Nanotransformations
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[edit] Course Description ([1] E-Flier)
How can we manage the unpredictable implications of extraordinarily small nanotechnologies? Nanotechnology is already on a path to radically transform the production of integrated circuits, materials, clothing, batteries, drug delivery, and our living environment. Some participants in nanoscale research argue that nanotechnology will transform what it means to be human, offering immortality even as machines evolve beyond expected human capacities. How should we prepare for the volatilities, uncertainties and opportunities that inevitably but unpredictably attend even the perception of such transformations in knowledge and technologies? Can we tune these innovations to the most sustainable and desirable planetary outcomes?
We seek to evolve a highly interactive and open community of teaching and research for the investigation, evaluation and design of the space of all possible transformations of the human environment through nanoscale science and technologies. Funded by the National Science Foundation, this course will help connect stake holders and participants in emerging nanotechnology at a major US research university active in the incubation of different nanotechnological futures - Penn State. The course will teach rhetorical analysis and engineering design [2] of nanoenabled technology[3] as two appropriate modalities for understanding the diverse impacts of nanotechnology on society while offering students foundations in nanotechnology (e.g. terminology, historical context, quantities and units, current memes & methods). Together we will ask our students and ourselves, in short: What kind of planet do we wish to design and grow, and how can we get there, together? Open Source methodologies of commons formation, competitive collaboration, crowd sourcing, version control, and open design will be reviewed and practiced.
As the last word of the last paragraph indicates, our method involves collective intelligence. Please help by contributing to this wiki or any of its wiki'd links!
[edit] Syllabus
This is a course designed to help students think systemically and working practically to design future nanosystems in the context of their ethical, legal, social, economic and environmental impacts. In order to focus our attention in this almost overwhelming array of implications, we will focus on the idea and claim that nanotechnology is an ontological technology - a technology that could alter not only what we do, but who and what we are. There are no prerequisites for this course besides an open mind and a willingness to collaborate. Meeting Time & Place 307 Hammond Tuesdays/Thursdays 11:15 am - 12:30 PM
Syllabus with 'first day' material(contact info, assignment, class policy, etc.)
Curious about what we're discussing in class? Check the *Weekly Outline*
[edit] Introduction to Nanotechnology
Nanotechnology systematically manipulates materials and devices on the atomic scale. Generally it refers to anything with a feature size of 100 nanometers (nm) or less. Most important is the scalar difference involved here: The journal Nature points out that in our usual imaginings of the nanoscale, we come up short, or rather, much too big: "Most formal definitions of nanotechnology revolve around the study and control of phenomena and materials at length scales below 100 nm, whereas informal definitions almost always make a comparison with a human hair, which is about 80,000 nm wide." Nature In other words, when we try and collectively imagine the nanoscale even in quantitative and comparative terms, we fudge by a factor of 800!
This course and this wiki deal with the social impacts of Nanotechnology, which includes your most welcome desire to learn about nanotechnology. Needless to say, the effects of nanotechnology need not be limited to the 100 nm scale We are investigating the Implications of Nanotechnology, the Societal Implications of Nanotechnology and much more by growing a diverse and integrative community of dialog. The community will diversify by working actively to seek out new contexts and contacts for nanotechnology across our planet. The community will integrate existing knowledge about nanotechnology across disciplines and traditions, with a focus on the plausible ontological effects of nanotechnology. Ontological technologies are technologies that make us wonder what we are or, in fact change what we are. That is, rather than act merely as tools for humans, ontological technologies alter the user, sometimes in ways that make them productively question their own self definition. In the post modern period, nuclear energy, biotechnology and the rapid growth of the Internet all occasioned debates about the ontological effects of these technologies on who and what humans are. Thousands of years ago, the Greek philosopher Plato - or, rather his character Socrates - treated writing as an ontological technology, and some contemporary scientists agree, arguing that external symbolic storage systems such as writing and "theoretic culture" outsourced and altered human consciousness. In design, much is made of disruptive technologies that sweep away old technologies such as cell phone displacing landlines. They often open up completely new (and profitable) markets like GPS navigation systems in cars. But Ontological technologies are more radical than disruptive technologies and change the culture in major ways and, specifically, even the way that we think about who and what we are. Many are meta-technologies like solid state information technology and genetic engineering. These spawn numerous disruptive technologies and reshape our world in ways that are both radical and hard to foresee. Nanotechnology is such a metatechnology and it is triggering ontological changes. However, not all nanotechnology is so radical. Nanoenabled designs range from those that are essentially hype through those that modestly enhance product performance to more transformative technologies that are bringing new genres of technologies in technologies like batteries, clothing, and drug delivery systems.
We are seeing the beginning of an exponential growth pattern in the role of nanotechnology in engineering design. “In 2007, more than $60 billion in products incorporating nanotechnology - devices of microscopic size - were sold. According to estimates, the amount may grow to $2.6 trillion by 2014.” On April 24, 2008, David Rejeski, Director of the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies (PEN http://www.nanotechproject.org/ ) at the Woodrow Wilson Center testified* to the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation Subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Innovation. He said that in the last two years the number of nanoenabled consumer products had increased from 212 to over 600 with a doubling period of 14 months, and that these products came from 321 companies in 21 countries. Rejeski noted that “All of these products are available in shopping malls or over the Internet, and we have purchased many of them on-line.” Consumer products are a favorite target in engineering design education, and so these courses will be both appropriate and timely. PEN maintains inventories for nanotechnology consumer products and other categories such as the environment. http://www.nanotechproject.org/inventories
Nokia has a neat cell phone concept that shows how Nanotechnology could impact the general public in the future.
[edit] Building & Growing Ethical Systems Through Collective Dialog
Philosophers, theologians and psychologists contend that different ethical stances make meaningful distinctions between good and bad outcomes. We will focus less on outcomes than on processes: From an engineering perspective, if you want to solve a problem, you build a system, test it and improve it through feedback. In this course we apply this analogy and focus on systems connecting ethical outcomes to open source design.
Even if our instrumentation (and our computer screens) yield higher and higher resolution, ambiguity appears to be a feature of our world. There is much disagreement about ethics: Some, for example, ask if it is a right action to use performance enhancing drugs. By way of contrast, is it right to compromise our quest for excellence in any way?. Studying the composition and analysis of arguments can be one way to study this contrast, and we shall do so. Rather than a system of rules, such contrasts can provoke dialog, a process which in turn captures the attention of more participants, connecting stakeholders to outcomes. Clearly, there is no single ethical system on a planet as conflicted and diverse as our own. But collective open source pedagogy and design seems a good candidate for any ethical system responding to and preparing for the transformations augered by nanotechnology. Such open source practice opens the formerly quite limited process of research and commercialization to crowdsourcing. Such highly parallel and distributed processes offer high redundancy for a world where we must expect the unexpected. Learning to live with such volatility while remembering who and what we are would be one ethic. But again, there is surely more than one: Any ethical process welcomes difference; this is a characteristic upon which many world religions and philosophies seem to concur. Let's welcome our differences of opinion and perspective! Hence our Open Access NanoBlogs.
[edit] Open Access Blogs in Nanotechnology & Society
Open Source Blogs in Nanotechnology & Society
Topics in this section are posted by faculty and students and global collaborators in an effort to promote open dialog on the implications of nanotechnology. Respond to a post by clicking the 'Discussion' tab at the top of the page, or add content directly onto the page. Further directions for blog manifestation can be found by clicking Open Source Blogs in Nanotechnology & Society.
[edit] Quick Takes & Tools
- Nano & Society Wikibook Chapter - Our collective Wikibook Project. Keep it open in a tab!
- Review of "Nanotechnology and the Commons - Implications of Open Source Abundance in Millennial Quasi-Commons"
Past Student Websites
Nanotechnology and Night Vision
Nanotechnology and Solar Cells
[edit] Course Resources
The course will run on the web at http://mycompwiki.com/index.php/Nanotransformations Other web resources we may use are Google Docs and Sites and Zoho. Dimdim, Thinkfree, and Mindmeister are other useful utilities. All are collaborative, web based, free, and A4 (anyone, anywhere, anytime, anyhow(platform)). Still, we need one "home base" for all of our Web 2.0 wanderings, so when in doubt, head to this wiki.
Student work will at least in part be expected to contribute to a nano wiki book http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Nanotechnology which is also a excellent resource
Reading assignments are largely on line and given in the outline below, Some excellent general sites for the course include:
http://www.nanotechproject.org/
http://www.nnin.org/index.html National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network (NNIN)
http://www.nanocafes.org/nanoresources/ethics
http://www.nanowerk.com/nanotechnology/reports/nano_reports.php?cat=Ethics
http://nano.foe.org.au/node/151
http://www.nanotech-now.com/team.htm
[edit] Assignments
1. 60% Students will engage weekly in assignments that will help build material for contributions to the wikibook, and also to a workshop with invited speakers.
2. 40% Students will form teams in week 6 to work with a nanotechnology researcher to prepare a report on the social, human, and ethical [SHE} impacts of the research being done. This report should be of value to the researcher and be integrated into the wiki book
[edit] Course Goals
This is a course designed to help students capable of thinking analytically and working practically to design future nanosystems in the context of their ethical, legal, social, economic and environmental impacts. In order to focus our attention in this almost overwhelming array of implications, we will focus on the idea and claim that nanotechnology is an ontological technology - a technology that could alter not only what we do, but what we are. There are no prerequisites for this course besides an open mind and a willingness to collaborate.
We will study what is unique about, and what is happening, in nano science and technology through readings, video content, interviews and presentations from several of the practitioners. We will study plausible impacts of nano on society through nano-enabled design of products, processes, and systems. We will search throughout the course to understand what the nano world means now and examine likely scenarios of what it will become in terms of redefining human nature and changing social relations and environmental systems. This will be where all our discourses will lead. And in all our discussion we will wrestle with the high levels of uncertainty of how nano-enabled products and processes will impact the world for which they are designed.
We will not assume that the nanotechnologies studied are intrinsically good or bad, although perhaps some limit cases will emerge (.e. nanoweapons). As in design, we heuristically assume that all technology involves change and that all change involves trade-offs, which may be assessed as good or bad depending on how they are assessed and by whom. Later in the course we will examine in what ways we might introduce ethics into our discourse and what the possibilities are for shaping the development and deployment of nano-technology in ethical design processes. This begins with the need for cognizance (understanding nanotechnology) and an awareness that individual ethics alone are not enough to build ethical systems. We will also examine the social processes of decision making, since the arrangements made for such decisions are malleable and each arrangement has a different tacit ethical system. Design methods offer a useful way of looking at the impact of nanotechnology on society and the environment, and social design ethics provide a sharp focus on the purposes and predicted outcomes of the design as well as a clear delineation of who makes (and who doesn't) the design decisions, how, and why.
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