Where are my nanobots?
Years ago I was reading the book Transcend by Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, and I got super excited over the idea of bloodstream nanobots. The idea is that as miniaturization improves, we can create cell-sized robots that can perform like (or probably outperform) existing red and white blood cells. With billions of these nanobots swimming around in our bloodstream, we can more effectively transport oxygen (the authors note that red blood cells aren’t actually that effective at doing this, whereas with highly effective nanobots we could probably sit at the bottom of a pool for up to 4 hours without needing to take a breath) and better destroy harmful pathogens (using what they call “nanorobotic microbivores” which can immediately identify harmful viruses and bacteria and tear them apart in a matter of seconds). Best of all, these nanobots will have wireless connectivity which means they can instantaneously download the newest information about an infectious disease, or rapidly upload to your doctor’s computer information about your nutrient and hormone levels.
Now imagine this in the context of COVID-19. Instead of waiting 12-18 months for a vaccine, we could instead just download the virus’s genome into our nanobots’ database and order them to “seek and destroy.” In a normal human immune system, it takes a while for the body to identify a pathogen as a harmful invader and begin producing the antibodies to fight it off. This problem would not exist with nanobots that could immediately recognize and target the COVID-19 invader. This rapid response to an infection would not only prevent people from getting sick, but also stop them from being asymptomatic carriers (as seems to be a particularly troubling aspect of this particular virus). If enough people had nanobot-supported immune systems, we would not be facing the sort of social and economic shut-down that we are experiencing. So where do I sign up??
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Of course, there are several buckets of cold water to splash all over this fantasy. The first is that such nanobots don’t really exist yet. The technology is certainly within our reach, but we haven’t yet fully worked it out. In the book, Kurzweil seems to think that we’ll have them by the mid-2030s. That’s possible, but Kurzweil has a history of being overly-bullish on the prospects of technology and severely underestimating necessary time frames. I love his optimism, but it’s pretty pie-in-the-sky most of the time. Still, I’ll keep my fingers crossed.
The second big concern is that people, on the whole, will reject this sort of invasive “cyborging” technology. It’s one thing to wear some Google Glasses on your face or a bio-monitoring watch on your wrist, but once we start putting stuff inside our bodies, people get squeamish. However, I’m not as concerned with this reluctance, since we already have a tradition of augmenting people internally—see heart pacemakers, metal or plastic hip replacements, and cataract-curing artificial lenses (the last of which I myself possess). So I think we’re pretty well down that road, and future generations will only become more comfortable with technology and its medical applications. After a couple decades, we’ll probably be as accepting of tiny robots in our bloodstream as we are today of metal pins in a reconstructed joint.
Yet there is a third concern that is the most troubling, and it involves questions of autonomy and privacy. If these nanobots are wirelessly connected (as they would have to be in order to receive and send crucial information), then they run the risk of being hacked or otherwise manipulated. A techno-terrorist could theoretically reprogram your nanobots to attack healthy tissues or induce uncontrolled replication of cells (i.e., cancer) in organs. Perhaps the nanobots could be programmed to amplify your levels of testosterone, inducing greater aggression, or decrease your levels of serotonin, leading to depression and anxiety—all of this without your knowledge and against your will. The level of manipulation that could be achieved is quite frightening.
Privacy is a concern as well. You bio-data would be accessible to your doctors, which is appropriate, but could also end up in the hands of insurance providers who might then discriminate based on that data, increasing your premiums or refusing coverage based on the nanobots’ detailed information about your health, nutrition, and any pre-existing conditions. Or what if a medical database were hacked and its patients’ information sold to advertisers? We’re already hyper-targeted by ads based on our phone’s GPS tracking and internet search histories—imagine what advertisers could do with information about our hormone and neurotransmitter levels!
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In the end, none of this is enough to scare me away. All technology involves trade-offs, a weighing of pros and cons. Nuclear science has provided us with (relatively) clean energy and cutting-edge medicine, but has also allowed us to build weapons of unimaginable destruction. The internet has given us access to more information than ever before and allowed us instant connectivity to the entire world, but has also given rise to trolls, fake news, and the so-called “dark web.” I’ve no doubt that any kind of medical “cyborging” will have its downsides and its social and personal costs.
But if the current pandemic teaches us one thing, it is that humans, despite our supposed conquest and harnessing of the natural world, are still extremely vulnerable, and that the structures of our societies are very brittle. Nature can still kick our ass when it wants to. And although I don’t think it helpful to frame nature as a malicious force out to get us, nor is nature a kind and loving mother figure that only wants what’s best for us. Nature simply is what it is—an amoral force largely indifferent to the success or failure of our particular species. So while we should respect nature’s power and grasp the consequences of our actions within it (for instance, by recognizing the raw power that climate change might wreak upon us if we continue our breakneck pace of environmental exploitation), we must also realize that our primary evolutionary adaptation is our big brain, which allows us to create technology and manipulate the surrounding world to our benefit in a way that no other species ever has.
Diseases have ravaged human societies since the advent of agriculture and what we consider “civilization.” But as our world becomes more interconnected, the specter of the pandemic takes on a whole new urgency. Whereas the bubonic plague could once devastate cities or entire regions in Europe or Asia over a period of several years, we now live in an age where a virus can shut down the entire human world in a matter of weeks. Any medical intervention that can prevent this sort of shock to our societies will most likely be well worth the externalities that it creates—we will find ways to control those we can, and learn to live with those we can’t.
At any rate, I’m still here ten years later, waiting on those nanobots that Kurzweil promised. So how about it, science?
