Nanobots in our bodies: nanotechnology’s unsettling possibility
By Kaylea Pallister
opinion editor
Published: Monday, April 30, 2012
Updated: Monday, April 30, 2012 01:04
Illustration by Parker Wilhelm
Scanning through online news articles for an interesting read while I finished my morning coffee, a few intriguing sentences from one in particular caught my eye. I didn’t really take a look at the headline, just picked up a few phrases here and there. It was a March 13 CNN article by Brandon Griggs, and its intriguing title read “Futurist: We’ll someday accept computers as human.”
One of those eye-catching snippets is that futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil “believes humans and technology are blurring.” Maybe, I thought to myself, that could be true. But I thought about it only in terms of dependency and the number of people I know, including myself, who use a laptop, a cell phone, a Kindle, GPS or dozens of other gadgets on a daily basis.
So, with that in mind, I really wasn’t expecting to read the rest of the sentence.
Kurzweil, who also notes the prevalence of “smartphone appendages,” believes humans and technology will “eventually merge.” Literally.
And, as anyone with an active imagination would, I began imagining cyborgs and scenes from “Battlestar Galactica,” “The Matrix” and “I, Robot.” Overkill, I know, but I can’t help it. I think it’s a perfectly natural reaction to jump to dystopian sci-fi at the mention of human-technology hybrids because, even with our current high-tech reality, I think most people are probably more comfortable operating a laptop outside of, not inside of, their bodies.
We’re more or less comfortable with GPS systems in our phones keeping tabs on our locations, robots assisting in performing delicate surgery and lasers cutting into our corneas to permanently improve vision, but somehow, the thought of permanently integrating the technology many of us have come to love seems a bit frightening.
Why? That’s what I want to try to understand.
As noted in a Feb. 16 BBC News article by Helen Briggs, Kurzweil predicts, “We’ll have intelligent nanobots go into our brains through the capillaries and interact directly with our biological neurons.”
On the one hand, that could be absolutely amazing, full of medical and creative possibilities. But on the other hand, if a doctor approached me with a syringe full of nanobots (again, my imagination’s going wild; I have no idea how scientists would plan to do this) and told me they could be inserted into my capillaries, I’d probably run quite recklessly in the opposite direction.
In some ways, nanotechnology seems like a logical step in the progression of science and technology. Like Kurzweil said in the BBC article, “We’re already a human machine civilization; we use our technology to expand our physical and mental horizons and this will be a further extension of that.”
But, as years of science fiction can attest, people have long imagined the complications and disasters accompanying a permanent integration of technology. And I believe there’s some sense in that.
If science and medicine progress according to Kurzweil’s predictions and nanobot technology does become available to us, we will need to understand fully all of the potential benefits and problems that could accompany such an advance.
I don’t think we should dismiss the idea of nanotechnology, but I believe it is something we should regard cautiously and take slowly. If, like the BBC article suggests, nanobots could keep people healthy, I could see people prematurely jumping on board with the well-intentioned idea to cure painful or progressive diseases.
That seems fantastic on the surface, but before people do that, I would want to make sure the research had been done to troubleshoot in case the nanobots decided not to fix the problem area, attacked a healthy region of the body or refused to exit the patient once the procedure was complete.
Again, this is just what comes to mind when I hear the word nanobots, but I believe concerns like mine will need to be addressed thoroughly before the public will be at least somewhat comfortable with the idea of human-technology integration. Quite simply, I believe there will be a time and a place for this type of technology, but to put it frankly, despite the exponential advances of science and medicine, I just don’t think we’re ready for it yet.
Kaylea Pallister will attend graduate school fall 2012. Please send comments to opinion@kstatecollegian.com.
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