Best of all, you could use this artificial-atom generatorthis "toy box," as Ashoori called itto design your own atoms. "We can make atoms of any size," he said. Horst Stormer, Ashoori's co-worker at AT&T, added: "You can make any kind of artificial atomlong, thin atoms and big, round atoms."
The amazing conclusion, of course, was that maybe you could link some of those newly created atoms together, thereby creating your own artificial molecule. And then maybe you could join those artificial molecules together to producewhy not?an artificial solid.
Was this not the blunt future already staring us smack in the face? Here were two staid and serious corporate physicistspractical men, laboratory typeshere they were talking about "real" versus "artificial" atoms, the bright new amusements they'd made in their little "toy box."
Compared to which nanotechnology was not all that outlandish a prospect. Nanotechnology, after all, only used nature's atoms, normal atoms, the tiny marbles that during these latter 20th-century days had been individually touched, pushed around, lifted and lowered, played with, bottled up, treated as pets, and given their own names. All nanotechnology wanted to do was to take those same objects and organize them into working machines.
Was that so crazy?
Nanotechnology would give you, as Eric Drexler had said,
"effectively complete control of the structure of matter"or as Rick
Smalley had put it, "as much control as you're going to get." But
was such control worth having?
Drexler pretty much took it for granted that having complete control of the structure of matter was a fine thing, that reaching "the limits of the possible" was a blessing. When Drexler considered the subject of "consequences," he tended to think in terms of physical risks, the threat of which had kept him mum about nanotechnology for three or four years after he'd first gotten the idea. Later he spent inordinate amounts of time trying to come up with strategies for avoiding the evil that people could do with an army of nano helpers at their disposal.
The fact remained, though, that the physical risks of nanotechnology might not be the worst ones. Far more serious might be those that were social and psychological. Far more frightening, definitely more paralyzing to the imagination, than the sight of nanotechnology going wrong was the prospect of its going right, of its control over matter being all too complete.
Could people handle the largesse of it all? The abundance, the bountythe boredom?
"It's going to be a very depressing state of affairs. Because obviously people get very depressed unless they can do things for which they feel challenged," said Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the University of Chicago psychologist and author of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.
Happiness, he said, arose not from mindless leisure activities but from confronting and surmounting challenges. Presented with no obstacles, the mind was left with nothing to engage it, and wandered off into boredom, anxiety, or worse. "That's usually what happens to people who retire, for instance."
"We'd have to find some new forms of expression and achievement," he said. "Otherwise people would just curl up and wither away."
Or otherwise they'd make trouble.
"In a sense it's already happened," said Garrett Hardin, the evolutionary biologist. "Look, we have 10 million unemployed; the only thing that keeps us from going crazy is the fact that we have television to divert these people. If we didn't have television I think we'd be in a great deal of trouble. We idle people and then we're surprised when they cause trouble, as in the Los Angeles riots."
But what if, after nanotechnology, the masses were supplied with all the material necessi ties of life?
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