The Smaller the Better

The limitless promise of nanotechnology -- and the growing peril of a moratorium.

Ronald Bailey from the December 2003 issue

(Page 5 of 5)

To address the social and economic effects of nanotechnology, the ETC Group is proposing a sweeping international effort to regulate and control its development. "Extreme care should be taken that, unlike with biotech, society does not lose control of this technology," warns Mooney. For the ETC Group, raising health and environmental concerns about nanomaterials and nanobots is mainly a delaying tactic. "The biggest concern really is that with a technology as powerful as this one, society has a role in deciding how it can and will be used," says Mooney. "This is going to have a profound effect on people's lives. Let people know that their jobs are going to be taken away."

In an April report on nanotechnology, the ETC Group declares: "The international community must begin work on a legally binding mechanism to govern atomtechnology, based on the Precautionary Principle, one that will look beyond laboratory research to consider the wider health, socioeconomic and environmental implications of nanoscale technologies....This protocol should be embedded in one or more of the relevant United Nations agencies....Ultimately, ETC Group believes that the international regulations for atomtechnology should be incorporated under a new International Convention for the Evaluation of New Technologies (ICENT)."

The framework for ICENT's evaluation of new technologies would be the Precautionary Principle. As the ETC Group explains, "The Precautionary Principle says that governments have a responsibility to take preventive action to avoid harm to human health or the environment, even before scientific certainty of the harm has been established. Under the Precautionary Principle it is the proponent of a new technology, rather than the public, that bears the burden of proof." Greenpeace's Douglas Parr also advocates using the Precautionary Principle to regulate the development of nanotechnology.

The Precautionary Principle can be summarized as "never do anything for the first time." (See "Precautionary Tale," April 1999.) The chief problem with the Precautionary Principle is that it encourages the natural conservatism of our species. People far more easily imagine the harms new developments might bring than the benefits. But history clearly demonstrates that the benefits of modern technology have far outweighed the harms. "Basically, people who support the strong Precautionary Principle say, 'We don't care if we throw the baby out with the bathwater,'" says the Foresight Institute's Peterson. "They don't want any risks, so they are willing to forgo the benefits."

The ETC Group also wants nanotechnology regulation to be "transparent, democratic and involve those who are potentially adversely affected by new technologies." That last proviso might have given whale oil entrepreneurs the power to veto electric lighting or allowed mimeograph machine manufacturers to nix photocopiers. When asked about how Michael Faraday, the inventor of the electric motor, might have fared under an ICENT evaluation, Mooney doesn't blink. It would "have been great if we had had a societal discussion about the impact of electricity," he says. "Someone might have said, 'This is going to be hell on horses.'"

An effective ICENT would have an effect opposite from the one the ETC Group imagines. By forbidding the spread of a technology that could end hunger, homelessness, and pollution, ICENT would in effect force poor people to remain in their traditional menial jobs while preserving corporate profits.

Mehta agrees with the ETC Group. He points to the automobile as a transformative and disruptive technology. "In the late 1800s, 85 to 90 percent of vehicles were electric," he says. "If we had had a regulatory authority that could have made the decision to go with electric instead of internal combustion engines and the power to enforce it, we would be in a different world and would have avoided a lot of later problems like urban sprawl....In 1900 people didn't have a sensitivity to social issues or a well-developed social science. We can't risk the same thing with nanotechnology, which could accelerate social injustice."

It's not clear on what basis such an authority would have opted for electric cars over internal combustion engines. Electric cars were and are more expensive than cars fueled by gasoline. If only electric cars had been permitted, we might be living in a world where people were much poorer, more crowded, and suffering from heavy metal poisoning from lead/acid batteries. Ironically, it may well be nanotechnology that finally ushers in the age of affordable electric automobiles by making possible more-efficient batteries or better fuel cells.

ICENT Assent

The ETC Group's ICENT proposal is starting to be taken seriously. Committees of both the European Parliament and the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization have called for the adoption of an ICENT. "ICENT would have the power to conduct analyses of the economic impacts, the effects on labor, on restructuring society," says Mooney. "ICENT would examine all scientific, economic and social issues of any new technology." Mooney argues that ICENT would improve our ability to forecast the effects of new technologies.

The track record for social, economic, and technological forecasting by experts is not very encouraging. Consider the notorious 1972 Club of Rome study The Limits to Growth and President Carter's Global 2000 report, both of which predicted that humanity would run out of a wide variety of natural resources by now. Or take Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich's prediction that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in massive famines in the 1970s. Such forecasts are not harmless. The predictions in the 1970s that the world would soon run out of oil, for instance, resulted in the creation of the expensive and polluting Synfuels program.

Corporations aren't any better at forecasting than government agencies. In 1876 a Western Union internal memo concluded, "This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us." In 1943 IBM CEO Thomas Watson famously predicted there would be a global demand for perhaps five computers.

Over the short term, nanotechnology will seem less odd than the telephone or the computer did. It will simply be incorporated into products that we already know how to use: computers, cameras, clothing, cars. It will make them function better and more cheaply. By contrast, a full-fledged nanotechnology, especially if molecular assemblers can be built, will disrupt all kinds of social and economic processes. Yet there is no reason to believe that humanity will be unable to cope with what is coming.

As for unintended consequences, someday something will go wrong with nanotechnology, as it has with electricity, cars, and computers. But we shouldn't deny ourselves the benefits of a new technology just because we cannot foresee every consequence. We should proceed by trial and error and ameliorate problems as they arise. That's how the dramatic progress humanity has seen during the last two centuries was accomplished. If an ICENT had existed in the 19th century, we probably would still be riding horses, using candles for lighting, cooking on wood stoves, and gulping whiskey for anesthesia.

Mooney comes close to celebrating the emancipating possibilities offered by the new technologies he fears. Yet he seems almost wistful for a time when he and many others believed ecological and economic collapse was imminent. "We have lived so long by the assumptions of The Limits to Growth, it is hard to contemplate alternative possibilities," he writes. "If nanotech does work, we might console ourselves with the knowledge that we were not really wrong all this time, it is just that The Limits to Growth have been postponed a few billion years....If nanotechnology is commercialized successfully, Armageddon may have to be put on the back burner."

Armageddon may indeed be postponed indefinitely, but only if, with due caution, we leave human genius free to harvest the fruits of technological progress.