Social and economic aspects of nanotechnology – Page 18

It isn’t science that drives the nanotechnology news agenda

The event on nanotechnology at the Dana Centre in London last night was interesting in that it focused, not on what scientists or technologists think that nanotechnology is or will be, but on the way the subject is portrayed in popular culture and the media. The conclusions are rather sobering for any scientists who still believe that it’s their laboratory work that sparks public interest in nanotechnology.

Clare Wilkinson, working at the University of Plymouth, talked about her comprehensive study of treatment of nanotechnology in British national newspapers between 2003 and 2004. What’s striking about her results is how little of the media coverage was generated by science correspondents (only 13%), and how small was the proportion of stories that were sparked by a research report or journal article (only 15%). And what’s not at all surprising to anyone who’s been following press coverage of nanotechnology is the way stock images and metaphors are used, again and again, to place stories in context.

What are the favourite stock images? Nanosubmarines and nanobots, of course, and to see where that’s come from one only has to look at the treatment of nanotechnology in the cinema. David Kirby, another of last night’s speakers, traced the history of nanotechnology in the movies from the inevitable Fantastic Voyage, through Star Trek: The Next Generation, to the recent crop of Virtuosity, Minority Report, The Hulk and Agent Cody Banks. He singled out Spiderman 2 (2004) as the first explicit invocation of something like the Grey Goo nightmare, pointing the way, perhaps, to the nano-dystopia of Prey. That film we’re still waiting for; but perhaps James Cameron’s remake of Fantastic Voyage will be even more significant. David’s research, based at the University of Manchester, has involved extensive interviews with the scientific consultants for Hollywood studios, and he reports that virtually every script that’s now being considered that has any kind of technological component is invoking nanotechnology in one form or another.

It’s clear that nanotechnology now has a status akin to nuclear energy in the fifties; an unseen power that serves as a universal plot device, facilitating miracles, on the one hand, and breeding monsters on the other.

Nanotechnology uncertainties and (missed) opportunities: the UK government responds

The UK government’s official written response to the Royal Society nanotechnology report can be found in this 26 page PDF document. As I wrote in this report from the launch event, the response is a missed opportunity to put the UK in the lead in establishing a sensible regulatory framework for the development of nanotechnology in a way that maintains public confidence. This has caused some dismay, not just from anti-nanotechnology activists, but also from pro-business voices. It’s telling that the only coverage of the story in the national press yesterday was in the Financial Times, which had both a news item and an editorial . The FT points out that in potentially controversial technology areas, good regulation can be a source of competitive advantage, and it fears that this response could signal a loss of momentum, with damaging consequences for the nascent nanotechnology industry.

Of course, the report expresses many perfectly fine sentiments about the need to coordinate research, to engage with the public and to develop an appropriate regulatory framework. But, in response to the rather specific recommendations of the Royal Society report, there’s very little in the way of actual action. There are four main categories of issues to be addressed:

Research into the potential toxicity of nanoparticles
The headline here is the dismissal of the recommendation of the Royal Society to fund a dedicated research centre for the study of potential nanoparticle toxicity and the behaviour of nanoparticles in the environment. Instead, research will be commissioned by a Research Coordination Group comprising representatives from research councils and government departments. But does this group have the authority to tell the Research Councils, for example, to set aside money for this purpose? That is not specified, and it seems unlikely.

Regulation
The government announced a study by DEFRA on environmental regulations, to report by end 2005. As far as Health and Safety legislation is concerned, the response reports that the Health and Safety Executive believe that there are currently no gaps in regulations. Chemicals will carry on being regulated under the Notification of New Substances regulations, which won’t be changed in the way the report recommended, to make nanoparticles be considered as new substances. it looks like the Government can’t see the point of doing anything while the replacement for these regulations, the Europe-wide Registration, Evaluation Authorisation of Chemicals, are being negotiated. To fend off accusations of inactivity on this front, the government has announced a review of the advisory committee structure, but anticipates that responsibility for advice on health and environmental risk will remain diffused over a total of 9 different advisory committees . As regards the issue of specifying the inclusion of nanoparticles in cosmetics, the government will look into the matter (no mechanism for this or date for reporting is specified.)

Social and ethical issues
The Royal Society’s recommendation for an interdisciplinary research program on social and ethical issues is not endorsed; instead there is simply a lukewarm general commitment to “delivering the science and society agenda”. It is clear that the Government is content that this be left to the research councils to sort out, but there’s a strong steer that scientists must be involved in any such research programme, and that the research should be geared to providing practical guidance on policy making and regulation.

Public dialogue
There’s general support for the importance of public dialogue, and a rather unspecific commitment to find funds and resources for it. The report cites one specific example – the Small Talk project. The scheme under which this was funded (COPUS – the committee for public understanding of science) has now been replace by another scheme, Sciencewise, which has had a recent call for proposals singling out nanotechnology for special attention. Not mentioned in the response is the ominous fact that government funding under this scheme is conditional on matched funding being raised from the non-government sources. This is unfortunate, as it could easily compromise the perceived independence of this kind of project.

Connoisseurs of committees will enjoy this report; in addition to the Research Coordination Group, we’ve also got the Nanotechnology Issues Dialogue Group, which will be reported to by the former and will report to and brief the two year and five year independent reviews, to be carried out by the Council for Science and Technology. This is a classical committee of the great and good (in this case, university vice-chancellors and other senior academics, industrialists and financiers), which, in its quarterly meetings has to provide advice to the Prime Minister on everything to do with science and technology, including both research and education, in government, academia and industry. Fitting in a complete independent review on nanotechnology as well shouldn’t prove too difficult. And of course, there’s the committee to review the advisory committee structure.

Converging technologies in Europe and the USA

Last Thursday saw a meeting in London to introduce to the UK a report that came out last summer on the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and neuroscience. Converging technologies for a diverse Europe can essentially be thought of as the European answer to the 2002 report from the USA, Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance. The speaker line-up, besides me, included social scientists, futurologists, an arms control expert and an official from the European Commission. What was striking to me was how much this debate was framed in terms Europe trying to position itself somewhat apart from the USA, though perhaps this isn’t surprising in view of the broader flow of international politics at the moment.

It’s almost a clich?� that public opinion is very different on the two continents, with the USA being much more uninhibited in its welcoming of new technology than the more technophobic Europeans. George Gaskell, a sociologist from the London School of Economics, presented survey data that at first seems to confirm this view. In his 2002 surveys, he found that while 50% of people in the USA were sure that nanotechnology would be positive in its outcome, only 29% of Europeans were so optimistic. But the picture isn’t as simple as it first appears; the figures for the proportion who thought that nanotechnology would make things worse were not actually that different – 4% in the USA compared to 6% in Europe. The Europeans were simply taking the attitude that they didn’t know enough to judge. The absence of any across-the-board distrust of technology is shown by a comparison of attitudes to three key technologies – nuclear energy, computers and information technology and biotechnology. The data showed almost overwhelming opposition to nuclear power, equally overwhelming enthusiasm for computers and communication technology, and a mixed picture for biotech. The key issues for acceptance prove not to be any deep enthusiasm or distrust for technology in general; it’s simply a balance of the benefits and risks together with a judgement on how much the governance and regulation of the technology can be trusted.

Where there is a big difference between Europe and the USA is in the importance of the military in driving research. J?�rgen Altmann, a physicist turned arms-control expert from The University of Dortmund, is very worried about the military applications of nanotechnology, and his worries are nicely summarised in this pdf handout. His view is that the USA is currently undertaking an arms race against itself, wasting resources that could otherwise be used both to boost economic competitiveness and to counter the real threat that both the USA and Europe face by more appropriate and low-tech means. Others, of course, will differ on the nature of the threat and the best way to counter it.

The balance between civil and military research and development was also highlighted by Elie Faroult, from the Research Directorate of the European Commission, who pointed out with some glee that the EU was now considerably ahead of the USA in investment in most civil research, and that this trend is accelerating as the USA squeezes spending on non-military science. For him, this gave Europe the opportunity to develop a distinctive set of research goals which emphasised social coherence and environmental sustainability as well as economic competitiveness. But having taken the obligatory side-swipe at the USA he finished by saying that of course, looking to the future, it wasn’t the USA that Europe was in competition with. The real competitor for both the USA and Europe was China.

Competitive Consumption

Partisans of molecular nanotechnology keep coming back to the theme of the devastation that they say will be caused to the world’s economic systems when it becomes possible to manufacture anything at no cost. Surely, they say, when goods cost nothing to make, then the money economy must wither away? I don’t accept the premise of this argument, but even if I did I think it is based on a misunderstanding of how economics works. The laws of economics, inasmuch as anything in that discipline can be described as a law, are really observations about human nature, and as such are not likely to be overturned on the basis of a mere technological advance. The key fallacy in this way of thinking is very succinctly put in an excellent book I’ve just finished: A nation of rebels: why counterculture became consumer culture, by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter.

This book is mainly an entertaining polemic against the counterculture and the anti-globalisation movement. What’s relevant to us here is its gleeful demolition of the idea of postscarcity economics, as proposed by Herbert Marcuse and Murray Bookchin. This is the idea that once machines were able to take care of all our material needs and wants, we would be able to form a society based not on the demands of economic production, but on fellowship and love. It’s very easy to see the connection between this and the arguments made by the proponents of molecular nanotechnology.

The key concept in understanding what’s wrong with these ideas is the notion of a “positional good”. Positional goods get their value from the fact that not everyone can have them; people pay lots of money for an expensive and rare sports car like an Aston Martin, not simply because it is a nice piece of engineering, but explicitly because possession of one signals, in the view of the purchaser, something about their exalted status in society. The whole aim of much advertising and brand building is to increase the value of artefacts which often cost very little to make, by associating them with status messages of this kind. Very few people are immune to this, unless they live in cabins in the wilderness; for most of the middle class majorities of rich countries their biggest expenditure is on a house to live in, which by virtue of the importance of location and neighbourhood is an archetypal positional good.

When one realises how important positional goods are in market economies, the fallacy of the idea that molecular manufacturing would cause the end of the money economy becomes clear. In the words of Heath and Potter:

“What eventually led to the undoing of these views was the failure to appreciate the competitive nature of our consumption and the significance of positional goods. Houses in good neighborhoods, tasteful furniture, fast cars, stylish restaurant and cool clothes are all intrinsically scarce. We cannot manufacture more of them, because their value is based on the distinction they provide to consumers. The idea of overcoming scarcity through increased production is incoherent; in our society, scarcity is a social, not a material, phenomenon.”

Nanotechnology and universal surveillance

What potential impact of nanotechnology on society should we worry about most? The headlines are being made by the possibility that nanoparticles are especially toxic. This is a real concern, but the problem is relatively bounded and the solutions aren’t difficult to put in place (even if those solutions are going to be bad news for laboratory rats). The primal fear is of loss of control of a technology so powerful that it could lead to the extinction of all life – the problem of grey goo. But as the hubris and lack of realism implicit in the assumption that we will, any time soon, be able to engineer what amounts to a new and superior form of life becomes more apparent, this fear should lose its force.

My major worry is in the way we’ll deal with a world in which computing and communication power is so cheap that every object and artefact can have the capability to sense its environment and interact with its neighbours. RFID and smart dust give us a good idea of which way this technology is heading, and developments in evolutionary nanotechnology are sure both to greatly increase the capability and dramatically decrease the cost of such devices.

Worries about the way this is heading are eloquently stated in an interesting new essay on nanotechnology by one of the grandest figures of US academic nanoscience, George Whitesides (the essay is in the current edition of the new Wiley nanotechnology journal, Small, but it probably needs a subscription for full text access).

“In my opinion, the most serious risk of nanotechnology comes, not from hypothetical revolutionary materials or systems, but from the uses of evolutionary nanotechnologies that are already developing rapidly ….
��Universal surveillance��the observation of everyone and everything, in real time, everywhere; a concept suggested by those most concerned with terrorism��is not a technology that I would wish to see cloak a free society, no matter how protectively intended.”

William: on The shifting sands of UK Government technology prioritisation
Douglas Robertson: on The shifting sands of UK Government technology prioritisation
Matt Cliffe: on When did the UK’s productivity slowdown begin?
Zelah: on What the UK should – and should not – do about semiconductors
Richard Jones: on “Science Superpower: the UK’s Global Science Strategy beyond Horizon Europe”