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The Social Conditions for Nanomedicine: Disruption, Systems, and Lock-In

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Robert Best  and
George Khushf
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Extract

Many believe that nanotechnology will be disruptive to our society. Presumably, this means that some people and even whole industries will be undermined by technological developments that nanoscience makes possible. This, in turn, implies that we should anticipate potential workforce disruptions, mitigate in advance social problems likely to arise, and work to fairly distribute the future benefits of nanotechnology. This general, somewhat vague sense of disruption, is very difficult to specify – what will it entail? And how can we responsibly anticipate and mitigate any problems? We can't even clearly state what the problems are anticipated to be. In fact, when we move from sweeping policy statements to more concrete accounts, nanotechnology seems to bifurcate into two divergent streams: one is fairly continuous with current developments, extending extant science in a quantitative way; the other is radically new, and includes science fiction-like dreams of molecular manufacturing and assemblers, with their utopian (or dystopian) scenarios of absolute plenty (or runaway self-replication). In these cases, “disruption” takes on the valence of Huxley's brave new world.

Type
Symposium
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 34 , Issue 4 , Winter 2006 , pp. 733 - 740
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 2006

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References

Speaking of the convergence of nanotechnology, biomedicine, information technology, and cognitive science (NBIC), James Canton anticipates “disruptions on a scale no civilization has ever seen before.” Canton, J., “Designing the Future: NBIC Technologies and Human Performance Enhancement,” Annals of the New York Academy of Science 1013 (2004): 186–198. A more general discussion of the need to anticipate the disruptions and mitigate their effects is found in Roco, M. and Bainbridge, W. S., eds., Social Implications of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
The problem of anticipating disruptions is recognized by Roco and Bainbridge in their introduction to supra note 1, at 12–13. They note that “[t]he process of innovation that will produce nanotechnology and diffuse its benefits into society are complex and only partially understood.” “Perhaps the greatest difficulty in predicting the societal impacts of new technologies has to do with the fact that once the technical and commercial feasibility of an innovation is demonstrated, subsequent developments may be as much in the hands of users as in those of the innovators. The diffusion and impact of technological innovations often depends on the development of complementary technologies and of the user network. As a result, new technologies can affect society in ways that were not intended by those who initiated them.”Google Scholar
This tension between the conventional/continuous and the radical/discontinuous is partly a function of the influence of older, more transhumanist notions of nanotechnology associated with Eric Drexler and the Foresight Institute; see e.g., Drexler, K. E., Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology (New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1986) and Drexler, K.E., Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1992). Foresight Institute documents on disruption can be found at <www.foresight.org> (last visited October 2, 2006). Much of the work of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology seeks to address these anticipated radical disruptions. Their work can be found at <http://crnano.org/> (last visited October 2, 2006). However, even in current scientific literature, these two strands are clearly manifest. The Canton citation in supra note 1, with its emphasis on human enhancement and radical disruption, is published with prominent scientific contributions. The first issue of Nanomedicine: Nanotechnology, Biology, Medicine, a new journal by Elsevier Press, prominently featured an essay by Freitas, Robert, a leading representative of the Drexler vision. It is thus extremely difficult to disentangle more conventional and radical notions of nanotechnology. In the end, it is perhaps better to speak of near-term, mid-term and long-term visions, with an increasingly radical notion of disruption emerging as one moves to the long term.Google Scholar
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