Avoiding both utopian and apocalyptic forecasts for nanotechnology
By Todd Seavey
Posted: Saturday, March 1, 2008

ARTICLES
Publication Date: March 1, 2008

The full text of this article appeared in the March 2008 issue of Reason magazine:

By the middle of the century, the inventor Ray Kurzweil suggests in his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near, human beings will live in perpetual clouds of nanobots, molecule-sized robots that spend each moment altering our micro-environments to our precise preferences. Over the longer term, he imagines that nanotechnology -- the manipulation of matter at the molecular level -- will let us change our shape and appearance, become immortal, and transfer our minds with ease between far-flung planets.

By contrast, the thriller writer Michael Crichton describes nanobots running amok in his 2002 novel Prey. With his signature mix of tech savvy and paranoia, Crichton imagines the tiny automatons forming "nanoswarms," clouds that visually mimic human beings in order to infiltrate and destroy us -- sort of microscopic, sentient super-kudzu.

Both our hopes and fears regarding nanotechnology have been extreme from the beginning...