When I look around my office, almost everything I see is either a person, a plant, or the product of machines. If you’re facing a computer screen, very likely your surroundings are similar.
The Forge of Vulcan
(detail)
But where did these productive machines come from? With varying degrees of human help, they were themselves made by machines. And those machines? By yet other machines. The ancestry of these machines leads back to the core of our industrial world, to the tools and machines that make, among other things, more tools and machines like themselves: the lathes and milling machines and molding machines (and more…) that, with some assembly required, make lathes and milling machines and molding machines (and more…). And so it goes, from machines past, to machines present, to machines future.
The products we use today are the fruit of a tree of technologies; the machines that made those products are the branches of the tree; and the tools and machines at the center of it all form the trunk that supports all the rest. Tracing down this trunk leads back into the depths of historical time, back to lower-precision machine tools (and more human labor), to hand-tools — to saws, files, and drills, and to the hammers, anvils, and tongs of the first blacksmiths.
Blacksmiths have always used their tools to make blacksmiths’ tools (iron hammers, iron anvils, iron tongs), and from crude beginnings, for generation upon generation, blacksmiths have learned to use these tools to make tools that are better. And so the level of technology grew higher, to steel, to precision parts, to machine tools, the Industrial Revolution, and all that has followed. When you contemplate a computer, think of the blacksmith’s hammer behind the nanometer lithography, and consider the power of using tools to make better tools.
Physics and engineering tell us that the nanoworld can sustain a technology tree that grows high and broad, but in considering how to develop such a thing, we must distinguish the fruit from the trunk. To grow a technology tree rooted in the nanoworld will require a focus on the core of the process of technological progress. Merely making things we can use will bring superficial rewards. The deep, strategic rewards will come from making tools and machines that we can use to make better tools and machines. This is the path to the revolutionary promise that brought nanotechnology to the attention of the world. It deserves our focused attention.
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But the blacksmith didn’t make a hammer in the name of technological progress. ‘Merely’ making things we can use is what drives innovation and produces the tools that will allow us to make better tools.
Simply trying to envision progress and make it happen might lead us down an entirely unproductive road. But as long as we focus on making things we want, we’re in no danger of that.
Although it is true that many things have deep roots in tools making tools, the driving force of the progress was in the development of ideas of new things and tools, not in the production of tools themselves. When we want a better machine, the problem is usually in us not knowing what this new machine should be, whether it’s possible to make it, how to make it, and what to do next. We don’t just wait X years for the known enabling machine to be finally assembled. The technological tree doesn’t grow on machines, it grows on minds. Machines are produced as a side effect, and serve as a cognitive crutch that tells what’s actually possible, and how good it is. But in those rare cases when we can plan far ahead, we should.
Eric, take the analogy further and include human hands and arms as machines. Our hands and arms were the original tools and original machines discovered by the first humans, as their brains changed to let them use these tools and machines to modify their environment. The definition of “machine” from Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary makes it clear: e (1): an assemblage of parts that transmit forces, motion, and energy one to another in a predetermined manner (2): an instrument (as a lever) designed to transmit or modify the application of power, force, or motion f: a mechanically, electrically, or electronically operated device for performing a task.
The bootstrapping process you describe is pervasive in computing. The pioneers built primitive programming tools, such as an assembler. This let them build better tools, like a compiler, which can then be used to produce a better version of itself.
The world economy is a big, ancient machine getting more and more sophisticated.
One of my favorite ways to waste time is to try to imagine how to answer the following mythical question: Suppose you were magically transported into the American mythical past of Minnesota, where you have access to unlimited timber and the effectively limitless quantities of iron ore in the Mesabi Range, and being in mythspace, you befriended Paul Bunyan and Babe, the Blue Ox. (That is, this is the tall tale of Paul Bunyan and the Time Traveler.) Suppose that the only thing that was transported with you was your PC, which somehow had magically retained its 3G wireless network connection back to the 21st century internet and would keep powered on for as long as needed (maybe with a fuel cell that could survive on moonshine likker). How many additional friends with the same limited material technology but unlimited information would you need to bootstrap yourselves a railroad back to Chicago or civilization, whichever came first? And what would be the minimum amount of time to accomplish this?
My guess? 20 people and 3 years, exploiting the strength of Paul and Babe to the fullest. Using mere mortals, 500 people and 8-10 years.
All of our comments serve an in-escapable truth, built in to the fabric of our existence. the creation of tools by great tools first needs a new mind which evaluates and imagines and thus seeks to create a tool to optimally meet its job. All of our comments show how differently we interpret a situation and our minds either contract ‘tunnel’ or expand in our vision and understanding of the information.
100 posts will still prove the point that unless tools that aid in the development of an existence, are placed in the hands of the many, then there is a smaller chance that the brainiacs who devise such mechanisms will have the after-thought … whether it be the brain child of a tunnel visioned individual ‘primary focus oriented’ or a humanitarian. and we all know, tools rarely get to all the hands that heal them.
I see this field as science fiction’s ace up their sleeve, they are too scared to believe it the highest card so they don’t play it. Nano-technology has presented itself as the answer to the question that has plagued man since the day the first were on this planet. Now it seems only too few understand.
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