What part could molecular nanotechnology play in cleaning up the environment?
Ray Kurzweil argues that human technology is nature’s way of continuing evolution. Extrapolating from that, I see a day when our technology becomes the environment. If nanoscale machines develop varying intelligence capacities, we may have what I call “the intelligent environment”. The natural environment today is already intelligent because it is self-regulating. Yet, for better or worse, technology may bring that intelligence to another level. This may help us to clean up the ecology by, for example, using sensors to detect and stop contamination. Yet our machines may also be so pervasive that they come to constitute a new kind of environment: one where some form of intelligence is present at every level of the ecology. This idea may upset many environmentalists because of the implications and risks, but we have to face the reality that we’re inventing technologies that are so pervasive they may do that. Look at our cities today. Many of us live in artificial environments. This isn’t
