Technology and commercial fixes

September 1st, 2009

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Posted by ChrisG at 6:47 pm

Am currently in Copenhagen at this event, giving a talk on nanotech and corporate social responsibility to an audience composed of nanotech researchers, nano-industrialists, investment managers and so on. Hmmm, tough crowd.

The remorseless efficiency of the private sector hasn’t been much in evidence thus far – chairing of sessions is amongst the worst I’ve seen, with one session going half an hour into the afternoon coffee break, and none as yet finishing on time.

Some scattered observations:

- Best quotation from an abstract (concerning the advantages of nano-engineered foods):

This would allow people to consume more modern convenience food while simultaneously and significantly increasing nutrient intake and reducing energy intake per meal and per day. Thus, reduce mental ill health, obesity and other postprandial insults. Emergent technologies can and must help correct the food system to stem the production of a human race with yet more diet induced diseased/obese morons.

Yay, tech fix!

- Number of keynotes to mention nanotechnology as contributing to a solution to a suite of “global problems” (water shortages, energy, AGW, disease etc.): all of them.

- Percentage of applications-related abstracts that focus on (especially colorectal) cancer treatments: 14%

- Percentage of applications-related abstracts which mention water purification: 1.4% (that is, exactly 1).

I’m casting something of an unfair picture there, of course. There have, for instance, also been a number of excellent, and very interesting, presentations on the potential contribution of nanotech to solar energy – such as printable solar cells. The standard model for a solar revolution often implies centralised solar farms, one per continent (or two in Africa’s case, as Europe isn’t sunny enough), for a total of 160000km² coverage of solar cells. Obviously such a programme would involve stratospheric resource use, if it were based on standard PV cells. But printable solar cells, based on polymer films of a few nanometres thickness on a substrate, would be a different story (although the question of supplying feedstock and hence resource use – as well as disposal and recycling – inevitably arises).

Such a technique would also potentially get us away from the centralised model, with any building – or indeed, anything with three dimensions – being able to go off-grid, so long as it incorporates a coating of printed PV. Disruptive, certainly. But the big questions around this involve non-technical issues – or rather, issues which concern the enrolment of techniques within socially constituted technologies [PDF, 441Kb]. For instance, a recurrent assumption among commentators who take a radical view of emerging technologies – especially nanotech – is that the market will be a virtuous selector of applications which will bring the most (revolutionary) benefits. Private and public good in perfect harmony, the technology strategist’s version of the invisible hand. But this assumption is also often shared by researchers and industrialists who just want to get products to market – there’s no need to tell people about the benefits of a technology, just build it (the product) and (if it’s any good) they will come, and market-based natural selection will distribute benefits – and further innovation – far and wide.

With energy infrastructure, this isn’t going to work. As Seamus Curran pointed out today (to his credit), the inertia oil dependence brings (and which developing economies will inevitably get caught up in, at least in the short term) is a major barrier to alternative energy, and may set back wider uptake of viable cheap PV by decades. Without concerted political action to reshape energy infrastructure, its governance and – we might add – the goals for which it is developed, cheap PV will face serious problems. The market is not enough.

Still, all the evidence of unquestioned priorities and unabandoned dreams of technical fixes aside, we could all do without yet another case of waving hands randomly at a host of familiar nanotech talking points.