Richard Jones over at Soft Machines is also back from holiday, and has a look at some development issues relating to nanotechnology. We have been involved in a number of recent high level meetings on this subject, and they often become quite bizarre.
While our position is simple, we know what technologies are available, and we want to get on with refining, testing and applying them, in the hope of stopping people from dying as soon as possible, there are also other other forces as work. At a recent meeting addressing development issues, much of the time was taken up with questions such as:
-Why nanotechnology is dominated by men and how to involve more women from developing countries;
-How to prevent people in developing countries from getting access to nanotechnologies in case there are any dangers (the argument goes along the lines of we would rather see people starve to death than eat GMOs);
-Preventing Africa from getting all the attention and giving equal status to South America;
-Replacing the word poor with one with less negative connotations.
Well comment on more detail on the findings of the meeting if and when a final report is made public, but the participants tend to fall into three distinct groups with, sadly, very little common ground:
-Those who want to get things done,
-Those who want to worry about not getting things done and want to have further meetings about more meetings, and
-Those who want to prevent progress for political aims (and not all of these are NGOs).
The conclusion of all of this is simple. As with toxicology, molecular manufacturing nd the rest, we have a large number of unanswered questions. Worrying about how to phrase these questions in politically correct language wont solve anything.
Well funded and managed research will, but with the caveat that nanotechnology should not be seen as an appropriate means to solve every global problem. We’ll leave that kind of naivety to the Foresight Institute.