Films from the Future

by Andrew Maynard

  The popular image of nanobots as miniaturized, fully autonomous robots is one of the zombies of the nanotechnology world. It’s an image that just won’t die, despite having barely a thread of scientific plausibility behind it. There’s something about the term “nanobot” that journalists cannot resist using, and that university press offices seem incapable of resisting in their attempts to make nanoscale research seem sexy and futuristic. Even as I write this, a quick Google search returns three pages of news articles mentioning “nanobots” in the last month alone. Yet, despite the popular image’s appeal, there is a world of difference between the technology seen in Transcendence and what’s happening in labs now.

  This is not to discredit the research that often underlies the use of the buzzword. Scientists are making amazing strides on disease-busting particles that can be biologically “programmed” to seek out and destroy cancer cells, or can be guided through the bloodstream using magnets or ultrasonic waves. And there have been some quite incredible breakthroughs in developing complex molecules—including using DNA as a programmable molecular construction set—that operate much like minuscule molecular machines. These are all advances that have attracted the term “nanobot.” And yet, there are night-and-day differences between the science they represent and imagined scenarios of minute autonomous robots swimming through our bodies, or swarming through the environment. Yet the idea of nanobots as a future reality persists.

  As an early popularizer of nanobots, Eric Drexler was inspired by the biological world and the way in which organisms have evolved to efficiently manufacture everything they need from the atoms and molecules around them. To Drexler, many biological molecules are simply highly efficient molecular machines that strip materials apart atom by atom and reassemble them into ever more complex structures. In many ways, he saw these as analogous to the machines that humans had developed over the centuries—wheels, cogs, engines, and even simple robots—but at a much, much smaller scale. And he speculated that, once we have full mastery over how to precisely build materials atom by atom, we could not only match what nature has achieved, but surpass it, creating a new era of technologies based on nanoscale engineering.

  Part of Drexler’s speculation was that it should be possible to create microscopically small self-replicating machines that are able to disassemble the materials around them and use the constituent atoms to build new materials, including replicas of themselves. This would allow highly efficient, atomically precise manufacturing, and “nanobots” that could make almost anything on demand out of what they could scavenge from the surrounding environment.

  Drexler’s ideas are the inspiration behind the nanobots seen in Transcendence, where these microscopically small machines are capable of building and rebuilding solar cells, support structures, and even replacement limbs and organs, all out of the atoms, molecules, and materials in their environment. While this is a vision that sounds decidedly science fiction, it’s one that, on the surface, looks like it should work. After all, it’s what nature does, and does so well. We’re all made of atoms and molecules, and depend on evolved biological machines that use and make DNA, proteins, cells, nerves, bones, skin, and so on. And just like nature, where there’s a constant battle between “good” biological machines (the molecular machines that keep us healthy and well) and the “bad” ones (the proteins, viruses and bacteria that threaten our health), Drexler’s vision of molecular machines is one that also has its potential downsides.

  One scenario that Drexler explored was the possibility that a poorly designed and programmed nanobot could end up having an overriding goal of creating replicas of itself, potentially leading to a runaway chain reaction. Drexler speculated that, if these nanobots were designed to use carbon as their basic building blocks, they would only stop replicating when every last atom of carbon in the world had been turned into a nanobot. As we’re all made of carbon, this would be a problem.

  This is the “gray goo” scenario, and it’s what prompted both Bill Joy and Prince Charles to raise the alarm over the risks of nanotechnology. And yet, despite their concerns and those of others, it is a highly improbable scenario.

  In order to work, these rogue nanobots would need some source of power. Like we find in biology, this would most likely come from chemical reactions, the heat they could scavenge from their surroundings, heat directly from the sun, or (most likely) a combination of all three. But to scavenge energy, the nanobots would need to be pretty sophisticated. And to maintain and replicate this sophistication, they would need an equally sophisticated diet that would depend on more than carbon alone.

  In addition to this, because there would be replication errors and nanobot malfunctions, these nanomachines would need to be programmed with the ability to repair themselves. This in turn would require additional energy demands and levels of sophistication. Even with a high level of sophistication, random errors would most likely lead to generations of bots that either petered out because they weren’t perfect, or started to behave differently from the previous generation (much like biological mutation).

  And this leads to a third challenge. At some point, the nanobots would find themselves hitting the limits of being able to replicate exponentially. This might be due to an accumulation of replication errors, or increasing competition with mutant nanobots. Or it could be brought about by a scarcity of physical space, or energy, or raw materials. However it happened, a point would be reached where the population of nanobots either became unsustainable and crashed, or reached equilibrium with its surroundings.

  The chance of nanobots overcoming all three of these challenges and creating a gray goo scenario are infinitesimally small. This is, in part, because the chances of something else happening to scupper their plans of world domination are overwhelmingly large. And we know this because we have a wonderful example of a self-replicating system to study: life on Earth.

  DNA-based life is, in many ways, the perfect example of Drexler’s molecular machines. It shows us what is possible, but it also indicates rather strongly what is not, as well as demonstrating what is necessary to create a sustainable system. We know from studying the natural world that sustainability depends on diversity and adaptability, two characteristics that are notably absent in the gray goo scenario. We also know that sustainable systems based on evolved molecular machines are incredibly complex, so complex, in fact, that they are light-years away from what we are currently capable of designing and manufacturing.

  In effect, for a Drexler-type form of nanotechnology to emerge, we would have to invent an alternative form of biology, one that is most likely as complex as the biology we are all familiar with. This may one day be possible. But at the moment, we are about as far from doing this as the Neanderthals were from inventing quantum computing.

  Yet here’s the rub. Even though self-replicating nanobots and gray goo lie for now in the realm of fantasy, this hasn’t stopped the idea from having an impact on the decisions people make, including the decision of ITC to attempt to murder a number of nanotechnologists. This is where technological speculation gets serious in a bad way. It’s one thing to speculate about what the future of tech might look like. But it’s another thing entirely when make-believe is treated as plausible reality, and this, in turn, leads to actions that end up harming people.

  Techno-terrorism is an extreme case, and thankfully a rare one—at the moment, at least. But there are many more layers of decision-making that can lead to people and the environment being harmed if science fantasy is mistaken for science fact. If policies and regulations, for instance, are based on improbable scenarios, or a lack of understanding of what a technology can and cannot do, people are likely to suffer unnecessarily. Similarly, if advocacy groups block technologies because of what they imagine their impacts will be, but they are working with implausible or impossible scenarios, people’s lives will be unnecessarily impacted. And if investors and consumers avoid certain technologies because they’ve bought into a narrative that
belongs more in science fiction than science reality, potentially beneficial technologies may never see the light of day.

  Of course, all new technologies come with risks and challenges, and it’s important that, as a society, we work together on addressing these as we think about the technological futures we want to build. In some cases, the consensus may be that there are some routes that we are not ready for yet. But what a tragedy it would be if we turned away from some technological futures that could transform lives for the better, simply because we become confused between reality and make-believe.

  Here, Transcendence definitely lives in the world of make-believe, especially when it comes to the vision of nanotechnology that’s woven into the movie’s narrative. And this is fine, as long as we’re aware of it. But as soon as we start to believe our own fantasies, we have a problem.

  Thankfully, not every science fiction movie is quite as rooted in fantasy as Transcendence. As we’ll see next with the movie The Man in the White Suit, some provide surprisingly deep insights into the reality of cutting-edge science and emerging technologies—including the realities of modern-day nanotechnology.

  Chapter Ten

  THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT: LIVING IN A MATERIAL WORLD

  “Why can’t you scientists leave things alone? What about my bit of washing, when there’s no washing

  to do?”

  —Mrs. Watson

  There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom

  In 2005, protesters from the group THONG (Topless Humans Organized for Natural Genetics) paraded outside the Eddie Bauer store in Chicago.142 They were protesting a relatively new line of merchandise being offered by the store: “nano pants.” It was never quite clear why the protesters were topless, although it did make the event memorable. But it did allow a crude but clever appropriation of the title of a 1959 lecture given by the physicist Richard Feynman. At least one of the protesters had an arrow drawn on their back pointing to their nether regions, along with the title of Feynman’s talk, “There’s plenty of room at the bottom.”

  Eddie Bauer’s nano pants used Nanotex®, a nanoscale fabric coating that make the pants water-repellent and stain-resistant. By enveloping each fiber with a nanoscopically thin layer of water-repellent molecules, the nano pants took on the seemingly miraculous ability to shed water, coffee, wine, ketchup, and many other things that people tend to inadvertently spill on themselves without leaving a stain. It was a great technology for the congenitally messy. But because it was marketed as being a product of nanotechnology, there were concerns in some quarters—including the THONG protesters—that putting such a cutting-edge technology in consumer products might lead to new, unexpected, and potentially catastrophic risks.

  Sadly for THONG, the 2005 protest failed spectacularly. Rather than consumers being warned off Eddie Bauer’s nano pants, there was an uptick in sales, probably because, for most people, the benefits of avoiding brown coffee stains were rather more attractive than speculative worries about a dystopian nano-future. And to be honest, the chance of this technology (which in reality wasn’t that radical) leading to substantial harm was pretty negligible.

  The nano pants incident was, in some ways, a preemptive parody of Transcendence, with the existential threat of nanobots being replaced with stain-resistant clothing, and the neo-Luddites trying to save the world being played by a bunch of topless protesters. Yet both the protest and the technology touched on the often-mundane reality of modern nanotechnology, and the complex ways in which seemingly beneficial inventions can sometimes threaten the status quo.

  As if to support the theory that there’s nothing new under the sun, the 1951 movie The Man in the White Suit in turn foreshadowed both the technology and the concerns that played out in that 2005 Chicago protest.

  The Man in the White Suit was made in 1951, and is, remarkably, a movie about stain-resistant pants. But more than this, it’s a movie about the pitfalls of blinkered science and socially unaware innovation. And while it is not a movie about nanotechnology per se, it is remarkably prescient in how it foreshadows the complex social and economic dynamics around nanotechnology, and advanced materials more generally.

  The movie is set in the textile mills of the early- to mid-1900s North of England. This was a time when the burgeoning science of chemical synthesis was leading to a revolution in artificial textiles. Nylon, Draylon, and other manmade materials were becoming increasingly important commodities, and ones that were emerging from what was then cutting-edge science. Spurred on by these advances, mill owners continued to search for new materials that would give them an edge in a highly competitive market. These textile mills were rooted in an Industrial Revolution that had started nearly two hundred years earlier. Yet they marked a tipping point from using try-it-and-see engineering in manufacturing to relying on predictive science in the development of new products.

  In the early days of the Industrial Revolution, there was what now seems like a remarkable separation between the academic world of science and the more practically oriented world of engineering. Innovators in the Industrial Revolution largely learned by trial and error and relied heavily on the art and craft of engineering. Human ingenuity and inventiveness enabled new discoveries to be translated into powerful and practical new technologies, yet rigorous scientific research was not typically a large part of this.

  In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, though, it became apparent that, by using a more scientific methodology based on predictive laws, models, and associations, companies could make breakthroughs that far exceeded the limitations of invention by mere trial and error. At the same time, the social legacy of the Luddite movement was still alive and kicking in the North of England, and there was a strong labor movement that doggedly strove to protect the rights of workers and ensure that new technologies didn’t sweep jobs and people aside quite as indiscriminately as it had done a century or so earlier.

  Against this backdrop, The Man in the White Suit introduces us to Sidney Stratton (played by Alec Guinness), a self-absorbed chemist who is convinced he has the key to an amazing new fabric, and simply needs the space and equipment to test and develop his theories. Stratton could have had a glittering career at a top university, but he was shunned by his academic colleagues for his radical and obsessive ideas. So instead, he insinuates himself into an industrial lab, where he can carry out his research with relatively little interference. Everything goes swimmingly until the owner of the factory he’s working at starts to ask awkward questions.

  Stratton is something of a lone genius.143 He despises the lack of imagination he sees in his more conventionally-minded and institutionalized colleagues and prefers to work on his own. His strategy of carving out some personal space in an industrial lab seems to be working, until it’s realized that no one can explain exactly what it is he’s doing, and why his research is costing the company so much.

  As his proclivity for spending company resources on unfathomable research is discovered, Stratton is dismissed. But, intent on pursuing his science, he gets a job at a competing firm; not as a scientist, but as a porter. From here, he finds a way to secretly conduct his research in the company’s lab. At this point we’re introduced to Bertha (Vida Hope), a union rep who assumes Stratton is a laborer like herself, and who is fiercely committed to protecting his labor rights as a result.

  As Stratton works at his double life, the lab takes delivery of a smart new electron microscope.144 While the rest of the scientists are struggling to make sense of this complex piece of equipment, Stratton can’t resist showing off and explaining how to use it. As a result, he’s mistaken for an expert from the electron microscope supplier, and is taken on by the textile company to run the instrument. And in the process, he gets full and unfettered access to the lab.

  Stratton’s double life as a laborer and an illicit lab scientist works out rather well for him, despite Bertha’s suspicions that the management are taking advantage of him. That is, until he’s recognized as the
formerly-disgraced scientist by the company director’s daughter, Daphne (played by Joan Greenwood).

  Worried that Sidney’s up to his old tricks of spending the company profits on indecipherable experiments, she rushes to inform her father. But before she gets to him, Sidney manages to persuade her that he’s onto something. Intrigued, Daphne reads up on her chemistry, and realizes that he could be right.

  Daphne allows Sidney to continue his work, and with her support, he successfully synthesizes the material he’s been striving for: a super-strong synthetic thread that never wears out and never gets dirty.

  In Stratton’s scientist-brain, this breakthrough is going to transform the world. He assumes that people are sick of washing, mending, and replacing their clothes, and that his invention will liberate them. He dreams of a future where you only need to buy one set of clothes—ever. In Stratton’s head, what’s good for him is also good for everyone, and a world without the messiness of buying, washing, and looking after clothes is definitely one that he’s excited about.

  But there’s a problem—several, as it turns out. And one of the biggest is that Sidney never thought to ask anyone else what they wanted or needed.

  Stratton is so excited by his discovery that he rushes to the company director Alan Birnley’s home to give him the good news. What he doesn’t know is that Birnley (played by Cecil Parker) has just learned that Stratton has been blowing through the company’s R&D budget. Birnley refuses to listen to Stratton, and instead sacks him. However, Daphne points out that her father has just waved goodbye to one of the biggest discoveries ever made in the textile world, and Stratton is persuaded to come back and work for him. In the meantime, word of the discovery has leaked out, and everything begins to fall apart.