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Abstract
The design of artefacts commonly involves the convergence of many technologies and this remains true for artefacts being created at the nanoscale. However, since 2000 the phrase ‘converging technologies’ has acquired a special interpretation related to the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science (acronym NBIC) for the improvement of ‘human performance’, raising the visibility of what has colloquially been called ‘nanotechnology’. Exaggerated forecasts soon followed for the value of innovatory markets for nano-artefacts or artefacts highly dependent on the various emergent nanoscale technologies. Many of these activities have resulted from a creative collision between chemistry and biology, and engineering and physics, especially where the latter have been related to micromechanical devices and electronics. The outcome has been rising expectations that the field, now designated as converging technologies, may be the beginnings of a ‘new world’ within a notional time horizon of 2030. The paper considers the possibility, feasibility and desirability of nanoscale artefacts (nano-artefacts) in contributing to a ‘new world’. By distinguishing between nano-artefacts and nanotechnology, some of the more unrealistic expectations surrounding the possibilities can be discouraged, facilitating investment decisions by business and informed debate by stakeholders regarding the future development and diffusion of nano-artefacts. The paper concludes that nano-artefacts are likely to have pervasive, radical effects by 2030, particularly in the fields that underpin life on the planet, including energy and food and the possibility of improving human performance. However, the effects are unlikely to be on the scale seen in the industrial revolution.
Notes
1. Convergence therefore is seen as a dynamic concept, different from and more exacting than the more traditional concepts of interdisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity, requiring understanding in depth and breadth of the possibility, feasibility and desirability aspects of any nano-artefact in the situation in which it resides, including the intended and unintended outcomes as they may evolve.
3. Australia, Canada, China, Chinese Taipei, Hong Kong, Japan and New Zealand are referred to in Anon Citation(2002).
12. http://www.unep.org/.
14. University and independent laboratories are included here.
15. See G. Stix Citation(2001) for some early milestones.
16. In the 1980s, Drexler published papers on protein engineering in which he argued that ‘development of the ability to design protein molecules will open a path to the fabrication of devices to complex atomic specifications, thus sidestepping obstacles facing conventional microtechnology. This path will involve construction of molecular machinery able to position reactive groups [note: not ‘atoms’] to atomic precision’. The paper is the first to ‘distinguish the protein fold prediction problem from the protein fold design problem’. Computational approaches based on this ‘inverse folding’ idea subsequently formed the basis for work both in de novo protein engineering and in the identification of fresh instances of known folding patterns in nature [Extract at: http://www.e-drexler.com/p/04/01/0228drexler1981.html].
21. Note that nanoscale catalysts have been in use for many years in the oil, gas and chemical industries.
22. http://www.onversity.net/load/immersion_lithography.pdf; http://www.microe.rit.edu/research/lithography/research/immersion.htm.
24. CSR has a long history going back to the 1970s. At that time activists began pressing for many forms of control over technology and industry. Technology assessment, social audits and social accounting were the outcomes of this early agitation. The involvement of the UN, the USA, the EU and many individual countries in CSR show that it is a growing activity and is clearly global, as illustrated by Welford. Since the early 1970s, the business environments of many companies have changed decisively, meaning that a rising number of companies are increasingly forced to include CSR initiatives in their overall business strategies. The GRI is a much newer development, assembled during the 1990s into a voluntary code, now supported by many companies with global business. It was launched in 1997 by the US Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies (CERES) and United Nations Environment Programme to enhance the quality, rigour and utility of reporting on matters relating to sustainability; nano-artefacts and nanotechnology are amongst these. The first version of the GRI was released in 2000. The revised version, implemented in 2002, was considered to be a milestone in the evolution of the GRI as an institution and as a reporting framework. The GRI has the essential attribute of being a ‘living process that operates in the spirit of “doing”’, enabling navigation towards continual improvement. The initiative has enjoyed widespread support from industry and many sectors of society; together they have built, by consensus, sets of reporting guidelines.
25. This is already happening to a limited extent. See Anon (2006).