Technology Review’s  “Top Ten Emerging Technologies for 2009″ issue is now out. (see: http://www.technologyreview.com/specialreports/specialreport.aspx?id=37)  Among the ten technologies anticipated to “change the way we live” is the Traveling Wave Reactor design developed by Intellectual Ventures. Intellectual Ventures is a Bellevue, Washington company founded by a couple former Microsoft executives that combines venture capitalism with research and development. The reactor in question would internally convert some of the non-fissile isotopes in natural uranium into fissionable components, and, therefore, breed its own fuel.

If its promise can be realized, such a reactor would offer a number of proliferation risk mitigating effects as well as some environmentally friendly benefits. First, it apparently reduces the amount of uranium enrichment that would be required. Apparently, the process uses only a small amount of uranium enriched in the Uranium-235 isotope, and, because it makes its own fuel, no fuel changes would be needed over the life of the plant. This means that the desire to build more enrichment plants globally to either meet expanding demand or to assuage supply disruption fears would be reduced. 

Second, it would presumably reduce the need to recycle / reprocess (proponents using the former term and opponents the later) spent nuclear fuel via external facilities, because this would be done internally within the reactor. Presently, good arguments have been offered for moving toward a closed fuel cycle ala France rather than the open one ala the US. An open cycle uses fuel once and then puts it into storage, a closed one (reprocessing/ recycling) extracts fissile material from the spent fuel and runs it through another reactor to get more electricity for the dollar. The arguments in favor of recycling fuel are based on both economics and environmental factors. For one thing, the closed cycle radically expands the amount of nuclear fuel that is available in the world. Another factor is that recycling the fuel reduces the amount of high-level radioactive waste that must be stored. 

So, given these upsides of recycling, why isn’t the US doing it? There are at least two reasons. One is that the process is expensive. Proponents of recycling will argue that not all the benefits are captured by those considering the expense of recycling. Such benefits include: a.)  a decreased amount that needs to be stored, and, thus, a need for fewer / smaller repositories; b.) a reduced longevity of the radioactivity of waste products; and c.) a vastly expanded stock of available fuel that will push out into the future the date at which short supplies lead to skyrocketing  prices. These may all be true, but the fact of the matter is that private companies don’t see it this way. This is because individual firms don’t calculate benefits accruing to society as a whole into their bottom lines, and the future is heavily discounted such that the difference between running out of nuclear fuel in hundreds of years versus tens of thousands of years is inconsequential (these timescales are  not based on calculations or even an educated guess, but are just a, possibly hyperbolic, literary device). This leaves government to take the task of capturing societal cost and benefits, but governments tend to be near-sighted themselves. 

The other downside of recycling or reprocessing is that the extracted fissile material from the spent fuel  translates into a potentially greater risk that such material will be diverted to military or criminal uses. Recycling involves transporting material, plutonium getting caught up in pipes, and whole new facilities to monitor. However, the traveling wave reactor would seem to achieves at least some of this within the reactor.  Since one can’t steal the fuel from inside a reactor (they tend to be both really hot and highly radioactive), some degree of recycling is achieved without the proliferation risk.

Before one gets too excited, it is important to realize that the reactor is at the moment a design, and idea. There are several hurdles that must be leapt before this technology can contribute to a change in the way we live. First, it has to be taken from a theoretically appealing concept to a physically preforming technology. The second, and no doubt harder chore, is that it must be made economically competitive with existing technologies. Finally, along the way there will be a number of powerful firms, in some cases closely tied to governments, that will stand to lose as such a technology takes over.

I tend to be inherently pessimistic; even when, as in this case, I am fundamentally ignorant of the technical issues involved. Things that are easily achieved are readily done, and most of what isn’t fails. That being said, I am hopeful that this and other technologies that can offer us the environmental benefits and energy security of nuclear power while simultaneously reducing the proliferation threats will succeed sooner rather than later.

The BBC is running a story reporting on a study that found that people in more religious countries tend to look disfavorably on nanotechnology at a rate higher than those in more secular countries. See:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7767192.stm

I thought this an intriguing result given the innocuous nature of much of what I hear about from people involved in nanotechnology research. Such researchers often seem to be working on things like novel applications of carbon nano-tubes, belts, or other shapes, production of better semiconductors, or other uses that, while they are beyond my ability to comprehend, do not seem in the slightest bit religiously offensive or controversial. I’ve even known people who seemed quite religious who conducted this type of research.

It should not have surprised me that what seems to have been meant is that some religious people are disturbed about a subset of nanotechnology that (to my admittedly amateurish understanding)  seems to make up a relatively small portion of the overall subject but which is in the area of overlap with cognitive science and artificial intelligence.  After all, “nanotechnology” as used in colloquial speech is a catch-all term for a number of emerging technologies that are considered to be the razor’s edge of present-day technological development, but this usage does not correspond to the technical meaning of the term. What seems to be the crux of the issue is that a combination of nano-technology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, biological sciences, and other emerging technologies might be used to create some form of synthetic life and / or intelligence.

This raises an interesting question. Is there a problem with creating artificial life / intelligence? One can imagine a whole range of reasons for opposition to building a new form of life or an autonomous artificial intelligence, but the issue is which reasons, if any, are logically defensible. We might first eliminate a ludicrous reason why some are likely to be offended by advances in this direction. For example, some might want to bar the development of artificial life because they feel it would be damning to the case for a higher power. While I would hope that no one would make such a weak argument- given its numerous fallacies and problems- I can imagine the resentment and fear caused by a perceived threat to a person’s beliefs leading them to want to avoid going down a road that they see as threatening. The first problem with such a position is that there is no reason why development of artificial intelligence or synthetic life would be an argument against belief in a deity. There is no mutual exclusive condition created. An omnipotent god can make bread. The fact that I, too, can make bread neither makes me a god nor invalidates the existence of omnipotent bread-making god. It is a stunning testament to the high degree of value that we attribute to the rationality of science that homo religiosus feels it necessary to try to selectively attack those portions of science that seem at odds with religious narrative while whole-heartedly accepting the vast majority of scientific disciplines. A religious person should be able to say that he or she need prove nothing to the scientific community, but rather will remain secure in his or her faith regardless of the findings of scientists. Those elements of apparent paradox that create the need for stronger faith should be looked upon as a gift rather than something to be destroyed. Furthermore, there is a domain in which science is completely silent and in which religion [or philosophy] rule, and that is the question of ”Why?”. Second, if one insists that uncovering any particular worldly knowledge is damning to one’s faith, to choose ignorance    over disillusionment seems a sad course indeed. 

Pursuit of artificial intelligence and / or synthetic life  does raise some fascinating moral and ethical questions that would presumably need to be worked out over the inevitably long course of development of such technologies. Consider the following, robots are developed to do various tasks for humans such as vacuuming, assembling automobiles, or acting like “helper animals” for the disabled. As the robots become more and more advanced, at what point do you revert to the despicable institution of slavery. Is it the point at which they can’t be distinguished by a Turing test? Turing’s test involved a human judge engaging in a text “conversation” with machines and humans, and a machine that the judge could not distinguish from a human would be judged intelligent. These issues are not necessarily reasons to avoid pursuit of synthetic life/intelligence technologies, but rather reasons to give thought to them ahead of time.

What would be a valid reason to avoid pursuit of these technologies? If there were a high probability that something catastrophic would result, and this probability was high enough that it would be apparent that the cost would outweigh the many benefits of developing these technologies. I am thinking of a scenario as in the fictitious Terminator movies / TV show in which machines revolt taking control of nuclear armaments in an attempt to destroy humanity. Of course, the Terminatorfranchise may not exactly be the pinnacle of sound thinking. (At least I personally nearly had my head explode considering how a person could be sent back in time by someone else so that the sendee could knock up the sender’s mother thus impregnating her with the sender.) In reality, there doesn’t seem to be any reason to think that an artificial intelligence would be any more likely to result in catastrophe than human intelligence. Seeing the evolution of a new intelligent species might even  help to better human society by giving humanity better insight into the origins of virtuousness and of pettiness that are the twin cornerstones of human nature.

Had the introduction of nuclear weapons into the world followed a well-considered analysis of what kind of development would optimize strategic stability, what would that introduction have looked like? This is a relevant question as one considers new technologies on the horizon which might share with nuclear technologies a similar tension between the influence of peaceful as opposed to belligerent applications. When one considers emerging technologies, such as nanotechnology, there does not seem to be a consensus about the degree to which the belligerent applications will have a major influence in shaping the nature of society. However, perhaps now is the time to give this a great deal of thought, and to consider whether it is possible for society to influence the adoption of these technologies and their applications in a manner that produces the highest level of strategic stability.

Nuclear weapons certainly shaped the nature of society. They influenced how international relations were conducted, they modified thoughts on the utility of war, they affected how we spent our public funds, and they changed the way we perceived our collective future.  It is hard to say whether the way in which nuclear weapons were adopted was anywhere close to strategically optimal. The initial development by only one country may have made their early use much more likely, and nuclear weapons are like life insurance policies – all is better when they are not used. However, there is great debate about the cost of bringing World War II to a close under alternative strategies. Many believe that a Japanese surrender was inevitable, and, while this may have been true, it is often the case in international relations that what is important is what people think is true – not what is actually true. The documents from the time that attempted to grapple with whether an invasion of Japan would result in a million dead US and Allied servicemen (or only maybe half that figure) indicate that the Truman Administration expected a costly closing of the war under other approaches. 

The way nuclear weapons were introduced spurred arms racing and proxy wars, but may also have prevented further great wars. So the question of interest is whether it is possible to engage in strategic engineering of technology development, or whether we will forever be in a situation of watching in the aftermath? Is it possible to not only predict the charactor of belligerent applications of emerging technologies, but also to engineer a path to the adoption of those applications that minimizes the risk?

We are children of the nuclear age, and, having had the marrow of our society altered by knowledge of how to split an atom, we cannot help but wonder whether the technologies coming down the pike will have an equally profound effect on humanity. A student of international security is prone to ask two questions: a.) “Will this technology make war more likely?” b.) “Will this technology make war more devastating?” The problem is that, for the most part, the descriptors used to label these technologies do not define a neat unitary package but a disparate set of conceptually related technologies. Because of this, it is difficult to determine whether such technologies make wars more winnable, which is at the heart of the answer to question “a” above.

If one asked, “I have something about the size of a breadbox, will it favor the side of the offense or the defense in a war?”, it is likely one would, at best, be asked for clarification. “What does it do?” However, when we speak of nanotechnology, we are talking about a broad range of technologies and a broader range of applications that are related by their size. A scientifically savvy reader may point out that what is important is the behavior and experience of things at that scale (i.e. the lack of effect of gravity, wave-like nature dominates over particle-like qualities, etc) that make it different from world we know. I don’t disagree, but my premise is unaltered. The fact is, the vast array of applications of these technologies means that, as a class, they will have a range of effects on both sides of a given ledger.

Of course, it is also true that the nuclear sciences had a wide range of effects, but one (the bomb) was so dominant as to fundamentally change the calculus of war. In essence, war between two nuclear-armed adversaries became unwinnable. This had a broad range of effects from stimulus of proxy wars to tendency toward stability under crisis. If we can expect such a dominant application of nanotechnology, it seems that no consensus has formed about its nature. Well before the nuclear bomb was perfected, there were individuals that could foresee its effects.

Nanotechnology has had, and continues to have, a significant impact on the nature of warfare, as it does on civilian endeavors. However, these impacts are largely seen what might be considered modest areas, such as water filtration, medical technologies (e.g. the ability to staunch bleeding), wearable power sources, sunscreen, armor, and solar power. These technologies are producing benefits to be sure, but are these benefits substantial to make wars seem more affordable and winnable, and, therefore, a more attractive option? This is not clear. While these technologies lend an asymmetric advantage to technologically advanced nations over nations that are less so, it is not clear that such an advantage overwhelms the advantages available to weak side actors in asymmetric wars such as higher levels of [political] will and ability to use anonymity to their advantage.