No secrets in a future with nano sensors?
Who's there? Scientists say nano sensors will be able to detect not only who you are, but what you've been doing. More with Christine Peterson from Earth & Sky. Read or listen: Expert says nanotech will bring us 'a more transparent world'
Christine Peterson looks ahead to a more transparent world.
Imster: Why will these kinds of sensors change our world?
Peterson: Nanotechnology will produce new sensors that can analyze chemical signals in our environment. And of course, we as individuals send off chemical signals that could be detected by these sensors.
Imster: Could you give me an example of how they might be used in our daily lives?
Peterson: Nanotechnology will eventually be able to develop a sensor for just about any chemical substance you can imagine. One obvious application would be in the detection of illegal drugs. One can imagine, perhaps, I’m speculating, that eventually federal education funding might be dependent on the deployment of these sensors in the classroom. If there’s any students present who perhaps have been indulging the night before, alarms would ring, class would come to a halt, and those students might get in trouble.
So you can see that this would be a very different world if these sensors were deployed and if that information was being used.
Imster: What is it about nano that enables such sophisticated detection?
Peterson: We already have chemical sensing devices that can detect certain kinds of chemicals. We see them when we go to the airport, for examply, attempting to pick up explosives. However, those are limited. They only detect certain kinds of things.
Right now we collect mostly video information. With nanotechnology, we’ll be collecting a lot more chemical information. What did you eat last night? What did you smoke last night? What is in your DNA? These kinds of things. It is a new dimension of information that can be collected.
If you want to detect a wide variety of things, you’re going to have to have very miniaturized devices, very small devices, very inexpensive devices. And that’s the kind of thing nanotechnology will become good at.
The kind of scenario people are looking at involves the collection of vast amounts of chemical data and the analysis of that data. To do that would require improved computers, and certainly improved computation is one of the applications of nanotechnology. So nanotech could bring both very large numbers of inexpensive sensors, and improved computation to analyze that data.
Imster: So what people are worried about is the ability of nanosensors to detect a lot of personal information?
Peterson: Yes. One of the privacy issues will be, what happens with the data that is picked up by these nanotechnology sensors, when that data is relevant to an individual.
What we’re looking at is a future where much, much more is known about individuals on a chemical basis. Obviously, we all know that the time is coming when we will all have our DNA analyzed on a routine basis. Nanotechnology will play a role in that.
I know some citizens are concerned that this type of information could be used by insurance companies. I think that these fears may be a bit overblown. We already have laws that regulate what information insurance companies can use. Perhaps this is an area where we are more worried than we need to be.
Imster: How can we look ahead and try to prepare for some of these threats to privacy?
Even if we didn’t have nanotechnology, per se, as technology advances, we would still be having more and more advanced ways to record information, to detect information, about individuals. For example, the proliferation of the video camera, the storing of that data, and being able to do face recognition with that data. That’s all happening entirely separate from nanotechnology already today.
And so, these privacy issues really come up completely apart from nanotechnology. We as a society need to think about how we want these collections of information to be handled and how it can be used. Who is collecting the information? Is it kept? Is it something that can be used in court? Is it something that can be used by insurance companies, etc.? It’s not really a nanotechnology issue, though nanotechnology will bring these privacy issues to the forefront. But I think it’s important to realize that society has to grapple with them very soon in any case.
The important thing to realize, both in the case of video information and chemical information collected by nanotechnology, is that while initially these collections are expensive, and are done primarily by government and by big business, longer term, these types of tools, we’re seeing it now with video cameras, will be in the hands of individuals.
So, when we think of policy options, we need to think about information being in the hands of huge numbers of individuals and how do we want that information handled.
I think we end up with a world with a great deal more transparency, which could be a good thing.
Imster: It seems like whether we’re for it or against it, it’s going to happen…
Peterson: There’s a march of technology, not just with nanotechnology, but with many forms of technology, toward being better able to collect and share information about other people. This is a trend we’ve been seeing for decades now, and it’s not going to stop. And it’s something that some of us are going to take a while to get used to.
Imster: And the plus sides, the benefits of these sensors, would be vast …
Peterson: The privacy downsides are, I would say, outweighed by the benefits of nanotechnology, particularly in terms of medicine. The type of sensors we’re discussing here would be even more useful for detecting whether someone has the very, very earliest stages of a disease and how to treat it for that individual.
Imster: Are there some areas that we are less worried than we need to be? What are real threats, real things I should be concerned about?
Peterson: It is very hard for the average informed person to figure out which of the concerns that you hear about with respect to nanotechnology are real and serious and ones that you’re going to see in our lifetimes, and which ones are so speculative that we don’t really need to think about those.
Personally, when I look at all of the issues that people raise on nanotechnology, most of them I feel are not that serious compared to this: some day we are going to have new forms of weapons using nanotechnology. They’re not in development now, to my knowledge, but they will be. And when that day comes, we’re going to have some problems.
The funny thing is that if you look far enough into where nanotechnology is going, you end up with things that sound pretty wild. But, to me, I believe, that stuff is probably true.
It’s easy to find very conservative projections. Personally, I find the more extreme ones to be plausible. I think they’re very plausible.
More with Christine Peterson from Earth & Sky:
Read or listen: Expert says nanotech will bring us ‘a more transparent world’
Read or listen: Nanotech sensors raise privacy issues
This really freaks me out!! Especially thinking about the horrible weapons that nanotech could make. I bet we get the nano-weapons before all the medical benefits.
But they could help you be safe too. Like checking if there’s e coli in meat. That whole spinach thing could have been avoided.
We are but equations to be solved. The massive data minning will enable manipulations of the variables that make us human, that make us unique, to be but strings of the puppet masters.
George Orwell wrote that Big Brother would be watching in 1984. didn’t happen and it still isn’t. We’ll figure out a way to live right with nano sensors.