Nanofear

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Nanotechnology isn’t morally acceptable to a lot of people.

My immediate reaction, after playing “what the?” is that this is a reaction from ignorance. I mentioned before that many people get visions of nanobots taking over the world dancing in their heads when you mention the word “nanotechnology” so I suspect this is just a simple reaction. It’s unknown, so I am suspicious and am predisposed to rejecting the idea. Calling it immoral is just an easy way to reject it, requiring little thought.

Of course it’s ignorant, because most of the respondents probably have a computer, which has nanoscale components in it. And use other nanotech products, perhaps even on a daily basis.

I’m not sure how the pollster draws the religious conclusions, because the poll questions aren’t given and we only have his word that the people were well-informed adults. I don’t trust polls, especially ones that are opaque.

0 thoughts on “Nanofear”

  1. Exactly: given the general state of American science literacy, finding that people are “well-informed” about a topic is rather surprising to me. We need to know more details of the survey.

  2. Ask that same group if they think solarphotovoltaics are morally acceptable, and I can about guarentee you that you’ll quickly find just how internally inconsistent their uninformed positions on this subject truly are. Also, good points about the survey itself.

    Polls show that 43% of all statistics are meaningless. 🙂

  3. I was at a lecture in which a Harvard prof explained the field of nanotechnology and some interesting applications of it. There was then a Q&A period. One person (who came to the lecture armed with magazine articles carefully highlighted and annotated) immediately launched into a series of questions about the safety of nanotechnology, in what was clearly an attempt to get this professor to admit that he had never considered the safety implications of small robots crawling around in your lungs.

    I think he summed it up best: “If we can transport phosgene in railcars across the country, we can safely handle nanotechnology.”