems that arise. All things do not simply scale down in proportion. There is the problem that materials stick together by the molecular (Van der Waals) attractions. It would be like this: After you have made a part and you unscrew the nut from a bolt, it isn’t going to fall down because the gravity isn’t appreciable; it would even be hard to get it off the bolt. It would be like those old movies of a man with his hands full of molasses, trying to get rid of a glass of water. There will be several problems of this nature that we will have to be ready to design for.

Rearranging the atoms

But I am not afraid to consider the final question as to whether, ultimately–in the great future–we can arrange the atoms the way we want; the very atoms, all the way down! What would happen if we could arrange the atoms one by one the way we want them (within reason, of course; you can’t put them so that they are chemically unstable, for example).

Up to now, we have been content to dig in the ground to find minerals. We heat them and we do things on a large scale with them, and we hope to get a pure substance with just so much impurity, and so on. But we must always accept some atomic arrangement that nature gives us. We haven’t got anything, say, with a “checkerboard” arrangement, with the impurity atoms exactly arranged 1,000 angstroms apart, or in some other particular pattern.

What could we do with layered structures with just the right layers? What would the properties of materials be if we could really arrange the atoms the way we want them? They would be very interesting to investigate theoretically. I can’t see exactly what would happen, but I can hardly doubt that when we have some control of the arrangement of things on a small scale we will get an enormously greater range of possible properties that substances can have, and of different things that we can do.

Consider, for example, a piece of material in which we make little coils and condensers (or their solid state analogs) 1,000 or 10,000 angstroms in a circuit, one right next to the other, over a large area, with little antennas sticking out at the other end–a whole series of circuits. Is it possible, for example, to emit light from a whole set of antennas, like we emit radio waves from an organized set of antennas to beam the radio programs to Europe? The same thing would be to beam the light out in a definite direction with very high intensity. (Perhaps such a beam is not very useful technically or economically.)

I have thought about some of the problems of building electric circuits on a small scale, and the problem of resistance is serious. If you build a corresponding circuit on a small scale, its natural frequency goes up, since the wave length goes down as the scale; but the skin depth only decreases with the square root of the scale ratio, and so resistive problems are of increasing difficulty. Possibly we can beat resistance through the use of superconductivity if the frequency is not too high, or by other tricks.

Atoms in a small world

When we get to the very, very small world–say circuits of seven atoms–we have a lot of new things that would happen that represent completely new opportunities for design. Atoms on a small scale behave like nothing on a large scale, for they satisfy the laws of quantum mechanics. So, as we go down and fiddle around with the atoms down there, we are working with different laws, and we can expect to do different things. We can manufacture in different ways. We can use, not just circuits, but some system involving the quantized energy levels, or the interactions of quantized spins, etc.

Another thing we will notice is that, if we go down far enough, all of our devices can be mass produced so that they are absolutely perfect copies of one another. We cannot build two large machines so that the dimensions are exactly the same. But if your machine is only 100 atoms high, you only have to get it correct to one-half of one percent to make sure the other machine is exactly the same size–namely, 100 atoms high!

At the atomic level, we have new kinds of forces and new kinds of possibilities, new kinds of effects. The problems of manufacture and reproduction of materials will be quite different. I am, as I said, inspired by the biological phenomena in which chemical forces are used in repetitious fashion to produce all kinds of weird effects (one of which is the author).

The principles of physics, as far as I can see, do not speak against the possibility of maneuvering things atom by atom. It is not an attempt to violate any laws; it is something, in principle, that can be done; but in practice, it has not been done because we are too big.

Ultimately, we can do chemical synthesis. A chemist comes to us and says, “Look, I want a molecule that has the atoms arranged thus and so; make me that molecule.” The chemist does a mysterious thing when he wants to make a molecule. He sees that it has got that ring, so he mixes this and that, and he shakes it, and he fiddles around. And, at the end of a difficult process, he usually does succeed in synthesizing what he wants. By the time I get my devices working, so that we can do it by physics, he will have figured out how to synthesize absolutely anything, so that this will really be useless.

But it is interesting that it would be, in principle, possible (I think) for a physicist to synthesize any chemical substance that the chemist writes down. Give the orders and the physicist synthesizes it. How? Put the atoms down where the chemist says, and so you make the substance. The problems of chemistry and biology can be greatly helped if our ability to see what we are doing, and to do things on an atomic level, is ultimately developed–a development which I think cannot be avoided.

Now, you might say, “Who should do this and why should they do it?” Well, I pointed out a few of the economic applications, but I know that the reason that you would do it might be just for fun. But have some fun! Let’s have a competition between laboratories. Let one laboratory make a tiny motor which it sends to another lab which sends it back with a thing that fits inside the shaft of the first motor.

High school competition

Just for the fun of it, and in order to get kids interested in this field, I would propose that someone who has some contact with the high schools think of making some kind of high school competition. After all, we haven’t even started in this field, and even the kids can write smaller than has ever been written before. They could have competition in high schools. The Los Angeles high school could send a pin to the Venice high school on which it says, “How’s this?” They get the pin back, and in the dot of the “i” it says, “Not so hot.”

Perhaps this doesn’t excite you to do it, and only economics will do so. Then I want to do something; but I can’t do it at the present moment, because I haven’t prepared the ground. It is my intention to offer a prize of $1,000 to the first guy who can take the information on the page of a book and put it on an area 1/25,000 smaller in linear scale in such manner that it can be read by an electron microscope.

And I want to offer another prize–if I can figure out how to phrase it so that I don’t get into a mess of arguments about definitions–of another $1,000 to the first guy who makes an operating electric motor–a rotating electric motor which can be controlled from the outside and, not counting the lead-in wires, is only 1/64 inch cube.

I do not expect that such prizes will have to wait very long for claimants.

Vernor Vinge is a retired San Diego State University math professor, computer scientist, and science fiction author. He is best known for his Hugo Award-winning novels A Fire Upon the Deep, A Deepness in the Sky, Rainbows End, Fast Times at Fairmont High, and The Cookie Monster, as well as for his 1993 essay “The Coming Technological Singularity,” in which he argues that the creation of superhuman artificial intelligence will mark the point at which “the human era will be ended,” such that no current models of reality are sufficient to predict beyond it.

Vernor Vinge

What Is the Singularity?

The acceleration of technological progress has been the central feature of this century. I argue in this paper that we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth.

The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence.

There are several means by which science may achieve this breakthrough (and this is another reason for having confidence that the event will occur):

• There may be developed computers that are “awake” and superhumanly intelligent. (To date, there has been much controversy as to whether we can create human equivalence in a machine. But if the answer is “yes, we can”, then there is little doubt that beings more intelligent can be constructed shortly thereafter.)
• Large computer networks (and their associated users) may “wake up” as a superhumanly intelligent entity.
• Computer/human interfaces may become so intimate that users may reasonably be considered superhumanly intelligent.
• Biological science may provide means to improve natural human intellect.

The first three possibilities depend in large part on improvements in computer hardware. Progress in computer hardware has followed an amazingly steady curve in the last few decades [17]. Based largely on this trend, I believe that the creation of greater than human intelligence will occur during the next thirty years. (Charles Platt [20] has pointed out that AI enthusiasts have been making claims like this for the last thirty years. Just so I’m not guilty of a relative-time ambiguity, let me more specific: I’ll be surprised if this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030.)

What are the consequences of this event? When greater-than-human intelligence drives progress, that progress will be much more rapid. In fact, there seems no reason why progress itself would not involve the creation of still more intelligent entities — on a still — shorter time scale. The best analogy that I see is with the evolutionary past: Animals can adapt to problems and make inventions, but often no faster than natural selection can do its work–the world acts as its own simulator in the case of natural selection. We humans have the ability to internalize the world and conduct “what if’s” in our heads; we can solve many problems thousands of times faster than natural selection. Now, by creating the means to execute those simulations at much higher speeds, we are entering a regime as radically different from our human past as we humans are from the lower animals.

From the human point of view this change will be a throwing away of all the previous rules, perhaps in the blink of an eye, an exponential runaway beyond any hope of control. Developments that before were thought might only happen in “a million years” (if ever) will likely happen in the next century. (In [5], Greg Bear paints a picture of the major changes happening in a matter of hours.)

I think it’s fair to call this event a singularity (“the Singularity” for the purposes of this paper). It is a point where our old models must be discarded and a new reality rules. As we move closer to this point, it will loom vaster and vaster over human affairs till the notion becomes a commonplace. Yet when it finally happens it may still be a great surprise and a greater unknown. In the 1950s there were very few who saw it: Stan Ulam [28] paraphrased John von Neumann as saying:

One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.

Von Neumann even uses the term singularity, though it appears he is thinking of normal progress, not the creation of superhuman intellect. (For me, the superhumanity is the essence of the Singularity. Without that we would get a glut of technical riches, never properly absorbed (see [25]).)

In the 1960s there was recognition of some of the implications of superhuman intelligence. I. J. Good wrote [11]:

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion,” and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control. … It is more probable than not that, within the twentieth century, an ultraintelligent machine will be built and that it will be the last invention that man need make.

Good has captured the essence of the runaway, but does not pursue its most disturbing consequences. Any intelligent machine of the sort he describes would not be humankind’s “tool” — any more than humans are the tools of rabbits or robins or chimpanzees.

Through the ’60s and ’70s and ’80s, recognition of the cataclysm spread [29] [1] [31] [5]. Perhaps it was the science-fiction writers who felt the first concrete impact. After all, the “hard” science-fiction writers are the ones who try to write specific stories about all that technology may do for us. More and more, these writers felt an opaque wall across the future. Once, they could put such fantasies millions of years in the future [24]. Now they saw that their most diligent extrapolations resulted in the unknowable … soon. Once, galactic empires might have seemed a Post-Human domain. Now, sadly, even interplanetary ones are.

What about the ’90s and the ’00s and the ’10s, as we slide toward the edge? How will the approach of the Singularity spread across the human world view? For a while yet, the general critics of machine sapience will have good press. After all, till we have hardware as powerful as a human brain it is probably foolish to think we’ll be able to create human equivalent (or greater) intelligence. (There is the far-fetched possibility that we could make a human equivalent out of less powerful hardware, if we were willing to give up speed, if we were willing to settle for an artificial being who was literally slow [30]. But it’s much more likely that devising the software will be a tricky process, involving lots of false starts and experimentation. If so, then the arrival of self-aware machines will not happen till after the development of hardware that is substantially more powerful than humans’ natural equipment.)

But as time passes, we should see more symptoms. The dilemma felt by science fiction writers will be perceived in other creative endeavors. (I have heard thoughtful comic book writers worry about how to have spectacular effects when everything visible can be produced by the technologically commonplace.) We will see automation replacing higher and higher level jobs. We have tools right now (symbolic math programs, cad/cam) that release us from most low-level drudgery. Or put another way: The work that is truly productive is the domain of a steadily smaller and more elite fraction of humanity. In the coming of the Singularity, we are seeing the predictions of true technological unemployment finally come true.

Another symptom of progress toward the Singularity: ideas themselves should spread ever faster, and even the most radical will quickly become commonplace. When I began writing science fiction in the middle ’60s, it seemed very easy to find ideas that took decades to percolate into the cultural consciousness; now the lead time seems more like eighteen months. (Of course, this could just be me losing my imagination as I get old, but I see the effect in others too.) Like the shock in a compressible flow, the Singularity moves closer as we accelerate through the critical speed.

And what of the arrival of the Singularity itself? What can be said of its actual appearance? Since it involves an intellectual runaway, it will probably occur faster than any technical revolution seen so far. The precipitating event will likely be unexpected — perhaps even to the researchers involved. (“But all our previous models were catatonic! We were just tweaking some parameters…”) If networking is widespread enough (into ubiquitous embedded systems), it may seem as if our artifacts as a whole had suddenly wakened.

And what happens a month or two (or a day or two) after that? I have only analogies to point to: The rise of humankind. We will be in the Post-Human era. And for all my rampant technological optimism, sometimes I think I’d be more comfortable if I were regarding these transcendental events from one thousand years remove … instead of twenty.

Can the Singularity be Avoided?

Well, maybe it won’t happen at all: Sometimes I try to imagine the symptoms that we should expect to see if the Singularity is not to develop. There are the widely respected arguments of Penrose [19] and Searle [22] against the practicality of machine sapience. In August of 1992, Thinking Machines Corporation held a workshop to investigate the question “How We Will Build a Machine that Thinks” [27]. As you might guess from the workshop’s title, the participants were not especially supportive of the arguments against machine intelligence. In fact, there was general agreement that minds can exist on nonbiological substrates and that algorithms are of central importance to the existence of minds. However, there was much debate about the raw hardware power that is present in organic brains. A minority felt that the largest 1992 computers were within three orders of magnitude of the power of the human brain. The majority of the participants agreed with Moravec’s estimate [17] that we are ten to forty years away from hardware parity. And yet there was another minority who pointed to [7] [21], and conjectured that the computational competence of single neurons may be far higher than generally believed. If so, our present computer hardware might be as much as ten orders of magnitude short of the equipment we carry around in our heads. If this is true (or for that matter, if the Penrose or Searle critique is valid), we might never see a Singularity. Instead, in the early ’00s we would find our hardware performance curves beginning to level off — this because of our inability to automate the design work needed to support further hardware improvements. We’d end up with some very powerful hardware, but without the ability to push it further. Commercial digital signal processing might be awesome, giving an analog appearance even to digital operations, but nothing would ever “wake up” and there would never be the intellectual runaway which is the essence of the Singularity. It would likely be seen as a golden age … and it would also be an end of progress. This is very like the future predicted by Gunther Stent. In fact, on page 137 of [25], Stent explicitly cites the development of transhuman intelligence as a sufficient condition to break his projections.

But if the technological Singularity can happen, it will. Even if all the governments of the world were to understand the “threat” and be in deadly fear of it, progress toward the goal would continue. In fiction, there have been stories of laws passed forbidding the construction of “a machine in the likeness of the human mind” [13]. In fact, the competitive advantage — economic, military, even artistic — of every advance in automation is so compelling that passing laws, or having customs, that forbid such things merely assures that someone else will get them first.

Eric Drexler [8] has provided spectacular insights about how far technical improvement may go. He agrees that superhuman intelligences will be available in the near future — and that such entities pose a threat to the human status quo. But Drexler argues that we can confine such transhuman devices so that their results can be examined and used safely. This is I. J. Good’s ultraintelligent machine, with a dose of caution. I argue that confinement is intrinsically impractical. For the case of physical confinement: Imagine yourself locked in your home with only limited data access to the outside, to your masters. If those masters thought at a rate — say, one million times slower than you, there is little doubt that over a period of years (your time) you could come up with “helpful advice” that would incidentally set you free. (I call this “fast thinking” form of superintelligence “weak superhumanity”. Such a “weakly superhuman” entity would probably burn out in a few weeks of outside time. “Strong superhumanity” would be more than cranking up the clock speed on a human-equivalent mind. It’s hard to say precisely what “strong superhumanity” would be like, but the difference appears to be profound. Imagine running a dog mind at very high speed. Would a thousand years of doggy living add up to any human insight? (Now if the dog mind were cleverly rewired and then run at high speed, we might see something different….) Many speculations about superintelligence seem to be based on the weakly superhuman model. I believe that our best guesses about the post-Singularity world can be obtained by thinking on the nature of strong superhumanity. I will return to this point later in the paper.)

Another approach to confinement is to build rules into the mind of the created superhuman entity (for example, Asimov’s Laws [3]). I think that any rules strict enough to be effective would also produce a device whose ability was clearly inferior to the unfettered versions (and so human competition would favor the development of the those more dangerous models). Still, the Asimov dream is a wonderful one: Imagine a willing slave, who has 1000 times your capabilities in every way. Imagine a creature who could satisfy your every safe wish (whatever that means) and still have 99.9% of its time free for other activities. There would be a new universe we never really understood, but filled with benevolent gods (though one of my wishes might be to become one of them).

If the Singularity cannot be prevented or confined, just how bad could the Post-Human era be? Well … pretty bad. The physical extinction of the human race is one possibility. (Or as Eric Drexler put it of nanotechnology: Given all that such technology can do, perhaps governments would simply decide that they no longer need citizens!). Yet physical extinction may not be the scariest possibility. Again, analogies: Think of the different ways we relate to animals. Some of the crude physical abuses are implausible, yet…. In a Post-Human world there would still be plenty of niches where human equivalent automation would be desirable: embedded systems in autonomous devices, self-aware daemons in the lower functioning of larger sentients. (A strongly superhuman intelligence would likely be a Society of Mind [16] with some very competent components.) Some of these human equivalents might be used for nothing more than digital signal processing. They would be more like whales than humans. Others might be very human-like, yet with a one-sidedness, a dedication that would put them in a mental hospital in our era. Though none of these creatures might be flesh-and-blood humans, they might be the closest things in the new enviroment to what we call human now. (I. J. Good had something to say about this, though at this late date the advice may be moot: Good [12] proposed a “Meta-Golden Rule”, which might be paraphrased as “Treat your inferiors as you would be treated by your superiors.” It’s a wonderful, paradoxical idea (and most of my friends don’t believe it) since the game-theoretic payoff is so hard to articulate. Yet if we were able to follow it, in some sense that might say something about the plausibility of such kindness in this universe.)

I have argued above that we cannot prevent the Singularity, that its coming is an inevitable consequence of the humans’ natural competitiveness and the possibilities inherent in technology. And yet … we are the initiators. Even the largest avalanche is triggered by small things. We have the freedom to establish initial conditions, make things happen in ways that are less inimical than others. Of course (as with starting avalanches), it may not be clear what the right guiding nudge really is:

Other Paths to the Singularity: Intelligence Amplification

When people speak of creating superhumanly intelligent beings, they are usually imagining an AI project. But as I noted at the beginning of this paper, there are other paths to superhumanity. Computer networks and human-computer interfaces seem more mundane than AI, and yet they could lead to the Singularity. I call this contrasting approach Intelligence Amplification (IA). IA is something that is proceeding very naturally, in most cases not even recognized by its developers for what it is. But every time our ability to access information and to communicate it to others is improved, in some sense we have achieved an increase over natural intelligence. Even now, the team of a PhD human and good computer workstation (even an off-net workstation!) could probably max any written intelligence test in existence.

And it’s very likely that IA is a much easier road to the achievement of superhumanity than pure AI. In humans, the hardest development problems have already been solved. Building up from within ourselves ought to be easier than figuring out first what we really are and then building machines that are all of that. And there is at least conjectural precedent for this approach. Cairns-Smith [6] has speculated that biological life may have begun as an adjunct to still more primitive life based on crystalline growth. Lynn Margulis (in [15] and elsewhere) has made strong arguments that mutualism is a great driving force in evolution.

Note that I am not proposing that AI research be ignored or less funded. What goes on with AI will often have applications in IA, and vice versa. I am suggesting that we recognize that in network and interface research there is something as profound (and potential wild) as Artificial Intelligence. With that insight, we may see projects that are not as directly applicable as conventional interface and network design work, but which serve to advance us toward the Singularity along the IA path.

Here are some possible projects that take on special significance, given the IA point of view:

• Human/computer team automation: Take problems that are normally considered for purely machine solution (like hill-climbing problems), and design programs and interfaces that take a advantage of humans’ intuition and available computer hardware. Considering all the bizarreness of higher dimensional hill-climbing problems (and the neat algorithms that have been devised for their solution), there could be some very interesting displays and control tools provided to the human team member.
• Develop human/computer symbiosis in art: Combine the graphic generation capability of modern machines and the esthetic sensibility of humans. Of course, there has been an enormous amount of research in designing computer aids for artists, as labor saving tools. I’m suggesting that we explicitly aim for a greater merging of competence, that we explicitly recognize the cooperative approach that is possible. Karl Sims [23] has done wonderful work in this direction.
• Allow human/computer teams at chess tournaments. We already have programs that can play better than almost all humans. But how much work has been done on how this power could be used by a human, to get something even better? If such teams were allowed in at least some chess tournaments, it could have the positive effect on IA research that allowing computers in tournaments had for the corresponding niche in AI.
• Develop interfaces that allow computer and network access without requiring the human to be tied to one spot, sitting in front of a computer. (This is an aspect of IA that fits so well with known economic advantages that lots of effort is already being spent on it.)
• Develop more symmetrical decision support systems. A popular research/product area in recent years has been decision support systems. This is a form of IA, but may be too focused on systems that are oracular. As much as the program giving the user information, there must be the idea of the user giving the program guidance.
• Use local area nets to make human teams that really work (ie, are more effective than their component members). This is generally the area of “groupware”, already a very popular commercial pursuit. The change in viewpoint here would be to regard the group activity as a combination organism. In one sense, this suggestion might be regarded as the goal of inventing a “Rules of Order” for such combination operations. For instance, group focus might be more easily maintained than in classical meetings. Expertise of individual human members could be isolated from ego issues such that the contribution of different members is focused on the team project. And of course shared data bases could be used much more conveniently than in conventional committee operations. (Note that this suggestion is aimed at team operations rather than political meetings. In a political setting, the automation described above would simply enforce the power of the persons making the rules!)
• Exploit the worldwide Internet as a combination human/machine tool. Of all the items on the list, progress in this is proceeding the fastest and may run us into the Singularity before anything else. The power and influence of even the present-day Internet is vastly underestimated. For instance, I think our contemporary computer systems would break under the weight of their own complexity if it weren’t for the edge that the USENET “group mind” gives the system administration and support people! The very anarchy of the worldwide net development is evidence of its potential. As connectivity and bandwidth and archive size and computer speed all increase, we are seeing something like Lynn Margulis’ [15] vision of the biosphere as data processor recapitulated, but at a million times greater speed and with millions of humanly intelligent agents (ourselves).

The above examples illustrate research that can be done within the context of contemporary computer science departments. There are other paradigms. For example, much of the work in Artificial Intelligence and neural nets would benefit from a closer connection with biological life. Instead of simply trying to model and understand biological life with computers, research could be directed toward the creation of composite systems that rely on biological life for guidance or for the providing features we don’t understand well enough yet to implement in hardware. A long-time dream of science-fiction has been direct brain to computer interfaces [2] [29]. In fact, there is concrete work that can be done (and is being done) in this area:

• Limb prosthetics is a topic of direct commercial applicability. Nerve to silicon transducers can be made [14]. This is an exciting, near-term step toward direct communication.
• Direct links into brains seem feasible, if the bit rate is low: given human learning flexibility, the actual brain neuron targets might not have to be precisely selected. Even 100 bits per second would be of great use to stroke victims who would otherwise be confined to menu-driven interfaces.
• Plugging in to the optic trunk has the potential for bandwidths of 1 Mbit/second or so. But for this, we need to know the fine-scale architecture of vision, and we need to place an enormous web of electrodes with exquisite precision. If we want our high bandwidth connection to be in addition to what paths are already present in the brain, the problem becomes vastly more intractable. Just sticking a grid of high-bandwidth receivers into a brain certainly won’t do it. But suppose that the high-bandwidth grid were present while the brain structure was actually setting up, as the embryo develops. That suggests:
• Animal embryo experiments. I wouldn’t expect any IA success in the first years of such research, but giving developing brains access to complex simulated neural structures might be very interesting to the people who study how the embryonic brain develops. In the long run, such experiments might produce animals with additional sense paths and interesting intellectual abilities.

Originally, I had hoped that this discussion of IA would yield some clearly safer approaches to the Singularity. (After all, IA allows our participation in a kind of transcendance.) Alas, looking back over these IA proposals, about all I am sure of is that they should be considered, that they may give us more options. But as for safety … well, some of the suggestions are a little scarey on their face. One of my informal reviewers pointed out that IA for individual humans creates a rather sinister elite. We humans have millions of years of evolutionary baggage that makes us regard competition in a deadly light. Much of that deadliness may not be necessary in today’s world, one where losers take on the winners’ tricks and are coopted into the winners’ enterprises. A creature that was built de novo might possibly be a much more benign entity than one with a kernel based on fang and talon. And even the egalitarian view of an Internet that wakes up along with all mankind can be viewed as a nightmare [26].

The problem is not simply that the Singularity represents the passing of humankind from center stage, but that it contradicts our most deeply held notions of being. I think a closer look at the notion of strong superhumanity can show why that is.

Strong Superhumanity and the Best We Can Ask for

Suppose we could tailor the Singularity. Suppose we could attain our most extravagant hopes. What then would we ask for: That humans themselves would become their own successors, that whatever injustice occurs would be tempered by our knowledge of our roots. For those who remained unaltered, the goal would be benign treatment (perhaps even giving the stay-behinds the appearance of being masters of godlike slaves). It could be a golden age that also involved progress (overleaping Stent’s barrier). Immortality (or at least a lifetime as long as we can make the universe survive [10] [4]) would be achievable.

But in this brightest and kindest world, the philosophical problems themselves become intimidating. A mind that stays at the same capacity cannot live forever; after a few thousand years it would look more like a repeating tape loop than a person. (The most chilling picture I have seen of this is in [18].) To live indefinitely long, the mind itself must grow … and when it becomes great enough, and looks back … what fellow-feeling can it have with the soul that it was originally? Certainly the later being would be everything the original was, but so much vastly more. And so even for the individual, the Cairns-Smith or Lynn Margulis notion of new life growing incrementally out of the old must still be valid.

This “problem” about immortality comes up in much more direct ways. The notion of ego and self-awareness has been the bedrock of the hardheaded rationalism of the last few centuries. Yet now the notion of self-awareness is under attack from the Artificial Intelligence people (“self-awareness and other delusions”). Intelligence Amplification undercuts our concept of ego from another direction. The post-Singularity world will involve extremely high-bandwidth networking. A central feature of strongly superhuman entities will likely be their ability to communicate at variable bandwidths, including ones far higher than speech or written messages. What happens when pieces of ego can be copied and merged, when the size of a selfawareness can grow or shrink to fit the nature of the problems under consideration? These are essential features of strong superhumanity and the Singularity. Thinking about them, one begins to feel how essentially strange and different the Post-Human era will be-no matter how cleverly and benignly it is brought to be.

From one angle, the vision fits many of our happiest dreams: a time unending, where we can truly know one another and understand the deepest mysteries. From another angle, it’s a lot like the worst-case scenario I imagined earlier in this paper.

Which is the valid viewpoint? In fact, I think the new era is simply too different to fit into the classical frame of good and evil. That frame is based on the idea of isolated, immutable minds connected by tenuous, low-bandwith links. But the post-Singularity world does fit with the larger tradition of change and cooperation that started long ago (perhaps even before the rise of biological life). I think there are notions of ethics that would apply in such an era. Research into IA and high-bandwidth communications should improve this understanding. I see just the glimmerings of this now [32]. There is Good’s Meta-Golden Rule; perhaps there are rules for distinguishing self from others on the basis of bandwidth of connection. And while mind and self will be vastly more labile than in the past, much of what we value (knowledge, memory, thought) need never be lost. I think Freeman Dyson has it right when he says [9]: “God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension.”

[I wish to thank John Carroll of San Diego State University and Howard Davidson of Sun Microsystems for discussing the draft version of this paper with me.]