Nanotech: The Most Dangerous Science Least Carefully Done

Nanotechnology promises how centrally important and powerful it will be in the near future. The near future is always “just around the corner,” much like the breakthrough in fundamental physics - if we just had a one more super particle collider, you know, just this last one again. We may dismiss such hype, but rejecting it wholesale fails to see that nanotechnology poses globally existential risks in a way unknowable yet also unavoidable like no other technology.

We cannot here discuss unintended consequences in detail – there are many ‘unknowable unknowns’ such as the long term side effects of waste water treatment nano-particles which promote the transfer of multidrug-resistance genes up to 200 times,[2] thus speeding up the evolution of ‘super-bugs’. Nanotechnology is a volatile substrate for unpredictable evolution accelerating and potentially leaving humans behind; self-assembly of nano-structures is intensely pursued.

A here more relevant problem is that in spite of the dangers, nanotechnology has little external oversight and an often unscientific culture hostile to criticism. It effectively lacks important regulatory mechanisms such as proper peer review and reproducibility checks. It lacks awareness of statistical methods such as error calculation, which are central in fields such as medicine or sociology, which similarly impact humans directly like nano-science promises to do. Such accusations need to be backed up, which is made very difficult today. In connection with the flawed detection of gravitational waves by Joseph Weber in the late 1960s, Collins wrote [3]