The Nanotech BC Blog: Social Issues in Nanotechnology

Soft Machines is one of my favorite nanotechnology blogs -- lucid, balanced and informed. Richard Jones's latest is a two-part article on the history of nanotechnology and the social interests that are propelling it.

The first part focuses on where nanotechnology has come from. The second looks at the social issues and groups that are affecting where it's going.

What particularly impressed me was Jone's recognition that science in general and nanotechnology in particular serve as a mirror for social and cultural fears and aspirations.

Technologies don’t exist or develop in a vacuum, and nanotechnology is no exception; arguments about the likely, or indeed desirable, trajectory of the technology are as much about their protagonists’ broader aspirations for society as about nanotechnology itself.

The Nanotech BC Blog: Talking about Nanotech

Richard Jones at Soft Machines has been writing lately about new and promising developments in the British nanotechnology community. His post on Friday was particularly interesting, focusing not on the science of nanotechnology, but on the challenges we face in deciding how, when or if to apply it. It appears that the technical challenges of nanotech might be the easy part. In reference to All Talk? Nanotechnology and public engagement:

On the one hand, there was the view that Science itself provides clear answers to policy questions; for example, given the correct information the need for GM food to feed the world’s population and nuclear energy to power it would become obvious. As for policy, we have a representative democracy to ensure that the people’s views are represented; it is politicians, not opinion polls, who ought to decide these issues, and public engagement is really just a question of the print and broadcast media informing people. On the other hand, we heard that the direct action and controversy-stoking of the social movements are the only way that opposing views can properly be heard, and that irrationality is a legitimate tool in the face of the entrenched hegemony of technoscience.

Perhaps it's natural that such potentially revolutionary technologies like nanotech end up dividing people into almost cartoonishly stark camps -- natural but depressing. My own sense is that there is a general inability in the scientific community to communicate the possibilities of nanotechnology in terms that make sense to regular people. That leads to misunderstandings and frustration on both sides and makes compromise very difficult.

Jones links to an interesting post by policy maker David Bott who also attended the same meeting as Jones and proposes the only real way out of the communication impasse that cutting-edge science often finds itself in:

If you are a scientist, I think there is real value in taking the time to explain what you do, and why you do it, to those who are not scientists, but only if you listen to what they say in return.