Augmented realities.
By now it is postulated that, if nano-robots can enter our veins and our cells, they can get into our brains and affect your neurons. This would lead to full immersion or virtual reality being built into the brain (watch the Matrix, and even if you have already seen it, watch it again). Augmented realities could be built into our on-board mental computers. Molecular nano assemblers could assemble our mind’s eye for us. Thomas Hornigold is a physics student at the University of Oxford and host of the Physical Attraction podcast. He explains it well on Christmas day, 2017:
It sounds like science fiction—although, with the advent of 3D printers in recent years, less so than it used to. Burke, who hosted the BBC show Tomorrow’s World, which introduced bemused and excited audiences to all kinds of technologies, has a decades-long track record of technological predictions. He isn’t alone in envisioning the nanofactory as the technology that will change the world forever. Eric Drexler, thought by many to be the father of nanotechnology, wrote in the 1990s about molecular assemblers, hypothetical machines capable of manipulating matter and constructing molecules on the nano level, with scales of a billionth of a meter.
Richard Feynman, the famous inspirational physicist and bongo-playing eccentric, gave the lecture that inspired Drexler as early as 1959. Feynman’s talk, “Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” speculated about a world where moving individual atoms would be possible. While this is considered more difficult than molecular manufacturing, which seeks to manipulate slightly bigger chunks of matter, to date no one has been able to demonstrate that such machines violate the laws of physics.
In recent years, progress has been made towards this goal. It may well be that we make faster progress by mimicking the processes of biology, where individual cells, optimized by billions of years of evolution, routinely manipulate chemicals and molecules to keep us alive.
“If nanofabricators are ever built, the systems and structure of the world as we know them were built to solve a problem that will no longer exist.”
But the dream of the nanofabricator is not yet dead. What is perhaps even more astonishing than the idea of having such a device—something that could create anything you want—is the potential consequences it could have for society. Suddenly, all you need is light and raw materials. Starvation ceases to be a problem. After all, what is food? Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorous, sulphur. Nothing that you won’t find with some dirt, some air, and maybe a little biomass thrown in for efficiency’s sake.
Equally, there’s no need to worry about not having medicine as long as you have the recipe and a nanofabricator. After all, the same elements I listed above could just as easily make insulin, paracetamol, and presumably the superior drugs of the future, too.
What the internet did for information—allowing it to be shared, transmitted, and replicated with ease, instantaneously—the nanofabricator would do for physical objects. Energy will be in plentiful supply from the sun; your Santa Clause machine will be able to create new solar panels and batteries to harness and store this energy whenever it needs to.
Suddenly only three commodities have any value: the raw materials for the nanofabricator (many of which, depending on what you want to make, will be plentiful just from the world around you); the nanofabricators themselves (unless, of course, they can self-replicate, in which case they become just a simple ‘conversion’ away from raw materials); and, finally, the blueprints for the things you want to make.
In a world where material possessions are abundant for everyone, will anyone see any necessity in hoarding these blueprints? Far better for a few designers to tinker and create new things for the joy of it, and share them with all. What does ‘profit’ mean in a world where you can generate anything you want?
As Burke puts it, “This will destroy the current social, economic, and political system, because it will become pointless…every institution, every value system, every aspect of our lives have been governed by scarcity: the problem of distributing a finite amount of stuff. There will be no need for any of the social institutions.”
In other words, if nanofabricators are ever built, the systems and structure of the world as we know them were built to solve a problem that will no longer exist.
In some ways, speculating about such a world that’s so far removed from our own reminds me of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s warning about trying to divine what a superintelligent AI might make of the human race. We are limited to considering things in our own terms; we might think of a mouse as low on the scale of intelligence, and Einstein as the high end. But superintelligence breaks the scale; there is no sense in comparing it to anything we know, because it is different in kind. In the same way, such a world would be different in kind to the one we live in today.”
How a Machine That Can Make Anything Would Change Everything
A big quote, but an excellent article, I thought.
In this predicted eventuality, the post human hierarchy of needs would indeed be very different. There would be no need for the physiological, for cleaning or clearing up after ourselves. With no bottom rung of Maslow’s triangle, we would be free to focus on ourselves purely socially, building on our esteem and actualisation and making our dreams come true.
But what if there were no sin wave to existence? What if there were no blues? How could we appreciate all the other colours of life? Surely permanent joy, bliss or orgasm would become boring very quickly.
You think, therefore it is…or isn’t.