(This is followup to my brief post from Moscow.)

Because I’m primarily known for the concept of an advanced, atomically precise nanotechnology, the enthusiastic welcome I received in Moscow at Rusnanotech 2011 indicates how the idea is received in Russia. With that in mind, here are some markers of Russian interest in the concept:

Dmitry Medvedev
speaking at Rusnanotech 2011

Remarks on nanotechnology
by the President of Russia

Rusnanotech is billed as Europe’s largest nanotechnology conference. As I mentioned in my post from Moscow, I’d been invited to give the closing speech at the opening plenary, outlining prospects for the future of nanotechnology. My remarks were followed by an unannounced speech by Dmitry Medvedev, the President of the Russian Federation. The pleasantly surprising opening of his talk suggests the impact of the concept of atomically precise manufacturing in Russia:

Good afternoon, colleagues,

It is hard to speak after Mr Drexler, who is such a legend, and I will probably have to make a few adjustments to my speech now, given what has already been said…. [Full transcript in translation here]

President Medvedev is widely known as technophile, and I’m told that he has read my first book, Engines of Creation. He paused to shake my hand on the way out.

A roadmap project led by
the Russian Academy of Sciences

As many of you know, I was the leader of the technical side of the 2007 Battelle / National Labs roadmap for productive nanosystems, which explores paths toward the development of high-throughput atomically precise manufacturing. This effort involved some 200 researchers and engineers from academia, industry, and the hosting National Labs. There’s now a Russian translation from the Russian Academy of Sciences.

At Rusnanotech, I learned more about a current international roadmap project, led by the Russian Academy of Sciences and centered on technological directions and market opportunities. During a followup meeting with a Rusnano representative visiting Oxford, I had an opportunity to review a draft overview of this remarkably systematic and detailed study.

A technical talk for a university audience

In the afternoon of the first day, I spoke to a predominantly young audience drawn from Moscow technical universities. In this talk (held at the venerable Polytechnical Museum) I discussed the physical and engineering principles of atomically precise fabrication. The audience response after the talk was warm (even uncomfortably warm), but I eventually escaped from a crush of questions and requests for name-cards, autographs, and photo ops. Russian culture evidently holds science and technology in high regard.

Again, please read this as an indication of Russian attitudes toward the technological vision, though I suppose that the talk itself must have been OK.

[Update: See video here.]

Answering questions
at the Rusnanotech
press conference

Pressed to exhaustion

The Rusnanotech media staff set up a press conference for the first day, and on the second day organized my schedule to include six, then seven, then eight requests for interviews, after which I balked. Six of these were for television, including the main Moscow station.

Remarkably, to the best of my recollection only one interviewer asked the question, “What is nanotechnology?” The exception was an (apparently) American interviewer calling from Washington for the Voice of Russia — the Russian interviewers apparently expected their audiences to have some general knowledge of the subject. (For comparison, imagine an interviewer asking a planetary scientist, “What is spaceflight?”)

Part of the trade-show floor (science & business tracks elsewhere)

The annual Rusnanotech meetings are organized by Rusnano, a state-sponsored corporation established with a mandate to accelerate Russian progress in nanotechnology. Although this was my first trip to Moscow, discussions at Rusnanotech and afterward suggest that I may find reasons to return in the near future.

Here’s a huge, data-rich visualization of the money dimension of McDonald’s meals, billionaires, the Moon landing, income quintiles, and the like. It’s well done, spans 12 orders of magnitude, and kept my attention for entirely too long.

In the news today:
“Governments, IOC and UN hit by massive cyber attack” (BBC)

How did the attack work? In a mind-numbingly ordinary way:

“An email would be sent to an individual with the right level of access within the system; attached to the message was a piece of malware which would then execute and open a channel to a remote website giving them access…they sometimes embedded themselves in the network and [tried to] spread across different systems within an organisation.”

In short:

• A person with broad authority ran a bit of code.
• The code, operating with this broad authority, wreaked havoc.

Quiz questions:

1. Why did the code inherit the person’s authority?
2. Is there a good reason for allowing this?
3. In the current model of computation, is it easy and natural to grant limited authority to individual computational objects?
4. What alternative model of computation (not an added security layer!) makes it natural to grant limited authority? What is it called? (Links, please.)

Questions for thought and discussion:

1. Why does the current computational model grant authority in this indiscriminate way? How does this lead to “sandboxing”?
2. What would be the main costs and benefits of moving computation toward the alternative model? How would this model play with the existing software base?
3. What are the leading implementations of this model today, at the language and operating system levels? In your opinion, should they be promoted more vigorously?

</lazy_quiz_mode>

I’m now working on a new book, Radical Abundance, scheduled for publication in 2013 by PublicAffairs. The book has a wide scope in both its content and intended audience, addressing scientists, a general reading audience, and thought leaders in the policy arena.

Radical Abundance will integrate and extend several themes that I’ve touched on in Metamodern, but will go much further. The topics include:

• The nature of science and engineering, and the prospects for a deep transformation in the material basis of civilization.
• Why all of this is surprisingly understandable.
• A personal narrative of the emergence of the molecular nanotechnology concept and the turbulent history of progress and politics that followed
• The quiet rise of macromolecular nanotechnologies, their power, and the rapidly advancing state of the art
• Incremental paths toward advanced nanotechnologies, the inherent accelerators, and the institutional challenges
• The technologies of radical abundance, what they are, and what they will enable
• Disruptive solutions for problems of economic development, energy, resource depletion, and the environment
• Potential pitfalls in competitive national strategies; shared interests in risk reduction and cooperative transition management
• Steps toward changing the conversation about the future

These topics interweave to make what will, I think, be a compelling story for readers with diverse interests, backgrounds, and concerns.

Update: As I mention in the comments, I’ll be posting the news on the blog when pre-orders are available, and inviting participation in pre-launch activities.

Publishers interested non-English-language rights please direct queries to Rosa at GeographicEngine dot com.

I recently returned from a scenario planning meeting in London with Royal Dutch Shell, where I joined a group exploring technology-driven aspects of global change. Topics ranged from health care, synthetic biology, and geoengineering to artificial intelligence and the future of the internet; I outlined prospects for high-throughput atomically precise manufacturing as force driving broad global transformations.

The methodology of scenario planning begins with a deep exploration of patterns and trends in the world, and leads to the construction of few scenarios that portray futures that are divergent, plausible, and internally coherent. These scenarios describe potential patterns of change that span economic, environmental, social, military, and technological aspects of the evolution of the world. At the Shell meeting, petroleum and energy concerns were only a small part of the mosaic.

Working in the context of divergent scenarios helps strategists to avoid fragile assumptions. Plans that make sense in a wide range of imagined futures will be more robust, less likely to fracture when they encounter the actual, unimagined future that happens instead. The aim isn’t to predict the future, but to stretch concepts of what it may be.

I’ve long admired the balance of humility and boldness in the scenario planning methodology, and it was a pleasure to join a group of strong minds charged with examining drivers for change along the way to the mid-21st century.

In a few days, by the way, I’ll have some important news about my work in progress.

Metamodern had vanished at the end of last month while I was traveling, and for a week or so I forwarded it to this stand-in page. As you can see, the blog is now up and running.

The stand-in page outlines a (re)emerging software technology that deserves several orders of magnitude more attention. Current software is mostly built on mud, but there’s is an option to use brick, instead.

Metamodern got wiped and (apparently) replaced by botware a few days ago after a visit logged as

173.234.47.14 – - [31/Mar/2011:16:58:20 -0700] “POST /b/wp-comments-post.php HTTP/1.0″ 200 0 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.14) Gecko/2009082707 Firefox/3.0.14 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)”

From then until now, I’ve been in Meridian, Mississippi, with sporadic internet access and recovery and reconfiguration still in progress.

A bit of snooping reveals that are some not-nice people associated with the region of IP address space around 173.234.47.14, but the real problem, of course, is the fragility of software that allows bits of code to grab (and trash) resources that they had no need to access, and should never have been able to access — not blocked by painful programming discipline, or security alert boxes, etc. but by the nature of the computational medium.

A better model of computation

It turns out that one can structure programming languages so that the creation of an object, together with subsequent messages to it, provides the object with access to resources that are held by the creating or calling object — and nothing more. Each object, in effect, runs on a virtual machine operating in a world that contains a fraction of the machine’s resources, and doesn’t, by default, allow access to arbitrary files, messaging over the internet, etc.

The mess I’m cleaning up, and a lot of pain (and incalculable opportunity) cost in the world, stems from a failure to recognize how much better we can do with languages that aren’t leaky mush.

There’s a Javascript-based implementation of these ideas, Caja, reportedly being adopted by MySpace, Yahoo!, and Google.

Here are some articles on the computational concepts:

• Object-capability model
• Capability-based security

A very big deal

Neither of these articles does a good job of explaining the qualitative differences that result from cleaning up the object model of computation in the way described, or why this matters much.

This line of development is, in fact, very, very, very important, and I urge anyone interested in making computation work better to dig deeper until “very, very, very important” seems like an understatement. What is hard to convey is the magnitude of the opportunity costs of the present morass, because the potential benefits of a better computational world are, by nature, unseen.

Note that most of the criticisms of the capability model are based on either misunderstandings or the idea that it is supposed to solve problems in other domains (for example, human access control). It’s a computational model with powerful security and stability properties woven into its fabric — nothing more, and nothing less.

Here are two Monirobo robotic machines — radiation-hard, 2.4 km/hr, 600 kg robots, recently arrived on site:

These probably aren’t very good at exploring wrecked buildings, viewing fuel storage pools obscured explosion debris, sampling smoke plumes rising from (?), etc.

Here’s a Parrot AR.Drone — iPhone controlled, resistant to multiply-lethal radiation doses [update: > 10 times the human -lethal dose; see comments], and available for $300 from Amazon:

Parrot’s-eye view from on high:

Exploring a warehouse:

They can of course carry lights for exploring dark places:

Parrot drones would be useful.

They haven’t been used.

It seems that our civilization has difficulty recognizing and applying its own abilities, even when they are concrete, available, and widely known.

(As you may know, Japan has displayed a special sort of organizational paralysis in this crisis, but wouldn’t it be surprising if “toys” like these were used in an incident managed by Very Serious People anywhere in the world?)

When I wake up to news of a coast smashed by a tsunami, I see yet another sign of our relative material poverty, a sign that our civilization hasn’t yet mastered the art of making things.

Japan, by modern standards, is rich, yet costs deterred the construction of deployable barriers able to resist fast-rising sea*. If our civilization had mastered and applied the art of making things (including large, strong, inexpensive, reliable things) the impact of shift in the crust and a surge of the sea could have been slight.

Physics says we can do much better, dropping the cost of making high-performance products close to the cost of supplying simple raw materials, dropping the cost of structures, computers, photovoltaics (and more) by orders of magnitude.

The economics of high-throughput APM will change the economics of disaster preparedness.

Video of surging water and tumbling buildings here.

* To be more concrete, here’s an outline of one design for a deployable barrier structure — massive (in total), but unobtrusive:

Barrier length: The length of the coastline to be protected from a tsunami surge.

Configuration (pre-deployment): A trench in the seabed offshore, a few meters deep and wide, located in water a few tens of meters deep.

Main anchoring structure: Cables stretching a few hundred meters further from shore, then deeply anchored into the seabed.

Configuration (deployed): A buoyant tension structure, restrained by the cables, that (when released) rises with the water level on the seaward side.

I leave the constraints on membrane curvature, tension, and cable geometry, together with required float volumes and cable strength, as an exercise for the design-oriented reader. Note that some water flowing over the top is acceptable.

A radical reduction in the cost of manufacturing structures — and of the equipment needed to put them in place — would make an engineering project of this scale practical to build.

See also: storm surges, New Orleans.