The Dark Side of Nanotechnology

Despite claims of a balanced review of both positive and negative possibilities in the future use of nanotechnology, the authors of Unbounding the Future; The Nanotechnology Revolution gave little detail on possible abuses and did not even mention criminal abuse.  I agree that it is very important that all foreseeable possibilities for the evolution of nanotechnology be discussed as widely as possible.  In this column I am going to explore some possible uses of nanotechnology by criminals, terrorists, military organizations and repressive governments.  

CRIME

Criminal abuse has not really been mentioned much in any fiction or non-fiction writings about nanotechnology but it will obviously happen.  It will be very hard to control and it will be wide spread.  Every member of our society has been directly or indirectly affected by criminal activity.  I think it is important to explore this aspect of nanotechnology.  There are a number of different types of crime currently plaguing our society.  Drugs, fraud, theft, robbery, assault and murder are prominent in the headlines.  

The government regulates many different products today, including alcohol.  Part of the purpose of regulation is to collect taxes on the regulated products.  Forget regulation with nanotechnology around.  I have seen estimates that up to one third of the alcohol consumed in the United States is bootlegged today.  The tax is so high that it is still profitable to manufacture illegally.  There are huge illegal distillation system hidden in grain silos in the Midwest.  With nanotechnology, alcohol could be produced anywhere in any quantity without the need for industrial distillation equipment or huge amounts of concentrated sugars. 

Nanotechnology will make possible the creation of a never-ending variety of new drugs.  They will be cheap to manufacture and almost impossible to legislate against.  As soon as one is declared illegal, another can be put into circulation.  They can be made highly addictive and highly pleasurable without nasty side effects.  Their manufacture will be almost impossible to stop.  With silent efficient nanotech manufacturing, there will be no traceable precursors or equipment to buy and no obnoxious fumes to give away locations.  Given a few moments warning, an illegal manufacturing facility could shut down and disguise operations so completely that law enforcement would have an extremely difficult time proving that anything illegal had happened at that location.  Our society had better reconcile itself to loosing the "War on Drugs" and find another metaphor for dealing with the problem.  It will not go away.

Fraud is a major problem today.  It boils down to misrepresentation.  If misrepresentation is based on identification, falsification of identification is going to be simple with nanotechnology.  With sophisticated nanotech replication equipment, anything can be duplicated.  Copies of the Mona Lisa could be cranked out like pancakes each duplicate indistinguishable from the original.  Nanotech equipment could probably tell the difference, but it is doubtful that all the people who might be susceptible to such a scheme will have access to such equipment.  Counterfeiting money would be a trivial task for nanotechnology.  This fact may spell the end of money and force the acceptance of total electronic banking based on a retinal scan or other biological identification system coupled with a universal credit card.

Theft may be dependent on unauthorized access to areas and objects.  Nanotech disassemblers would be the ultimate penetration devices.  Picking a lock is irrelevant if you can make concrete or steel disintegrate on demand.  People often masquerade as other people in order to commit theft and other crimes.  With nanotechnology to assist in forgery, any sort of credentials or authorization could be fabricated.  With nanotechnology make up systems, some one who is about the same size and shape as another individual could easily pass close visual inspection.  Only a bioverification system, like retinal scan or DNA matching, could detect the substitution.  High security areas could have such sophisticated identification systems as well as nanotech detection capability, but the average individual or organization would have a very difficult time dealing with this problem.

There is great public concern about robbery, assault and murder these days.  The creation of sophisticated nanotech weapons is inevitable.  Either special drugs or actual bioactive nanotech machines have definite potential for use in attacking a victim.  A silent and efficient delivery system, such as a dart gun firing tiny slivers by compressed air, could be used.  These new drugs, or nanopoisons, could also be administered by skin contact.  If a person were hit with a drug that rendered them highly suggestible, they could be instructed to do almost anything.  Canceling control of voluntary muscle systems would render a victim totally helpless.  Another possibility is the destruction of recent memories so that the victim would have no recall of the event or the assailant.  It should be easy to poison an individual and extort money in return for the antidote.  It might be possible to administer nanodevices that would kill an individual at a preset time and give the appearance of a perfectly natural death such as a heart attack.  It would be almost impossible to protect someone against such weapons.

TERRORISM

Terrorists may well use any or all of the above nanotechnological techniques to wreak havoc but they are usually interested in larger scale destruction and damage.  Although violence against people is usually connected with damage to property, nanotechnology will make it simple to separate these two types of terrorism.

Blowing up airplanes is a favorite terrorist activity.  With improved screening, it should be possible to detect bomb systems made by current technologies.  However, bombs manufactured by nanotechnology should be almost impossible to detect.  Nanotech assemblers could manufacture the explosive chemicals while the plane is in flight.  Although explosions are dramatic, it would also be easy to release a disassembler that could destroy the electronic controls by causing the wiring system to disintegrate or destroy the structural integrity of the plane by attacking the metal in the body.

Holding hostages is also a favorite tactic of terrorists.  They always state that they will kill the hostages if they are attacked.  They usually threaten to do this with guns or explosives.  Nanotechnology could be used to "infect" the hostages with some sort of slow poison, which could only be counteracted by the antidote of the terrorists.  It might also be possible to implant poison injection systems in the hostages keyed to a deadman switch controlled by the leader of the terrorists.  The advantage over guns and explosives is that these new techniques pose much less threat to the lives of the terrorists themselves and thus do not require the usual fanatical mind set needed for these sorts of plots.  Nanotechnology would be much easier for anyone to use and would not require onsite setup and control by technical experts or be as susceptible to prior detection as conventional weapons or sophisticated explosives.

Large-scale mischief would be very easy with nanotechnology.  We might finally see the pollution of a city's water supply by some sort of nasty disease, nanobeasty or drug.  One of the worst possibilities would be to specifically target a particular genetic type.  The nanopoison would read the DNA of any system it invaded and only be fatal to a specific DNA profile.  If it was set broadly, an entire racial type could be targeted.  If it was set narrowly, a particular family or even individual could be targeted.  It would be most likely be used by terrorists because of the genetic diversity of most nations and armies.

MILITARY

The United States used large quantities of nasty chemicals to defoliate the jungles that provided cover for the Viet Cong in Vietnam.  Special nanotech machines could be created which would strip any particular type of tree or plant and then deactivate after a given period.  This could have devastating consequences for a civilian population if directed against a food crop.

A more immediately deadly nanoweapon would be a device that attacked flesh.  It could be targeted against a particular species such as cattle or poultry.  It could also be targeted against human being with horrifying consequences.  This is about the nastiest antipersonnel weapon I can imagine.

A great deal of munitions is expended in attacks on urban areas in order to destroy structures.  A nanoweapon could be developed which would attack concrete and steel causing buildings and fortifications to disintegrate.  The results would be tragic for people caught inside.  Whole cities could be destroyed with minimum effort and cost to the attackers.

When Dresden was bombed during World War II, huge deadly firestorms were triggered which raged through the city and took a terrible toll in human life.  With nanoweapons designed to cause anything inflammable to burn, napalm would be outmoded.  Forests, crops, houses and buildings would vanish in a raging holocaust.  Conventional wars are fought with huge quantities of explosives.  Special "igniter" nanoweapons could be built and released to seek out and explode stockpiles of munitions.

Advanced nations might be able to defend themselves against such nanoweaponry.  They might also enter into arms control agreements with sophisticated nanomonitoring.  But the real danger is the use of such weapons against Third World countries and the sale of such weapons to Third World countries for use against each other.  The recent war with Iraq is a horrible example of the consequences of both these actions.

DICTATORSHIPS

One of the worst imaginable abuses of any advanced technology is the possibility that a tyrannical government will harness it repress a civilian population.  The popular image of such suppression is represented by the George Orwell novel, 1984.

It should be simple to monitor any desired location, and even large numbers of individuals, for sound and vision.  The Romanian Communist government was working on expanding a sophisticated video surveillance system when it was overthrown.  They had plans for tens of thousands of video cameras and detailed surveillance on hundreds of thousands of people.  The main problem with that level of surveillance is the inability to have enough human monitoring.  With the powerful computers made possible by nanotechnology and expert system software, the computers could monitor huge numbers of locations and conversations and call any suspicious actions, statements or circumstances to the attention of human supervisors. 

Nanotech implants in peoples' brains could trigger the release of any desired brain chemical to keep a civilian population docile and compliant.  Nanotech devices could be implanted in the skin of individuals to trigger the pain receptors on command.  Horrible excruciating pain could be switched on or off like a light and leave no physical damage of any kind.  There could even be a lethal poison implant.  Any of these implants could be remotely triggered for a specific individual.  Each citizen could be implanted with unremovable and easily readable identification nanodevices that could be powered from bioelectricity.  These implants could continuously broadcast the location of that individual.  Pain or death could be triggered automatically if an individual left an allowed area or entered a forbidden zone.

The charge may be leveled that it is irresponsible of me to discuss such abuses of nanotechnology.  I am not so conceited as to suppose there are no potential abusers with better imaginations than mine.  They will have great motivations, and enormous resources to develop and carry out much worse abuses than any I have mentioned.  In order to have a well reasoned debate and regulation of nanotechnology people and policy makers must have detail on possible abuses as well as detail on positive prospects for the future use of nanotechnology.

Theft arrived with property, weapons arrived with tools and dictators arrived with government.  There never was a "golden age of man" since the dawn of what we call civilization.  There will not be a "golden age of nanotechnology" when there are no abuses of this fantastic new technology.