The author of “Where Is My Flying Car” says that the Feynman Program (teching up to nanotechnology by machining miniaturized parts, which are assembled into the tools for micro-scale machining, which are assembled into tools for yet smaller machining, etc) might be technically feasible and the only reason we don’t have it is that no one’s tried it yet. But this seems a bit crazy for the following reasons:
The author doesn’t seem like a domain expert
AFAIK this particular method of nanotechnology was just an idea Feynman had in the famous speech and not a serious proposal (he introduces it with “let me suggest one weird possibility”)
Investment in the Feynman Program, if it’s feasible, would pay off quickly, since there are large economic benefits to the incremental microtechnologies (getting halfway there at a reasonable price would essentially produce any manufactured good that doesn’t require nanoscale processes, which seems like most of them, while also increasing quality).
In particular, semiconductor manufacturing started at the micro-scale, and many companies converged on lithography for manufacturing rather than using miniature robots. Then we invented MEMS, which is machinery created using lithography-like processes, and chip factories never switched from lithography to MEMS. We never even progressed from MEMS to fully general microtechnology.
Does anyone with domain expertise have further thoughts?
I’m not a domain expert in micromachines, but have studied at least miniature machines as part of a previous job.
One very big problem is volume. Once you get down below tonne scale, making and assembling small parts with fine tolerances is not really any less expensive than making and assembling larger parts with comparatively the same tolerances.
That is, each one-gram machine made of a thousand parts probably won’t cost you any less than a hundred-kilogram machine made of a thousand parts. It will almost certainly cost more, since it will require new techniques to make, assemble, and operate at the smaller scale. The cost of maintenance per machine almost certainly goes up since there are more layers of indirection in diagnosis and rectification of problems.
So this doesn’t scale down at all: attention is a limiting factor. With advanced extrapolations from current techniques, maybe we could eventually make nanogram robot arms for merely the same cost as hundred kilogram robot arms. That doesn’t help much if each one costs $10,000 and needs maintenance every few weeks. We need some way to make a trillion of them for $10k, and for them to do what we want without any individual attention at all.
making and assembling small parts with fine tolerances is not really any less expensive than making and assembling larger parts with comparatively the same tolerances.
I wasn’t ever involved with manufacture of the individual parts, so I don’t have direct experience.
I suspect it’s just that as you go smaller, material costs become negligible compared with process costs. Process costs don’t change much, because you still need humans to oversee the machines carrying out the processes, and there are similar numbers of processes with as many steps involved no matter how large or small the parts are. The processes themselves might be different, because some just can’t scale down below a certain size for physics reasons, but it doesn’t get easier at smaller scales.
Also, direct human labour still plays a fairly crucial role in most processes. There are (so far) always some things to be done where human capabilities exceed those of any machine we can build at reasonable cost.
John Storrs “Josh” Hall is involved in the field of molecular nanotechnology.[1] He founded the sci.nanotech Usenet newsgroup and moderated it for ten years, and served as the founding chief scientist of Nanorex Inc. for two years. He has written several papers on nanotechnology and developed several ideas such as the utility fog, the space pier, a weather control system called The Weather Machine and a novel flying car.
He is the author of Nanofuture: What’s Next for Nanotechnology (ISBN 1-59102-287-8), a fellow of the Molecular Engineering Research Institute and Research Fellow of the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing.
Hall was also a computer systems architect at the Laboratory for Computer Science Research at Rutgers University from 1985 until 1997. In February 2009, Hall was appointed president of the Foresight Institute.
In 2006, the Foresight Nanotech Institute awarded Hall the Feynman Communication Prize.[2] [3]
What do you mean by “domain expert” is that doesn’t count him as being one?
I think a MEMS engineer would be better suited to evaluate whether the engineering problems are feasible than a computer scientist / futurist author. Maybe futurists could outdo ML engineers on AI forecasting. But I think the author doesn’t have nearly as detailed an inside view about nanotech as futurists on AI. There’s no good answer in the book to the “attention bottleneck” objection JBlack just made, and no good story for why the market is so inefficient.
developed several ideas such as the utility fog, the space pier, a weather control system called The Weather Machine
These are all ideas of the form “If we could make fully general nanotechnology, then we could do X”. Gives me the same vibe as this. Saying “nuclear reactor. . . you have hydrogen go through the thing. . . Zoom! it’s a rocket” doesn’t mean you can evaluate whether a nuclear reactor is feasible at 194X tech level, and thinking of the utility fog doesn’t mean you can evaluate whether MEMS can be developed into general nanotech at 202X tech level.
I can’t comment on what JBlack means by “domain expert”, but looking at that list of things about Hall, what I see is:
“Involved in”, which means nothing.
Founded and moderated a newsgroup: requires no particular domain expertise.
Founding chief scientist of Nanorex Inc for two years. I can’t find any evidence that Nanorex ever produced anything other than a piece of software that claimed to do molecular dynamics suitable for simulating nanotech. Whether it was actually any good, I have no idea, but the company seems not to have survived. Depending on what exactly the responsibilities of the “founding chief scientist” are, this could be evidence that Hall understands a lot about molecular dynamics, or evidence that Hall is a good software developer, or evidence of nothing at all. In the absence of more information about Nanorex and their product, it doesn’t tell us much.
Has written several papers on nanotechnology: anyone can write a paper. A quick look for papers he’s written turns up some abstracts, all of which seem like high-level “here’s a concept that may be useful for nanotech” ones. Such a paper could be very valuable and demonstrate deep insight, but the test of that would be actually turning out to be useful for nanotech and so far as I can tell his ideas haven’t led to anything much.
Developed ideas such as utility fog, space pier, etc.: again, anyone can “develop ideas”. The best test of the idea-developer’s insight is whether those ideas turn out actually to be of any use. So far, we don’t seem close to having utility fog, space piers, weather control or flying cars.
Author of “Nanofuture”: pop-science book, which from descriptions I’ve read seems mostly to be broad general principles about nanotech that doesn’t exist yet, and exciting speculations about future nanotech thatt doesn’t exist yet.
Fellow of a couple of things: without knowing exactly what their criteria are for appointing Fellows, this could mean anything or nothing. My guess is that they made him a Fellow because he was an early popularizer of nanotech ideas, not because of actual expertise or accomplishments.
Also, literally the only things I can find about the “Molecular Engineering Research Institute” are places where Storrs-Hall describes himself as that. It looks worryingly like one of those pseudoscholarly institutions that a person or small group creates in order to sound more impressive. I’m willing to be corrected on this one, though.
I can’t find much sign that the “Institution for Molecular Manufacturing” is much better, actually.
Computer systems architect at the Laboratory for Computer Science Research at Rutgers: This does seem to be a real thing at a real university. I think it is evidence that Storrs-Hall knows something about writing software.
Awarded the Feynman Communication Prize: implies no particular domain expertise.
Everything here is consistent with Storrs-Hall being a competent software guy who had a bunch of vague but exciting-sounding ideas about nanotech, writes well, and was in the right place at the right time—and nothing more than that.
(It’s also consistent with his being more expert than that. But it doesn’t seem like it’s much evidence for that’s being so.)
In nanotech? True enough, because I am not convinced that there is any domain expertise in the sort of nanotech Storrs Hall writes about. It seems like a field that consists mostly of advertising. (There is genuine science and genuine engineering in nano-stuff; for instance, MEMS really is a thing. But the sort of “let’s build teeny-tiny mechanical devices, designed and built at the molecular level, which will be able to do amazing things previously-existing tech can’t” that Storrs Hall has advocated seems not to have panned out.)
But more generally, that isn’t so at all. What I’m looking for by way of domain expertise in a technological field is a history of demonstrated technological achievements. Storrs Hall has one such achievement that I can see, and even that is doubtful. (He founded and was “chief scientist” of a company that made software for simulating molecular dynamics. I am not in a position to tell either how well the software actually worked or how much of it was JSH’s doing.) More generally, I want to see a history of demonstrated difficult accomplishments in the field, as opposed to merely writing about the field.
Selecting some random books from my shelves (literally random; I have a list and am selecting random lines from the file, discarding fiction and anthologies), I find:
Nigel Slater, “Real fast food”. Slater is more food-journalist than chef, but there the proof is in the eating. I have made many things from his books and found that they consistently taste good and don’t require excessive effort, which for me is sufficient reason to consider him a domain expert. Non-technical domain, though.
Alec Vidler, “Essays in liberality”. A book of theological essays. Highly non-technical domain, much worse even than nanotech in terms of whether such a thing as domain expertise exists.
Richard Dawkins, “Unweaving the rainbow”. I like Dawkins, but it’s debatable whether he passes my domain-expert test; the main thing he’s known for in evolutionary biology is the “selfish gene” concept, which is more a new perspective on ideas others had already had than a new discovery in its own right.
John Potter, “The Cambridge companion to singing”. Potter is a tenor who has made >100 commercial recordings and performed in groups such as the Hilliard Ensemble. Singing well enough that anyone wants to sell your performances, or well enough to be a member of a group like the Hilliard Ensemble, is a difficult accomplishment in the field, and for this I consider him a domain expert. (Until his retirement he was also on the music faculty at a good university, but that’s only indirect evidence.)
Peter Sagal, “The book of vice”. Highly non-technical domain; author is a humourist and journalist. Not a domain expert.
Ruppert, Wand & Carroll, “Semiparametric regression”. I’ll consider only the first-named author. Author of what looks like about 100 statistical papers. Many of them are applied stats papers in journals with other subjects, suggesting that what he does is useful outside statistics itself. I had a look at one of his papers; it looks as if it is doing actual mathematics, discovering useful things about the merits of a couple of different approaches to data-smoothing. Sure looks like a domain expert.
H G Atkins, biography of Heinrich Heine. Non-technical domain. All I can easily find out about the author is that he was a professor of German at a good English university. Writing and publishing a biography of Heine is arguably itself evidence of domain expertise in, er, the life of Heine, but this one isn’t easy to assess with confidence.
Laura Miller, “The magician’s book: a skeptic’s adventures in Narnia”. About those books and C S Lewis’s life. Author does not appear to be a domain expert by my criterion.
Matthew Chapman, “40 days and 40 nights”, about the Dover intelligent design trial. I guess the domain is something like “history of church-and-state fights in the US”; I don’t think the author is a domain expert by my criterion.
A K Dewdney, “The Planiverse” (a sort of updated “Flatland”). Not clear what would constitute domain expertise, and maybe this should be excluded from the list for being fiction, though clearly its main point is not storytelling. At any rate, Dewdney is a professor of computer science but I don’t think he qualifies as a domain expert on two-dimensional universes occupied by intelligent beings.
That’s 10 books, which seems like a reasonable place to stop. Somewhere between 3 and 5 of the authors are domain experts by my criterion (generalized in what I think is an honest way to domains other than technology). Maybe 3 of the books are concerned with technical domains (Dawkins, Ruppert et al, Dewdney) and 1 or 2 of the 3 authors qualify.
I picked some more random books to bring the number of technical-domain ones up to 10. I’ll summarize more briefly. “(P)” means pop-science/pop-maths; “(T)” means technical works aimed at experts. Ruelle, “Chaotic evolution and strange attractors” (T); domain expert. O’Neill, “Doing data science: straight talk from the frontline” (P): marginal, leaning toward domain expert. Mlodinow, “The drunkard’s walk: how randomness rules our lives” (P): marginal, leaning toward not. (Author is a domain expert in theoretical physics, not so much here.) Steele, “Probability theory and combinatorial optimization” (T): domain expert. Nick Lane, “The vital question: why is life the way it is?” (P): not a domain expert. Gribbin, “In search of Schrödinger’s cat” (P): not a domain expert. Hatton, “Safer C: developing software for high-integrity and safety-critical systems” (T): domain expert. So, counting Dawkins, O’Neill, Mlodinow as half-domain-experts, I make that five out of 10.
So it seems like if you pull a book on a technical topic off my bookshelves at random, about half the time the author is a domain expert in this (admittedly fairly strong) sense; it seems to be pretty much all the time for hardcore technical works for expert audiences, whereas popular books are more likely to be written by journalists or by experts in other fields.
I wouldn’t call that “very few people”, in this context. (As a fraction of the whole population it’s “very few”, and I’m perfectly OK with that and assume you are too.)
The author of “Where Is My Flying Car” says that the Feynman Program (teching up to nanotechnology by machining miniaturized parts, which are assembled into the tools for micro-scale machining, which are assembled into tools for yet smaller machining, etc) might be technically feasible and the only reason we don’t have it is that no one’s tried it yet. But this seems a bit crazy for the following reasons:
The author doesn’t seem like a domain expert
AFAIK this particular method of nanotechnology was just an idea Feynman had in the famous speech and not a serious proposal (he introduces it with “let me suggest one weird possibility”)
Investment in the Feynman Program, if it’s feasible, would pay off quickly, since there are large economic benefits to the incremental microtechnologies (getting halfway there at a reasonable price would essentially produce any manufactured good that doesn’t require nanoscale processes, which seems like most of them, while also increasing quality).
In particular, semiconductor manufacturing started at the micro-scale, and many companies converged on lithography for manufacturing rather than using miniature robots. Then we invented MEMS, which is machinery created using lithography-like processes, and chip factories never switched from lithography to MEMS. We never even progressed from MEMS to fully general microtechnology.
Does anyone with domain expertise have further thoughts?
I’m not a domain expert in micromachines, but have studied at least miniature machines as part of a previous job.
One very big problem is volume. Once you get down below tonne scale, making and assembling small parts with fine tolerances is not really any less expensive than making and assembling larger parts with comparatively the same tolerances.
That is, each one-gram machine made of a thousand parts probably won’t cost you any less than a hundred-kilogram machine made of a thousand parts. It will almost certainly cost more, since it will require new techniques to make, assemble, and operate at the smaller scale. The cost of maintenance per machine almost certainly goes up since there are more layers of indirection in diagnosis and rectification of problems.
So this doesn’t scale down at all: attention is a limiting factor. With advanced extrapolations from current techniques, maybe we could eventually make nanogram robot arms for merely the same cost as hundred kilogram robot arms. That doesn’t help much if each one costs $10,000 and needs maintenance every few weeks. We need some way to make a trillion of them for $10k, and for them to do what we want without any individual attention at all.
Seems like the key claim:
Can you give any hint why that is or could be?
I wasn’t ever involved with manufacture of the individual parts, so I don’t have direct experience.
I suspect it’s just that as you go smaller, material costs become negligible compared with process costs. Process costs don’t change much, because you still need humans to oversee the machines carrying out the processes, and there are similar numbers of processes with as many steps involved no matter how large or small the parts are. The processes themselves might be different, because some just can’t scale down below a certain size for physics reasons, but it doesn’t get easier at smaller scales.
Also, direct human labour still plays a fairly crucial role in most processes. There are (so far) always some things to be done where human capabilities exceed those of any machine we can build at reasonable cost.
Wikipedia describes the author as saying:
What do you mean by “domain expert” is that doesn’t count him as being one?
I think a MEMS engineer would be better suited to evaluate whether the engineering problems are feasible than a computer scientist / futurist author. Maybe futurists could outdo ML engineers on AI forecasting. But I think the author doesn’t have nearly as detailed an inside view about nanotech as futurists on AI. There’s no good answer in the book to the “attention bottleneck” objection JBlack just made, and no good story for why the market is so inefficient.
These are all ideas of the form “If we could make fully general nanotechnology, then we could do X”. Gives me the same vibe as this. Saying “nuclear reactor. . . you have hydrogen go through the thing. . . Zoom! it’s a rocket” doesn’t mean you can evaluate whether a nuclear reactor is feasible at 194X tech level, and thinking of the utility fog doesn’t mean you can evaluate whether MEMS can be developed into general nanotech at 202X tech level.
I can’t comment on what JBlack means by “domain expert”, but looking at that list of things about Hall, what I see is:
“Involved in”, which means nothing.
Founded and moderated a newsgroup: requires no particular domain expertise.
Founding chief scientist of Nanorex Inc for two years. I can’t find any evidence that Nanorex ever produced anything other than a piece of software that claimed to do molecular dynamics suitable for simulating nanotech. Whether it was actually any good, I have no idea, but the company seems not to have survived. Depending on what exactly the responsibilities of the “founding chief scientist” are, this could be evidence that Hall understands a lot about molecular dynamics, or evidence that Hall is a good software developer, or evidence of nothing at all. In the absence of more information about Nanorex and their product, it doesn’t tell us much.
Has written several papers on nanotechnology: anyone can write a paper. A quick look for papers he’s written turns up some abstracts, all of which seem like high-level “here’s a concept that may be useful for nanotech” ones. Such a paper could be very valuable and demonstrate deep insight, but the test of that would be actually turning out to be useful for nanotech and so far as I can tell his ideas haven’t led to anything much.
Developed ideas such as utility fog, space pier, etc.: again, anyone can “develop ideas”. The best test of the idea-developer’s insight is whether those ideas turn out actually to be of any use. So far, we don’t seem close to having utility fog, space piers, weather control or flying cars.
Author of “Nanofuture”: pop-science book, which from descriptions I’ve read seems mostly to be broad general principles about nanotech that doesn’t exist yet, and exciting speculations about future nanotech thatt doesn’t exist yet.
Fellow of a couple of things: without knowing exactly what their criteria are for appointing Fellows, this could mean anything or nothing. My guess is that they made him a Fellow because he was an early popularizer of nanotech ideas, not because of actual expertise or accomplishments.
Also, literally the only things I can find about the “Molecular Engineering Research Institute” are places where Storrs-Hall describes himself as that. It looks worryingly like one of those pseudoscholarly institutions that a person or small group creates in order to sound more impressive. I’m willing to be corrected on this one, though.
I can’t find much sign that the “Institution for Molecular Manufacturing” is much better, actually.
Computer systems architect at the Laboratory for Computer Science Research at Rutgers: This does seem to be a real thing at a real university. I think it is evidence that Storrs-Hall knows something about writing software.
Awarded the Feynman Communication Prize: implies no particular domain expertise.
Everything here is consistent with Storrs-Hall being a competent software guy who had a bunch of vague but exciting-sounding ideas about nanotech, writes well, and was in the right place at the right time—and nothing more than that.
(It’s also consistent with his being more expert than that. But it doesn’t seem like it’s much evidence for that’s being so.)
I guess very few people live up to your requirements for domain expertise.
In nanotech? True enough, because I am not convinced that there is any domain expertise in the sort of nanotech Storrs Hall writes about. It seems like a field that consists mostly of advertising. (There is genuine science and genuine engineering in nano-stuff; for instance, MEMS really is a thing. But the sort of “let’s build teeny-tiny mechanical devices, designed and built at the molecular level, which will be able to do amazing things previously-existing tech can’t” that Storrs Hall has advocated seems not to have panned out.)
But more generally, that isn’t so at all. What I’m looking for by way of domain expertise in a technological field is a history of demonstrated technological achievements. Storrs Hall has one such achievement that I can see, and even that is doubtful. (He founded and was “chief scientist” of a company that made software for simulating molecular dynamics. I am not in a position to tell either how well the software actually worked or how much of it was JSH’s doing.) More generally, I want to see a history of demonstrated difficult accomplishments in the field, as opposed to merely writing about the field.
Selecting some random books from my shelves (literally random; I have a list and am selecting random lines from the file, discarding fiction and anthologies), I find:
Nigel Slater, “Real fast food”. Slater is more food-journalist than chef, but there the proof is in the eating. I have made many things from his books and found that they consistently taste good and don’t require excessive effort, which for me is sufficient reason to consider him a domain expert. Non-technical domain, though.
Alec Vidler, “Essays in liberality”. A book of theological essays. Highly non-technical domain, much worse even than nanotech in terms of whether such a thing as domain expertise exists.
Richard Dawkins, “Unweaving the rainbow”. I like Dawkins, but it’s debatable whether he passes my domain-expert test; the main thing he’s known for in evolutionary biology is the “selfish gene” concept, which is more a new perspective on ideas others had already had than a new discovery in its own right.
John Potter, “The Cambridge companion to singing”. Potter is a tenor who has made >100 commercial recordings and performed in groups such as the Hilliard Ensemble. Singing well enough that anyone wants to sell your performances, or well enough to be a member of a group like the Hilliard Ensemble, is a difficult accomplishment in the field, and for this I consider him a domain expert. (Until his retirement he was also on the music faculty at a good university, but that’s only indirect evidence.)
Peter Sagal, “The book of vice”. Highly non-technical domain; author is a humourist and journalist. Not a domain expert.
Ruppert, Wand & Carroll, “Semiparametric regression”. I’ll consider only the first-named author. Author of what looks like about 100 statistical papers. Many of them are applied stats papers in journals with other subjects, suggesting that what he does is useful outside statistics itself. I had a look at one of his papers; it looks as if it is doing actual mathematics, discovering useful things about the merits of a couple of different approaches to data-smoothing. Sure looks like a domain expert.
H G Atkins, biography of Heinrich Heine. Non-technical domain. All I can easily find out about the author is that he was a professor of German at a good English university. Writing and publishing a biography of Heine is arguably itself evidence of domain expertise in, er, the life of Heine, but this one isn’t easy to assess with confidence.
Laura Miller, “The magician’s book: a skeptic’s adventures in Narnia”. About those books and C S Lewis’s life. Author does not appear to be a domain expert by my criterion.
Matthew Chapman, “40 days and 40 nights”, about the Dover intelligent design trial. I guess the domain is something like “history of church-and-state fights in the US”; I don’t think the author is a domain expert by my criterion.
A K Dewdney, “The Planiverse” (a sort of updated “Flatland”). Not clear what would constitute domain expertise, and maybe this should be excluded from the list for being fiction, though clearly its main point is not storytelling. At any rate, Dewdney is a professor of computer science but I don’t think he qualifies as a domain expert on two-dimensional universes occupied by intelligent beings.
That’s 10 books, which seems like a reasonable place to stop. Somewhere between 3 and 5 of the authors are domain experts by my criterion (generalized in what I think is an honest way to domains other than technology). Maybe 3 of the books are concerned with technical domains (Dawkins, Ruppert et al, Dewdney) and 1 or 2 of the 3 authors qualify.
I picked some more random books to bring the number of technical-domain ones up to 10. I’ll summarize more briefly. “(P)” means pop-science/pop-maths; “(T)” means technical works aimed at experts. Ruelle, “Chaotic evolution and strange attractors” (T); domain expert. O’Neill, “Doing data science: straight talk from the frontline” (P): marginal, leaning toward domain expert. Mlodinow, “The drunkard’s walk: how randomness rules our lives” (P): marginal, leaning toward not. (Author is a domain expert in theoretical physics, not so much here.) Steele, “Probability theory and combinatorial optimization” (T): domain expert. Nick Lane, “The vital question: why is life the way it is?” (P): not a domain expert. Gribbin, “In search of Schrödinger’s cat” (P): not a domain expert. Hatton, “Safer C: developing software for high-integrity and safety-critical systems” (T): domain expert. So, counting Dawkins, O’Neill, Mlodinow as half-domain-experts, I make that five out of 10.
So it seems like if you pull a book on a technical topic off my bookshelves at random, about half the time the author is a domain expert in this (admittedly fairly strong) sense; it seems to be pretty much all the time for hardcore technical works for expert audiences, whereas popular books are more likely to be written by journalists or by experts in other fields.
I wouldn’t call that “very few people”, in this context. (As a fraction of the whole population it’s “very few”, and I’m perfectly OK with that and assume you are too.)
Thank you for this comprehensive answer. I like the requirement of “actual practical accomplishments in the field”.
Googling a bit I found this article on miniaturization:
https://www.designnews.com/miniaturization-not-just-electronics-anymore
Would you consider the cited Thomas L. Hicks from American Laubscher a domain expert?
He certainly looks like one to my (itself rather inexpert) eye.