I was thinking recently about nanotechnology as an x-risk, so it’s awesome you took the time to research this. Nanotechnology features heavily in early writings on x-risk and trans-humanism, sometimes even being mentioned more prominently than AI-risk. Which as I understand it coincided with a strong push of public and private investments in all things nanotech from around 2000 (although not always APM). From 2010 on investment seems to have gone down and a lot of people in the space, like Eric Drexler and Nick Bostrom, redirected their attention to AI, leaving me wondering what happened to it, and how real of a threat it remains.
Do you think the retreat of investment into nanotechnology reduced attention towards it as an EA cause area, compared to research into more well-funded (and hyped) technologies like AI?
Yeah, I think that progress in nanotech stuff has been very slow over the past 20 years, whereas progress in AI stuff has sped up a lot (and investment has increased a huge amount). Based on that, it seems reasonable to focus more on making the development of powerful AI go well for the world and to think less about nanotech, so I think this is at least part of the story.
Great post!
I was thinking recently about nanotechnology as an x-risk, so it’s awesome you took the time to research this. Nanotechnology features heavily in early writings on x-risk and trans-humanism, sometimes even being mentioned more prominently than AI-risk. Which as I understand it coincided with a strong push of public and private investments in all things nanotech from around 2000 (although not always APM). From 2010 on investment seems to have gone down and a lot of people in the space, like Eric Drexler and Nick Bostrom, redirected their attention to AI, leaving me wondering what happened to it, and how real of a threat it remains.
Do you think the retreat of investment into nanotechnology reduced attention towards it as an EA cause area, compared to research into more well-funded (and hyped) technologies like AI?
Yeah, I think that progress in nanotech stuff has been very slow over the past 20 years, whereas progress in AI stuff has sped up a lot (and investment has increased a huge amount). Based on that, it seems reasonable to focus more on making the development of powerful AI go well for the world and to think less about nanotech, so I think this is at least part of the story.