Sympathetic Stupid

Thursday, September 29, 2005

Miniscule Help For Developing Countries

Gee, nanotech's cool. It's like, little robots which can do, like, anything. Like you could get nanotech implanted in your skin to give yourself a dermal display on the back of your hand! Imagine getting that all over your body, you could have constantly mutating tatoos!

But nanotech's not just about decadent Western body art. Leapfrogging is a concept I've seen popularised through the most excellent and ubiquitous WorldChanging site. It's where developing areas can skip semi-obsolete technologies and go straight to the cutting-edge, jumping past developed countries which are struggling to replace their legacy tech. Examples. Mobile phones are more common than land lines in much of the developing world, because they're cheaper to install. A developing public sector could adopt Linux throughout rather than Windows; again, it's cheaper. From this article, solar power rollout can give a decentralised power grid. If you've got few petrol stations, it's easier to transition to hydrogen. It's about the infrastructure can be created when there are few legacy considerations.

So, industrial manufacturing economies are passé; why not go straight to information, or better, straight to nano? Is this possible? Is it desirable?

It's definitely desirable, and it might even be vaguely possible. Molecular manufacturing promises to be more precise, which means there's less wastage of materials and power, in the process and the products. Lower power needs are most important as this allows the use of solar cells - there's your decentralised grid, especially in the tropical band which holds many developing countries. In general, nanotech should allow advanced lifestyles with less environmental burden, making it vaguely feasible that people across the world have similar privileges.

And similar life expectancies. There's no doubt nanotech will revolutionise medicine - apparently it's now possible to get early-warning on cancer. Whether this will be subject to leapfrogging is debatable; it seems less likely to me. But water is important, or rather, lack of it is deadly, as are water-borne diseases. 100% effective filters at the nano scale would allow both the reclamation of waste water and the reduction of environmental impact. I wonder how little water a person could survive on, if they had a quick, effective nanofilter - maybe 1 cup, recycled indefinitely? Where to get the filters? How about the local nanofactory? These would require a relatively small initial cost outlay, and little infrastructure; the missing piece of the puzzle is the chemical supply. One nanofactory could provide manufactured goods to an area with nothing. These could also produce cheap, effective greenhouses, increasing agricultural efficiency.

Here's a list more comprehensive than mine, from the Eureka Alert.

It's all positive, right? But it's never quite that easy. New tech comes packed with potential downsides. Remember cars before carbon emissions? Or spray cans before CFCs spoiled the party? Or antibiotics when noone knew about superbugs? Or the internet before porn, spam and identity hacking? Nanotech side effects are an order of magnitude worse than any of these, but the techniques for dealing with them will be similarly more powerful. Yes, care is needed, as with GM crops (I'm on the fence on that one). But I'm convinced that technology is still, as always, the answer to many problems.

The key problem is that capital invested in nanotech will search out those regions where the profit will be highest. No, that won't be sub-Saharan Africa. Yes, that will be the US and Europe. So there's a big challenge in getting it to where it's needed most, to facilitate the leapfrogging behaviour which could produce such dramatic developmental results.