Charles Ostman, nanotech expert and NanoThink advisor, explores atomic-scale engineering—from Rice University’s fullerenes to black-budget labs like Mitra’s—revealing risks like uncontrollable "quasi-viral" mutations and military-grade tech 10–12 years ahead. He warns of a potential "virtual terraform" economy, where intangible assets replace hardware, and ethical collapse could mirror civilizational failures, citing Soviet-era nuclear threats in Uzbekistan/Kazakhstan. Ostman’s work, blending synthetic biology (e.g., ICS’s 50,000 AI soldiers) with immersive belief-system rewiring, faces skepticism but aims to democratize access amid regulatory chaos, suggesting humanity’s survival hinges on navigating this uncharted convergence. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert in the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening and good morning, as the case may be across all these many time zones, stretching from the Tahitian and Hawaiian island chains all the way eastward to the Caribbean and the U.S. Virgin Islands, south into South America, north well to the pole, magnetic North Pole, and worldwide, of course, on the internet.
This is Coast Coast to M. I'm Mark Bell.
We are going to go venturing into a world this morning bigger than you could possibly imagine.
It is kind of like outer space.
Travel in outer space.
Except it's not.
It's travel into inner space.
We're going to do a program this morning on something called nanotechnology.
Machines, I said machines with moving parts so small that with the naked eye you could not possibly see them or discern their operation.
My guest is a man I had on about a year and a half ago, Charles Osman, and I'll tell you more about Charles in a moment.
And oh, by the way, guess what, folks?
The first crop circle of the year, as you know, has already occurred.
And guess who has a photograph?
So if you want to go up to the website and take a look, and it really is neat.
Because, of course, the crop is new, so it's green.
This crop circle occurred instead of in mature wheat or something, in a green field.
And it is beautiful.
And of course, it's on the website, which is where you should be.
That would be www.artbell.com.
www.artbell.com.
It is beginning early this year, indicating no doubt there's going to be a lot of crop circles.
A lot of people think they are fractal, particularly the more complex ones, like Stonehenge with 191 circles, and that they are either a message or have meaning.
Nobody really knows what they are, but they certainly are, and they are not the product of Doug and Dave with the board and some chains tromping about.
So you go take a look at the first crop circle of the year.
It's on the website now.
Now, nanotechnology.
What in the world is that?
I've got a man who knows.
His name is Charles Austin.
I had him on the air, I'm going to guess, about a year, year and a half ago.
He is a member of the Science Advisory Board of NanoThink.
Nano Think.
A privately funded nanotechnology think tank and development research facilitation for a consulting group.
He's also a senior fellow of the Foresight Institute.
That's not Farsight Foresight, folks.
A senior fellow of the Institute for Global Futures.
Currently the science editor and author for Mondo 2000 magazine.
I'm sure you've heard of that.
Technical editor and author for Midnight Engineering.
And contributing editor-author of Robotics Digest.
He's also currently authoring a piece for the IEEE Spectrum on the topic of biomolecular nano-computing systems and devices.
Good Lord.
That has a kind of an interesting connotation to it.
I take that to mean a compression and convergence of a very wide plethora of different types of industries, scientific disciplines, and even socioeconomic systems, which up until fairly recently were still relatively autonomous, self-contained process engines that would produce some kind of product, service, and or scientific discipline-oriented results as part of a development stream that resided within their own autonomous realm.
And this process is being driven by this connectivity grid, which we now call the Internet.
And I date back to the very early days.
I'm an old crafty fellow.
I date back to quite a few decades ago, really, back in the National Lab System, when the Internet was developed for the National Lab System as nothing more than a communication network.
And yet, even back in those early days, there were a few, what were considered perhaps on the fringe kind of people that speculated at some threshold moment in time, when the connectivity factor went up to about where it is now, everything would be poised almost like a clip, if you will, where the rate of change and the volume of change processes would simultaneously converge so that every technology is interconnected to every other technology.
I would like to get your thoughts, if I could, on the Internet Itself, where it has gone, where it presently is, and where it's going, and what it means for society.
Oh, I have wonderful you should ask this, and I'll start by saying approximately two years ago, I wrote a paper, a technical thesis, a refereed paper, called The Internet of an Organism, which I submitted to the European Society of Artificial Intelligence and Cybernetics, and they had their annual conference in Austria.
To my astonishment, they not only published the paper, which was no small feed themselves, but when I got back to proceedings, roughly about a third of the other participants, most of whom were professors from various universities around the world, India, former Soviet Union, all over Europe, United States, Canada, etc., had very similar ideas.
They were using terms like the global Gaia being encapsulated in this synthetic neural net engine, you know, things that really would have sounded completely off the grid to most folks, but to me it made perfect good sense.
And I thought, okay, here we are, a bunch of different people in different parts of the planet, but we had a very, very similar vision of how this process is evolving.
And therefore, I submit to you the following idea, that an organism in itself is self-correcting, self-modifying, it grows, it adapts, it will, at a certain point, spawn offspring of sorts.
And that's what you have going on in the internet now.
You have a hopefully benign, but what I see to be an involuntary symbiosis between the human species and this connectivity system, which in fact does have self-modifying, self-correcting properties.
You already have companies like NGT and ATT developing neural net-driven and even genetic algorithm-driven routing structures to optimize performance of the peak load pattern set.
And in the book that I'm currently working on, I study this problem rather carefully.
I have a whole series of sort of what I call option graphs and say under these criteria, this potential series of outcomes could arrive.
And I want to offer the following things.
The fact that we are heading into an enormous change is, in fact, absolutely the way it is.
Some people look at prophecy and talk about some sort of calamity due to a huge conversation.
Some people talk about a spiritual calamity.
Some people talk about huge weather changes and so forth.
I actually don't focus on that at all.
But what I do focus on is a socioeconomic upheaval on a scale never before experienced in human history.
There's going to be a mantle of chaos that this process, this convergence and this quickening, will sort of come up against.
It'll be like a barrier.
It'll be like the next evolutionary test, if you will.
And if we, as an organism, can successfully negotiate this test, we'll come through it as a more robust organism, as a more robust society as a process.
If we fail, we'll be sort of mired in our own socioeconomic chaos.
And we're about two, three, maybe five years and a half away from that horizon.
Yes, and in fact, I understand what he's getting at.
His basic theorem is that just as you have biodiversity in an ecosystem to make a more robust ecosystem, you should have behavioral diversity or cultural diversity to maintain the health of the society.
I mean, before the Internet days, people would travel around the world.
Americans would go somewhere else abroad and they'd see an Americanization of some autonomous nation state that used to have its own separate little culture.
And there would be like a flattening out of the unique or where they had just gone to.
That's like the organic version of what Michael is now referring to in what I call the virtual terraform.
But that may or may not be the case.
There are quite a few variables.
It's like a node on a decision tree.
And which branch gets activated, I think, relies upon a very complex set of conditions getting to that node occurs.
But I want to offer one more thought here.
That is that what the Internet is doing now is only a precursor to what's about to happen.
Because I visualize a realm in where experiential conveyance becomes the methodology by which education, marketing, the interaction between other people throughout the world.
Right now we have something called Verbal, which is a virtual reality modeling language that allows you to have interactive 3D environments come through the wire and appear on your computer screen or on your ESAN.
And it's still very primitive, very crude.
A bunch of my friends who are part of the technical community are probably very forefront of creating these things.
And as a matter of fact, if you want to look at socioeconomic system paradigms, we are shifting, even now as he speaks, away from a hard, asset-based commodity-driven system.
In a sense, that is one of the possible options, and that's why this is the test.
Every time the human species, and I think this has happened many times in many other worlds throughout the universe, I think this was a very common rote series of processes that any organism would go through, an intelligent organism.
So here we've climbed this ladder.
As we get to these rungs, which are ever more closely spaced, by the way, the risk-gain ratio volume of that rung provides us the potential of traumatic failure or the potential of attack regrowth.
And each one is an increment larger than the one before.
I mean, we've already survived global warfare, global nuclear warfare.
The coin is still being flipped as to whether or not we suppress the biosphere's capacity to support life beyond what it is now.
And I think, you know, the bets are still off on that one.
But racing up along this is the essence that we have the potential of utilizing this experiential conveyance engine as a methodology for enhancing one's educational potential.
And let me see if I can communicate what I'm trying to say here.
I first saw the most compelling version of virtual reality quite a few years ago, and not with goggles and gloves and trying to shoot at something like you've seen in an arcade.
No, that's done as stupid as well.
What I saw was the following.
A friend of mine who unfortunately passed away, his dream was to capture the great archaeological sites throughout the world, especially ones which are trapped in politically difficult circumstances, like Baalbek in Iraq or Ankarawat in Cambodia, and or many of the sites that are now crumbling away because of human and exposure to pollution, that sort of thing.
The point is that by capturing these things and making these very elaborate virtual models, you can then not only preserve them, but allow the community around the world to visit the same site and have the same experience.
But more importantly, the efficiency by which that experience is conveyed cannot be imagined by any other medium.
And here's the proof.
I went to Brazil as part of an international virtual reality consortium demonstration.
This was about five, six years ago, actually.
And here I was on stage in downtown Rio.
This fellow had dragged along his ever since I was in his supercomputer, this huge enormous box.
He was heading out of his place, something called a leak helmet.
And we had people coming up on stage from all walks of life, all genders, young kids, old folks, people that drove cabs for living college professors, many of whom didn't speak English at all.
They could put on that helmet, and suddenly they were inside of a 5,000-year-old African city called Buhan, which at that time was the capital within the Nubian Empire, which is now the Sudan.
In other words, unless you were a professional archaeologist that could go to some obscure library and find the right book and read about it, you would never even know this place existed, let alone have a sense for who these people were, the culture, the spectacular beauty of their buildings, and the complexity of their sociology and so on.
And yet you've got all of that stuff almost instantaneously in a matter of seconds.
Now I'm going to hold you back just a little bit, but you're going in the right direction.
I want to see this to the audience and to the general world who's listening in a way that really can, there's a logical event stream, but I want to make sure we don't skip a step.
So we've gotten to the point of experiential conveyance.
We have a knowledge engine, you might say.
And we now have things called autonomous agents.
These are smart entities that represent your interest.
They are sentient.
They ply the fabric of the net, if you will, looking for things of interest, looking for things that they have learned about because they know your behaviors and how you respond.
It becomes an extension of yourself because of the ever more rapid rate of change and the ever more increasing scale of complexity.
Okay, this goes back, again, I'm going to have to back out here just ever so slightly, again, mostly financed by the military.
There was an interest, and it still is, of course, there's a language called SOAR, S-O-A-, which is an artificial intelligence paradigm, which I won't go into details about.
But the point is, SOAR and other protocols of this nature were deployed to create synthetic environments that could be populated with autonomous agent entities.
This way, they could simulate the behavior of soldiers in the field in a battlefield situation, because a battlefield commander, by today's standards, the timeline between decision boundaries, where you have multiple threads of information streaming in constantly, and the decision loops are measured in a matter of some time.
Sentience, in its ultimate form, is self-awareness.
You really become an autonomous entity.
You are now aware that you exist, and you begin to adopt the mannerisms that would determine that you, on your own, can learn, adapt, function, and decide willingly that you want to divorce yourself from whoever created you and sort of do your own thing to put it as plainly as possible.
Now, would these sentient entities be a creation, or are they going to be a byproduct of just some critical mass moment that we reach with regard to the net?
I believe the internet, they say now, is doubling in size every three or four months.
My guest is Charles Osman.
We're going to be talking about nanotechnology.
But he just suggested we're close to a point now where there will be born, virtually, or created or both on the internet, individual, sentient beings, aware beings that will be part of the net.
Try and imagine that.
Try and imagine that.
Back now to Charles Ossman.
Charles, I'm visualizing that quite well in my mind.
What I guess I don't understand is what do you think or imagine might be the critical moment in speed, storage, interconnectivity that would either begin to produce or allow to be produced the sentient beings we talked about?
Well, this is just the problem that I'm currently working on.
And that's funny you should bring this up.
But I want to back away just a little bit because I want to make sure that we don't skip a crucial step.
There really is a specific, like a logic tree structure.
I want to make sure all the branches actually do hook together.
So getting up to this point, you have to have a motivation or a fiduciary incentive, you might say, to translate this technology development into a realm in which it actually can be valuated and become a primary component in the virtual terraform-based business and economic sensor system in the near future, which is why I keep harping on this idea of the virtual asset-based commodity-driven system, where it won't be things that you can touch or sense in the normal way.
It'll be intangibles.
It'll be things like the quality of knowledge, engineered knowledge on demand, extensions, ubiquitous computing, supercomputing, but would appear to be supercomputing from our perspective, having a box that sits at home, is it going to be replaced by what you might call an intelligent orifice that simply hooks into the functionality fabric that's out there, and that out there keeps expanding and growing to an ever larger capacity.
A typical machine has a CPU, some glue logic, some bus interface, all the sort of usual stuff that's physical in the machine, if you've got what you'd see in there.
If one at work has you read, Gardner Group, Forrester, and all the professional logistics analysis, people that supply this kind of information, you're actually right.
The aggregate average lifetime profitability window, if you will, a piece of hardware that goes out on a shelf, if you don't capture your expected profit returns in three months, you can just justify the shelf space it occupies.
In the interim, it will be using traditional silicon, only something called FPGAs and FPGAs, which are rewritable, direct memory in a sense, except that you have functionality matrices that sort of rewrite themselves on a per instruction cycle or several instruction cycles basis.
And now you have an intelligence out there.
Right now you have Java applets and Java code that can actually go into your machine, if you will, and sort of rewrite the machine's identity, if you want to call it that, on a per function as per needed basis.
There's another whole world up there called Corba.
And Corba is a virtual state machine where in software residing on the ubiquitous functionality fabric of all these interconnected nodes out there, you have a virtual dust structure.
You have virtual code engines, if you will, that are surrounded by a prophylactic-like wall of identity tags.
Us people, us entities, it used to be until not too long ago that we were our own self-contained units, if you will.
Our intelligence was inside our head.
Our bodies were just that, our bodies.
And we had a belief barrier, you might say.
We could commit to the believing of what our senses and our internal processes would allow us to be convinced that this was real and this was the stuff we were interconnecting with.
That's about to change.
The whole idea of the invocation of rapture, if you want to call that, as an engineerable process, is being done now in very subtle ways.
I mean, it happens in a certain context when you go see a movie and you surrender into that movie for a couple of hours.
You have a vicarious experience and you're drawn into a story that you might be watching on your television set.
In the old days, it was glyphs on pieces of paper, you know, called writing.
You'd surrender yourself into a book.
Well, what's about to come around the corner, instead of the monodirectional broadcast, what's called push technology, where you have an orthogonal storyboard structure punctuated by advertising slots, and if the advertisers are lucky, they might get 3% hit rate on the return on their investment for how many people watch the show versus what kind of response they get to selling their product.
Imagine a bi-directional, immersive environment where instead of watching cheers, you become part of cheers.
Of cheers.
And you go into this virtual domain, populated by, I'm not kidding now, virtual actors and actresses.
They have a conversation.
You get to learn about them.
The reward for participation is the depth of emotional engagement you establish with these virtual entities.
And the point is, the reward for investing in that kind of infrastructure is that now you can back annotate the psycho and socio-demographic data streams that come from the activity of you participating in that environment.
Now all of a sudden I could perhaps have a 30% hit rate of what I can sell you as opposed to 3%.
This is very attractive stuff.
Virtual malls, virtual entertainment domains, where everything is connected in an intelligence fabric, this is big money.
You're suggesting that you would be so immersed in this material that you would understand without being told or being told in a very special way precisely why you should need and want this product.
It would be a real straight-on piece of communication that you could not ignore.
The invocation of rapture as an engineerable process has certain emotional and cognitive cue points, and that's what's being measured now.
And I want to give Ishardi as an example.
In her world called Osmos, you really drift into a world where there is no up, down, left, and or right.
You look like scuba diving.
She happens to scuba dive, so she's never had it for it.
But you put on a suit of sensors in a sense.
It measures your chest volumetric displacement, measures your heart rate, GSR and other biokinetic data and so forth.
In other words, every essence of your bioprocessing activities are sort of fed into this environment that corresponds to your state of mind and physiological state.
This is done, Charles, so it understands how it is affecting you and therefore if it is not affecting you in a certain way, with respiration or heartbeat or whatever, it then will modify its approach?
All she was wanting to do was measure to what extent a person would sort of become immersed and sort of establish themselves as part of the environment.
After about 45 minutes or so of this kind of interactive exposure, most people were so interconnected in all ways, both subliminal and consciously, that when they disconnected themselves from the environment, they really had to go through a recovery period.
They would sort of stumble around and kind of have to readapt to the real world.
And this was a very benign, very pleasant, aesthetically soft, you might say, experiment.
My vision is if this kind of technology were applied in a much harsher way, I mean, if you look, for instance, at Saturday morning television and you see the incredible production work that goes into the TV ads, you see, where they really want to reach inside the skull of some eight-year-old kid who's going to rush off and test your mommy to buy the box with zero weapons.
Imagine if you magnify that by an order of magnitude, I can see some very serious, you know, there's cause for trepidation.
And as a person who develops this kind of stuff, I understand what's at stake.
And so this is like one very small sliver, however, of a much larger arena of functionality.
So I'm going to take the next step, which is, as life becomes ever more quickened, as you would say it, and as functional complexity goes up, the ability for a single human being to render mission-critical decisions on the fly and meet those temporal and functional requirements simply goes beyond human capacity.
This was the military's interest.
They want to be able to provide decision rendering under duress as an enhancement to a human being's ability to recognize and perceive threats and responses.
The commercial world then extracts from this some core components, some functionalities that it's become aware of.
And I've gone, over the past 18 months, I've been to over 30 different technical and academic as well as commercial symposia, conferences, trade shows.
I've talked at a few of them, submitted papers here and there.
But I mean, I've gone to events like, here we are, the first international conference on autonomous agents, the first international conference on multi-agent systems, the first conference on virtual humans.
Virtual humans.
Virtual, in fact, the second conference comes up in about a month and a half, and I'll be there, of course.
And here's the point I'm trying to get across, that these are no longer theoretical ideas or some kind of tangential with the thrills of science fiction writers' imagination.
No, there's teams of engineers figuring out how to optimize these processes and put them online as a resource, as a strategic resource, as a competitive resource, and potentially a predatory resource.
My agents are smarter than yours.
Therefore, I will crush you in the open field of battle on the virtual terraform.
Wow.
And people who are strategizing how to position themselves as strategic entities in this virtual terraform, they're arming themselves now with the smartest intelligent agents they can devise for their own purposes.
The ability to fetch up that kind of resource on demand has a valued added, it has a valuation.
It is against these kinds of commodities that trading will occur.
In other words, having some physical stuff that represents the value of your company will have less value than having access to this.
And as people begin to accept this in their course of their daily life, whether it's their entertainment, through educational processes, etc., the whole idea of surrendering through your belief area into this external realm, where the decision-making process, knowledge conditioning, and the acceptance of other alternative forms of reasoning, you might say, becomes the norm rather than the exception.
But once, you, all right, I'm going to ask again, how far away do you think we might be from the first sentient entities created or self-creation on the Internet?
On the net, it's probably happening now, but very quietly.
In terms of, if you go to any of these conferences, there's like a dividing line.
You have the autonomous robot world where they try to cram a bunch of intelligence into an actual physical thing that walks around and censors things and does the R2D2 model.
But that's still, we still have some very specific engineering limitations, which, by the way, nanotechnology solves.
I mean, that's the subject I'm going to go to next.
But as far as where we're at now and how to engineer this kind of stuff, I wrote a paper about a year and a half ago where I recited the requirements, like a laundry list.
And I said, if I had such and such, we could build a sension changer with these behavioral qualities.
Over the course of that 18 months, sure enough, different individuals or groups would appear magically out of the fabric of the outer realm and say, Charles, you read this paper?
And guess what we have?
And so over these course of these months, we've been able to assemble, in my belief, the pieces of the puzzle.
And actually, sorry to have my notes here in front of me.
It's rather clumsy because I have such a plethora of different kinds of material I have to have.
In the world of security, in fact, I'm addressing a visiting group of Japanese dignitaries on this exact topic.
Right now, there are a handful of folks here in this country finally, after many, many years of sort of not getting around to it, they finally are beginning to recognize this as a strategic implementation of power.
It's not going to be a bomb that blows up or even a biohazard or some other physical anomaly that's going to cause real harm to this country.
But heaven help us, should the electronic infrastructure, our banking systems, our transactional processes, all of our database, if that were to be in some way, even in a fairly minor way, put on hold even for a short amount of time, you would have absolute anarchy in the streets.
I mean, eight, ten days max, it would be free for all.
It would be wild panic.
All of your electronic currency would have nobody.
We're still using coins and pieces of paper, which is about to go away, by the way.
E-Cash is right around the corner.
There's a whole other agenda about that, which probably I shouldn't get into because it would be too complex for the moment.
But I'm trying to get at it.
You have this convergence, as I say, of all these different forces, socioeconomic, political, even, as well as technology in a big way, all focusing on a common target.
And the timeline of that target, here's where your clicking comes in.
Like I said, it's a matter of a very small handful of years.
And it will be fed to the outside world, to the general public, in layers that will be ever more temporarily compressed together.
And what will happen is people will be sort of indoctrinated into accepting these things as the norm of their world.
So right now, which is why I'm teaching a course I'm teaching at SS State, this is the moment and time to try to at least gain some sense of awareness of how these things are happening, in what form will they be presented to you, most likely as an entertainment product per se at first, and knowing how to adapt and therefore empower yourself to use.
These tools can be useful.
As an educational system, I see spectacular potential for a great game.
The issue of control was what I was around the corner.
And we're looking at a decentralized communication rib.
It's not like you have big giant nodes where everything branches out from the corner of a node.
Almost the exact opposite.
It's like the cilia of a mole growing over the face of an orange.
That in itself is its own protectionary mechanism.
That is an evolving structure which is self-preserving, in its own contextual interplay with the human symbiotic relationship with this thing we call the Internet.
And talking about belief barriers one more time.
Imagine now we get to a realm where we accept the idea that we're going to surrender our beliefs to this external engine of intelligence that sees us to conditionalized knowledge streams as part of our daily life.
We now take that with us to every aspect of even our culture, let's say.
Now, is it at that threshold that Michael Crichton's vision of the flattening out, if you will, of civic diversity, that could be where that note occurs.
Oh, I would think that Michael Crichton's model could occur significantly before the dangers that you're talking about when you really get this surrendering of one's belief system.
Then at that point, you have more than Michael Crichton was talking about.
Close your eyes and try and imagine a world where the internet has progressed.
It doubles now every three or four months, whatever it is in size, up to the point where it is delivering virtual reality to you, even in a non-direct connection to your brain.
Something like a virtual world.
It's right around the corner.
To the degree that they now know that a human being surrenders their bleep system to a virtual world.
Are you grasping that?
Well, we'll try and make it a little clearer for you, if possible, in a moment.
My guest is Charles Osman.
He is an expert in nanotechnology, but we haven't even launched into that right now.
We're still into the middle of this growing neural net.
All right, now, who is Charles Osman, for those of you joining us at this hour?
He's a member of the Science Advisory Board of NanoThink, a privately funded nanotechnology think tank and development research facilitation and consulting group.
Also a senior fellow of the 4Sight Institute, a senior fellow of the Institute for Global Futures, currently the science editor and author for Mondo 2000 magazine, technical editor, author for Midnight Engineering, and contributing editor and author of Robotics Digest.
He's also currently authoring a piece for IEEE Spectrum on the topic of, get this, biomolecular nanocomputing systems and devices.
And the first hour of conversation concerned virtual reality, the net, and the fact that we are virtually right now on the very edge of sentient beings being born on the internet or created sentient beings,
sentient entities, independent thinking aware entities that are in this giant neural network.
It's incredible to even consider.
Listen, we have got the first crop circle of the year on our website.
You're going to want to see it.
It's incredible.
It's in a brand new crop of green, and it is beautiful.
It comes to us from England, and we were waiting for the air photo.
All right, so you really think that we're not all that far from the virtual world that we can deliver through the net to people that will cause them to begin to surrender their belief system.
When that occurs, then we are at the point where there will be sentient awareness beings traveling that net.
In other words, all the components are sort of there waiting to be interconnected.
I have studied this to a depth now where I feel that it's no longer this impossible barrier.
Certainly there are some serious engineering difficulties that will have to be addressed, but it's not like this impossible concept.
There are enough viable working functional prototypes in their various stages of development.
So yes, combined in X-Way, this could be the result.
I'll tell you what the failure point is right now.
It's not even so much, can we have a faster throughput, can the novel size be faster at the home?
Yes, it can.
I mean, if you have a cable provider interconnect to your smart digital TV box, if you will, that looks like an Ethernet connection.
It's much, much faster than typical modems now.
You would have already very fast, unbelievably fast, really, very inexpensive for performance characteristics.
CPU chips, you have what are called Glint chips, which are these integer math rendering chips that can produce very compelling 3D graphics in this world.
Okay, and actually you define that quite well because it's not going to be making more or faster the same.
It's going to an entirely different process altogether.
But in our current modality, you start to approach a gigahertz, let's say, then things get very funny indeed because everything looks like an antenna.
You have R signatures which simply pollute everything up to get into a store.
I mean, people can do gallium arsenide and other specialized materials at 2 plus gigahertz now, but those require very unusual packaging and routing techniques to make a whole engineering subscience of that, which is not ever going to really get into the commercial.
The problem with silicon and any of its derivative alloys that are used to make the chips now, and I guess we can get into nanotech now, but I just wanted to say.
Well, only because now you have thermodynamic problems.
You can only, gosh, if you're going to go for top-down manufacturing technology, that is traditionally how chips are made, is for those that aren't familiar, you grow a rod of silicon called a rutile, which you then slice into little thin wafers.
Those wafers are then coated with a photoresist material onto which you then project a wiring pattern that represents the topographical features of what you're about to create etched into that silicon.
And you feed it through a series of chemical beds, the end result being you end up with this bumpy surface.
It has a bunch of little troughs and valleys and little wire-like connections that allow the different transistor devices that have been etched into the surface of the material to be interconnected.
And what happens is you go through a series of these stages where you go through an etch run, then you deposit a layer of molecules of the next material, then you etch that.
And then you go through that sandwiching process several times, and you find out with the final construction.
Below about 0.02 microns, though, the roughness of the features, the atomic precision by which you can control how well those features are constructed via this kind of top-down assembly process, it simply doesn't work anymore.
And at the same time, if you're trying to cram electrons through a very, very small junction size where the actual number of atoms you have to have a statistical population that says you can have a certain amount of thermal noise.
because semiconduction means you're passing electrons from one bomb to the next, that process goes down.
You have interstitial molecular friction going up, and therefore you get even more heat.
And it's a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts, but there's a thermal need called the thermal runaway effect, where it simply doesn't work at all.
And it's already being done now, and this is where nanotechnology comes in, by the way.
But once again, we're getting ahead of ourselves.
Forgive me.
I feel this is your show, and I don't want to do this.
I'm just trying to make sure that we haven't left out a crucial rung in this ladder.
Because just to get back to the net part, and I'm trying to explain the financial and sort of business strategy interest and why this is going to be done.
We talked about entertainment and experiential conveyance of a sort of a new industry.
We talked about the strategic applications of synthetic extensions and engineering rendering of a process that I would pay money to have access to because it makes me a more powerful player in the new competitive business arena of the virtual terraform.
We talked about a virtual asset-based commodity socioeconomic system where the things that have the highest valuation, actually, or the intangibles, if you will, the components of this virtual terraform.
And then you asked me, you said, well, Charles, what about how fast or how smart of a box do I have at home?
This is where it gets interesting.
Because I submit to you, this is what I thought to say before the break came on, that the boundary between what you have at your home and the much larger intelligence out there, that becomes ever more transparent.
What you really end up with is, as I said earlier, an intelligent orifice.
The local orifice has its local intelligence that can handle very compelling delivery mechanisms like that.
You have wonderful graphics and wonderful sound and very smart sensory systems and all the kind of stuff that allows the interface between you and it much more compelling.
But the reality is that you have this huge, and I mean infinitely scalable, functionality matrix out there and all you really want to do is connect to it.
And so the stuff that makes that connection process is what's being solved now.
And the failure point that I was trying to explain earlier isn't so much how much pipe space we have, it is how much fiberspace there is.
It's an enormous amount of fibers.
It's beyond ridiculous how much is unused even right now.
It's the routers and the switchers.
The telcos are panicking.
I just went to a conference called the ACM 97 conference a few weeks ago.
And in fact, there I saw William Perry, Secretary of Defense, give his speech, followed by Brenda Laurel, which was a pretty interesting combination, followed by a fellow by the name of Dr. Maurice, who's a very well-known educational specialist, followed by the commissioner of the SEC, all who's giving very compelling but completely different perspective viewpoints of the same, sort of like a gemstone with multiple facets.
The point being that if the entire country is wired this way, and virtually all aspects of commerce and daily life are suddenly embedded in this fabric, we can't have this.
And yet, The phone companies respond to the SUC who wants to get a wire into every house and every note, they're saying, look, all we're going to get out is local access fees.
We have to have some way of attaching a value-added enumeration system to access requests so that we can recapture our investment.
There's all kinds of ideas floating around out there.
Part of why Corba is becoming interesting is because Corba is more than just smart data packets.
These are function packets.
And if I have function packets that represent stuff that I've created or stuff that I want or things that I have access to or could have access to under certain conditions, every time I activate one of these entities, there's a fee.
It's like, okay, instead of going to the store and buying a disk that you put into your machine, you buy the permission to activate some functionality that's out there in this ubiquitous fabric.
And that is where the sentence engines really suddenly take off.
Now, I want to give you some factual information.
There's a guy by the name of Dr. Hugh Garris.
I've spoken with him a few times.
I'm quite familiar with his work.
He's being financed by NTV, which is the second largest telco in the world, certainly the largest in the 10.
His project is, I'm not kidding, building self-replicating synthetic brains.
Well, in his world, he's implementing the logic in silicon, but he obviously is looking towards molecular as the next transition.
To me, silicon is nothing more than a clumsy container for a functionality set.
As soon as I can abandon silicon, the happier I am, and I understand exactly where this guy is going, and there's other people I know who are doing the same thing with him.
But in his literature, he talks about growing dendritic structures, growing structures that can be influenced by input stimuli, but then reorganize their branching structures so they become optimized to respond to a certain kind of stimulus set, you might say.
And why does the Telco want to invest in this?
Because rather than just building more switches and routers, they want to make their routers and switches intelligent.
They want to have them use a process called adaptive resonance where they can anticipate peak load pattern sets and reconstruct themselves on the fly to be the fact of equivalent of a xenomorph.
And they're willing to spend billions of dollars on this because they will save billions of dollars on it.
Well, if you want to design an emotional cognition engine, you can go as far back as the early 80s.
One of the great minds that I bowed before, and if I ever had a chance to talk with a gentleman, I would be just in awe beyond speech, which is hard to imagine, which I bought away so much.
His name is Stefan Grossberg, and he wrote a very well-known book that anyone who's taken your basic ag courses would know about.
It's called Neural Networks and Natural Intelligence.
Buried back in the last 12, you know, 13 chapters in, suddenly you stumbled into a really, really interesting, compelling model.
He's got his version of an emotional cognition image, and it's one of several I've studied, by the way, which back in his day would have been very difficult indeed to implement, and it certainly would have gone far beyond the computational capacity of quote-unquote traditional computers and or traditional computing languages.
You have to have some kind of external reference point to say, does it care?
Does it feel?
Does it want to feel?
Does it have desires?
Does it respond to something that it would not otherwise respond to unless it had been conditionalized by some sort of behavior that it had found an affection for?
And when I went to this year's Autonomous Agents Conference, there were several emotional cognition engines in their various states of development.
Had a chat with some of the folks there.
Some of them I read their papers and finally had a chance to shake their hands and say, hello, how are you doing?
I could show them some of my notes and we could chat them lunch at the conference.
But the whole point is, this is no longer like some way out there fringe thing.
This is like people in labs saying, well, here's our version of how to do such and such.
Now, I submit to you the following thing.
I look at the whole process of computing, quote unquote, giving way to what I call a functionality matrix, where you have the de facto equivalent of object-oriented organelle components that can reorganize themselves to fulfill a certain kind of task or class of tasks, not that dissimilar from an actual xenomorphic organism.
You take that a step further and you suggest, look, the human body has got organs that are specialized in what they do.
They work together to form the entire being, but they all have their localized metabolisms and their symbiotic codependencies on one another to maintain the functionality of that organism.
A complete engine that's going to become an organistic-like process system would be constructed the same way.
It will involve both optical, electrical, and electro-optical components, which eventually will operate at the molecular scale.
And the stuff to make this possible is being solved now.
And now, the fact that we are being fed into this unbelievably huge transitional change, like I said, some people have attached religious paradigms or philosophical paradigms or some sort of calamity.
And maybe these things all line up.
I'm willing to entertain, by the way.
I don't think we're alone at all.
I think, like I said, we're a dot in somebody's not, probably a dot in a whole bunch of folks is not.
Would they be interested to see us right now as we're about to cross into this next domain?
It's probably one of the most misunderstood, I'm being a little poyer, but it's probably one of the most misunderstood terms and probably most poorly connected to the reality of what it actually is, because it is such a diffuse and broad-ranged concept.
It's not just a single science or a single thing to do.
It covers almost every aspect of chemistry, physics, computing, material science, medicine.
It's so enormous that it's very difficult to capsulize.
But I will try to offer a one-sentence glimpse as a branching node from which you can then extract the different applications.
It's the mechanical manipulation of atoms or molecules to perform some kind of a process or to assemble into something or to become something that it is not currently known.
In the previous, before the break, we had talked about how fast can we make a processor device.
My answer was, well, if we could go to superconductivity, all of a sudden you've just bought yourself an order of magnitude, or better.
The problem is, how do you make superconductive semiconductors?
Sounds like a mouthful, but that's what it means.
Well, by current-day solution-based chemistry standards, you're not going to.
Now, the most recent discoveries, and they were kind of almost like alchemy in a sense, there was something of an affinity to say.
And I don't want to detract from Dr. Chu and or Stanford Devshinsky and the others who had theorized about these non-crystalline semiconductor materials that could be superconducting.
That's a whole long story in itself.
But it's kind of a strange and meandering path where finally it sort of works, but it wasn't exactly the direct result of it.
What I'm saying is that using nanotechnology, one can invent a material to respond to an engineering requirement.
And I'll give you an example.
There is a new class of material called fullerenes.
Fullerenes are cages of carbon.
They look like little balls, little soccer balls, although they come in tubes now in other configurations around it and so on.
It was invented by Dr. Smalley at Rice University, but now there's a whole bunch of companies actually producing it as a commercial product.
Why would you want to do this?
Because once you have these little cages of carbon, you can then put elements and or molecules of other materials inside the cages of carbon.
And then you can bind these cages together and invent a new matrix of material that would never form under natural conditions or with traditional solutions.
Well, I have no doubt molecular computing is big on their list, but specialized Materials in general.
And I want to jump ahead just a little bit because, see, we talked just earlier about the idea that if we suddenly get off this planetary surface, we're going to be in somebody else's backyard.
They might not like that so much, and that's why they're dropping the visitors now.
Well, the nanotech realm is what facilitates that.
Why?
Because there's a whole plethora of physicists and theoreticians out there who've come up with some very nice, very doable, in my belief, models, mathematical models of how to contrive a gravity well or how to do a time-space manipulation.
Now, here we're going to go ahead a couple of decades.
I'm in an engineering lab.
Instead of pulling up my AutoCAD, three-dimensional drawing with some machine I'm trying to contrive, I fetch up a series of equations that represent some kind of a property that I wish I could invent a material to match.
Then the fenshing engine, which is vastly smarter than we are right now, sort of anticipates this and says, okay, here's 10 or 12 nano options.
Try this.
And the nano assembler spews it out for me as an inkot or a sample tool or anything connected by design.
That's what they're on the point.
That's why there'd be folks out there looking at us now saying, well, we're getting kind of close.
Oh, yeah, no, I completely understand what you're saying.
What I'm trying to get across here, though, is as follows.
The reason I was so bent on socioeconomic focus and the economies of the near future and the revaluation away from hard ethics to virtual ethics and all that stuff is because when you have this kind of a functionality being brought online and accessible to the general audience, or supposedly so, how do you establish the valuation of commodities and goods?
In a sense, the software is the thing that has the value.
The stuff that it creates is valueless.
A very kind of clunky analogy would be if all the diamonds that exist in the world are suddenly dumped into the marketplace, the diamonds would have the value of each of them.
Okay, so you apply the sort of nano domain to that same logic form.
Well, gee whiz, folks, guess what?
So in this short-term interim sort of this chaos manifold that we're about to be thrust through, something's going to have to be sorted out where a whole new paradigm of valuation systems has to be established to determine what has value and by what new methodologies of measure can different kinds of business entities and socioeconomic systems can be established.
We don't know that yet.
this is a rise to the failure point.
If not so much, will the thinking machine run amok or will the...
And talk about a socio-political, philosophical, spiritual dilemma.
How do you solve for X on that one?
And even if you were not to get that far, even if you were just to say, okay, all known diseases go away, because now if you can target a cell, you see, the first half of the process is wonderful.
It's a precise mechanism for delivering something to a cell that can go inside of it and then manipulate its internal chemistry.
It's only the second half, where the ribosome is forced to create more viral components at the expense of the host itself, that's all that throws and the organism dies eventually.
Fine.
Well, there are those biophysicists out there who look at a virus as a machine component of sorts.
And if one were to go as far as being able to engineer viral-like devices which can perform the essential equivalent of intracellular corrective chemistry, yes, that's a lock and a key.
But, but, as I said earlier, every new run on this ladder carries with it a magnified, a larger risk versus gain ratio, volume, you might say.
In this particular example, if we got this far, we could either buy life and happiness or eradicate life as we know it to be.
Why?
Viruses tend to be kind of fragile.
They mutate rather readily.
They mutate extremely often, as a matter of fact.
Mutational velocity is the inverse of organism complexity.
Therefore, since the virus is the simplest thing that exists, really, in terms of its total molecular structure and so on, it's the thing that will be like most xenomorphic in its activities, how it interprets its surrounding environment.
And if we hatched a cluster of these things and a couple of them get out of hand, that's all it would take.
We might as well scoured the surface clean.
It's far over.
We're back at ground zero.
So these are the kinds of pathways that I believe other worlds have stumbled into the wrong fork, the decision trees.
They get to node number such and such and they pick the wrong node.
Well, okay.
We are nothing more than an experiment.
We are nothing more than a bunch of protein molecules that got together and after billions of years got this far.
Well, I think statistically, I'm kind of a, you know, I'm not some bolts guy.
I mean, I'm an engineer by trade, really, from beginning square one.
So I like to look at the pragmatic aspects of, you know, what statistics involved, will the machine survive under these trauma-induced conditions and so on.
I would submit to you, just as a guess, that statistically, there is a rising rate of no return.
In other words, you start off with an aggregate C of organisms out there in the known universe, some percentage gets an intelligence threshold of X, some subset of that gets to the next level up, if you follow my drift, and then a much smaller subset gets to the next level up than that.
And by the time you get to that sort of ultimate upper level, you're talking about a very small percentage, you know, a half a percent or a tenth of percent.
I'm just guessing.
I just have this graph in my mind based on nothing other than my own speculation.
But I can see an ordering system like that because it really does mimic what happens in the Berlinianism that we can witness here on our own planet.
But why not apply that to a galactic scale or some localized region with that galaxy, that kind of thing?
I mean, I can see that kind of a macro systematic patterning effect, if you will, play it out amongst the stars that cluster together.
Charles, if you were one of them and you were watching our development, at what stage that you've speculated about tonight would you say, okay, we need to get involved now.
These people have reached point X. We can't wait any longer.
If I saw ubiquitous nanotech suddenly being applied in a very stupid and sloppy way, and at the same time they were on the threshold of really turning on anti-gravity devices and kind of clumsily stumbling around other solar systems, yes.
I mean, when I saw the fringe of that technology being crossed, yeah, I'd step in.
I think that perhaps some very interesting sort of quasi-successes have been demonstrated as a trajectory towards a design goal.
I think that under very tightly controlled conditions, for a very brief moment in time, yes, some kind of contrived gravity event probably has been done.
But to make a sustainable, flyable, if you want to call it, that's not even the right choice of words, you know, deployable, self-contained entity that could simply, at will, cruise about and do its own thing, we were not even close to having the kind of power supplies and the kind of specialized materials and all the stuff, the physical stuff that it would take to implement it.
I think we have some pretty close models as to how it could be done, but like I said, we don't quite have the nanotechnology available to create those materials on the fly.
And when you talk about the quickening, that quickening is being matched by the rate of interest, you might say, that these folks are taking a closer eye.
Speaking of scrutiny factor, what we're going to do here in a minute is I'm going to open up the lines and I'm going to see if my audience has been getting this and if they have logical questions for you.
I want you to answer some questions from the audience.
I want to see how the audience reacts to what they've been hearing.
I'll tell you, I can give you my reaction right now.
I feel like a child listening to somebody who has about 100 million miles of knowledge more than I do, knowing only enough to know that I think he knows what he's talking about.
It's like listening to Einstein and not getting it, but knowing that it's right.
Does that come across about...
My guest is Charles Osman.
He's here talking about nanotechnology.
It is a world and a realm that you've got to sit down and adjust to before you can even begin to think about.
Because it has literally, it's molecular manipulation.
And when you can do that, you can do anything.
It's a world that's hard to even contemplate.
So coming up in a moment, your questions for him, if you have one, if you understood enough of this to form one, then come on ahead.
It's going to be very, very interesting.
Music by Ben Thede All right, Charles Ossman is my guest, and it has been quite a couple of hours, and this should be very interesting.
I know precisely where you're going, and I've been through this loop many times.
You can go one of two ways.
It could either homogenize access for everyone, that would be the utopian view, or you would end up with a benign dictatorship with the select few, the techno-elite, who are cybernetically enhanced and who have the inner access that sort of dictate policy to the rest of the planetary population.
And today's unfortunate, not-so-pleasant repository, I mean, if you look at the kind of the dark side of the quickening and you see social degradation plummeting the way it is, you'd have to sort of lean towards the maybe the benevolent dictatorship rule only because it's the one that might work.
I see much of humanity, and this is going to sound very rude and I'm sorry, as being spoiled little brats.
They're kind of, you know, they go to the bathroom in their own living room.
They're poisoning the planet and they're acting stupidly and selfishly and they just have no, they just don't get it.
They don't comprehend that we're living inside of a living organism, the thing called Magaiah, that it should be cared for, that there should be some kind of thing.
I'm not putting someone down for having an alternative perspective, quite the opposite.
And I might point out as well that up until recently, or some time ago actually, there was a group called the Assembly Multitude, founded by a gentleman by the name of Ted Kayler, who's a very wonderful, extraordinarily bright guy.
Okay, I think the answer is that those who have will have it, and those who don't will not, and there will be bigger, more important class distinctions that make today's class distinctions look like nothing.
I want to ask a question about what would be the best way to disseminate information about nanotechnology currently.
Well, this is precisely what I'm trying to do.
That's why I'm on the science advisory board of NanoSync Now.
That's why I write all the writings I do, and I go to various conferences, and that's why I'm teaching a course at San Francisco State.
Well, the reason I ask is I tell fellow students, professors I have, I try to mention nanotechnology to them, and they just kind of blow it off.
They kind of give it like the he-vo.
I think the reasoning is just because as follows, and I want to be careful not to throw stones in a glass house.
Scientific American came out, actually, I don't know if I was.
I actually read it.
Yeah, it was very stupid, and I thought, why are they doing this?
And I'm sad to see Scientific American stumbling around trying to find a new Denny for itself.
It's like they're trying to become a sort of a popular science magazine, which is very sad, because at one point they had extraordinarily high standards.
Unlike the journal Nature, which is a very solid, serious scientific journal, Scientific American Stadium has kind of gotten a little fluffier in their presentation of the journal.
The thing is, nanotechnology is not a singularity.
You can go to the Foresight Institute and talk with Eric Drexler and Ralph Markle and all those folks or visit the website, and you'll see their particular implementation of a diamond order silicon-based nanomechanical machine system, which is probably like the classical vision that most people theorize about nanotech.
That's only one really small, no pun intended, little side note of a much larger plethora of both biological and non-biological systems.
Some of which are self-assembling, some of which are self-organizing, some of which involve machine-like systems, others which involve more evolutionary aspects or like controlled organisms, if you want to look at it from that perspective.
From the last Time you were on this program to this time, what you are talking about now is such a leap from where you were that that really is frightening.
And that's why when we first talked, just before I actually went on the air, I said it's amazingly timely and seminal that you would release your book, The Quickening, because this is like the ultimate metaphor of that process actually occurring, at least in this domain.
Considering how that seems like the majority of the people on our planet don't seem to have the best attitudes and usages for most discoveries, sadly to say, yes, our track record has been pretty bad.
That was actually putting down the fact that most of us are pretty morally corrupt.
My question was, do you think that those monitoring us, as you had mentioned, might decide that perhaps they would want to stop us from progressing to a point where we would be in their backyard and become a problem to them?
I would say that would be a very, in my opinion, if I were in their shoes, and this is how I try to evaluate that, if I had to make that decision, that's where I would step in.
My question was that in listening to Charles, he said when we get to a certain point, we come to ground zero.
My question is this, with human adaptability and the way that humans adapt to new situations and whatnot, what do you see the next step, if we do reach a level of point where it becomes so chaotic that we can't understand it, yet we adapt to it and we meld?
The woman who first came on talking about separation of clashes, this could be one of those separation strata.
In other words, per like Gibson's Blade Runner or something, you have this kind of street level of everybody's just rushing around trying to survive and it's this really strange world where you've got sort of like organo-nanotech on demand as per synthetic organisms running around and all this kind of sort of garden variety stuff is as common as buying a loaf of bread.
And in fact that, in my mind, in fact, how it will play out.
I think synthetic organisms and biobots and quasi-organic entities are going to become as common as something you buy at the hardware store.
That, to me, is like the first round.
Well, that's what's being done now.
I mean, if you want to talk about if somebody's been learning to do X, that's where it's going.
But to get back to your question, if we have to go to the scenario where, okay, you've got this ever more fluidic kind of quasi-chaotic socioeconomic system substrate where there's no permanence in anything and everything is always in a state of flux, there would be a layer above that where that would be sort of like the grid of order, if you will.
And who would occupy that grid of order?
Would it be the autonomous geographically defined nation-state of today?
Here's my model about how things are and where they're going.
And I spend an awful lot of time digesting this.
I mean, I've read every conceivable social economic science literature you can imagine.
And this is why I just a lot of this kind of stuff.
I see three layers.
I see the general population, then a layer above that called government, quote unquote, then a layer above that, which are the real power brokers, the major families, the major corporate entities, like this sort of dark layer above that we don't really see, but we know they're there.
Now that layer called government becomes an ever-thinner veneer.
It's almost like a membrane, which is kind of quasi-porous.
And the power brokers from above simply say, okay, to maintain a certain range of order that we can control to suit our own purposes, we'll allow a certain degree of porosity.
We'll simply plug and play the political components.
We'll buy the candidates we want.
We'll sort of contrive whatever event is necessary to maintain the status quo.
Could you ask Charles, please, Arch, this is by facts, if nanotech could be applied to alter basic matter and shape, for example, to produce fictionalized food replicators, as in Star Trek.
In other words, you're manipulating at the molecular level, so you create, you have a machine, well, I don't know if machine is the right word.
You have a technology that allows creation of food out of biomass.
And here's, and it's a wonderful question, and this is one of the better answers, or have been better visions that I try to, in my, because everybody wants to talk about the dark side, darkness sells.
I want to try to offer something that's, at least a picture.
It takes, you know, 10 times or 12 times to buy a mess to feed a cow from what you actually extract from in terms of nutrition value.
It would make a whole heck of a lot more sense if it was growing the cow as an animal than killing it if you could simply fabricate the stuff that resembles its flesh blackly.
In other words, if I could just grow a steak, now whether that's done with cloning technology or with an actual nano assembly, okay, there could be some arguments about the technology, but that's the kind of thing I'm looking for.
i.e., you have a generic sort of peptide stew, if you will, out of which you can contrive the food substantive choice.
Well, you simply, I mean, all cells are nothing more than a bunch of proteins and peptides and some other what I call organic glue logic that really represents the software of what that cell consists of.
All right, well then, so that my mind can grasp this, does that mean you could take a pile of dirt and throw it in a machine, and it would convert the molecules in the dirt to become steak or whatever else you want?
In other words, if there was enough of the stuff you wanted present in that kind of soil, it depends on the kind of soil you're dealing with, per se.
But I visualize sort of a generic organic gray goo of stars, if you want to call that.
It was like genetic.
You know, you might have like 10 different variations that has a high percentage of protein so you can actually get a meat-like substance out of it, and then you can flavor the meat certain ways.
You know, all these different things, but these are all chemistry processes.
Therefore, once you've mapped in the software of that molecular nature, theoretically, yeah, you can have whatever steak with whatever flavor of something or other.
And that person who just called, and thank you, actually has highlighted the very essence of what I do today.
Corporate CEO types, guys that have gone to the most expensive business, you know, brown school business or whatever, the most, you know, any, you name it, top school, they've gone there, they're parked on a desk, they've got all the, you know, sort of quasi-corporate power one can dream of, and yet they don't know what's going on.
They're pleading for some way to have a crystal ball.
They come to people like me, you know, if you saw me, it'd be quite twice because I have a bunch of hair and a beard going, and they think I'm going to have the answer.
Well, this is the stuff that the future is going to be made of.
Yeah, you're saying that the answer to our question, space travel, does not lie with solid fuel rockets or liquid rockets or any blunder must-bust method like that.
The answer to our disease control, to our longevity, even immortality, to our food supply problems, to everything you can imagine lies not out there, but in here.
Well, it's a new type of techno-scientific discipline where social, science, economics, and 10 or 12 different set of disciplines have to actually be cross-correlated to come up with one contiguous information stream.
Stretch your mind with us a little bit this morning.
What we're talking about is a whole different world.
And I'll illustrate that in a moment.
All right, my guest is Charles Osman.
The subject is nanotechnology.
And first I'm going to give him a very simple question, and then I'm going to give him a question he thoroughly deserves, one I don't even understand myself.
Charles, if I understand what you've been saying correctly, the manipulation of molecules would allow, for example, you to set a nanotechnological army into the task of making gold bars.
Well, you can create gold, but not this way directly.
But let me explain.
In Lawrence Laboratory, where I spent many years in my life when they were, we did make gold.
It was an accelerator.
But it cost tens of thousands of dollars to make one gram.
Why?
Because of the energy it took to propel particles towards a target.
We were breaking apart and rebuilding the nuclei of atoms so that we eventually end up with a resultant atom that had the atomic structure of gold.
Now, with a superconductive accelerator, where the cost of the energy drops to virtually zero, and those superconductors are fabricated with materials that were nanotechnology-created substances, you see how that works?
You wouldn't use the nanotechnology to directly make it.
The Pauli exclusion principle claims no two electrons in an atom may possess the same four quantum numbers.
Since these numbers determine the behavior of electrons in an atom, the principle is used to establish the number of arrangements of electrons in the atomic structure.
Good God.
Are the event horizons going to be connected to said atomic structure, since scalar propulsion technology can fold or flip magnetic fields inside out, unfolding a space-time structure?
Well, I'm going to say that this is not the area of physics I could claim to be a specialist.
Now we're crossing the so-called hyperdimensional domains, and we're talking about, now I have friends that do this concept.
They're theoreticians, and this is their cup of tea.
And they'll talk about things like, right now, us creatures, as of here in the domain that we're familiar with, we are equipped cognitively in a sort of interstitial fabric of awareness.
We can see three spatial and one temporal dimension.
That's what we know about.
That's what we're designed to interact with.
It doesn't mean that there aren't others out there.
And in fact, right here at UC Berkeley, every year a bunch of physicists get together.
They're the kind of physicists that probably would answer this question.
And they say, well, have we resolved special relativity yet?
No, we're getting closer, though.
Let's throw another dimension at it.
So right now they're up to 23 or 24 spatial dimensions and some number of temporal ones.
I don't think we can track this method.
But that's the kind of problem we would solve that way.
My question is, if this technology was released into the public right now, what kind of effect would it have?
Well, that's a very good question, and it's just the kind of question I try to answer fairly often.
The one thing I can start with is saying it's not going to be a one-sing.
This is a really hard thing to get across because unlike, say, nuclear power or some other horrible, poisonous thing that we created because of some manufacturing process, it's not a one-sing issue.
It's going to be a gradation of a whole bunch of things that synergistically interact with each other.
Probably the biologicals are going to be first, followed by competing, changing in a way that can only begin to sort of get the essence of now, which is what I tried to communicate with you earlier.
Material science is suddenly going to have a whole cluster of changes, and they'll come across in very subtle ways.
You know, smart materials, things that learn about you and mold themselves.
Something really simple.
There's a class of materials called polyochlamide gels.
And there will always be a three-tiered system, sort of with the same political model I offered before, only the technology model.
Right now you have the consumer level, stuff that you and I or anyone can have claim in our career button by.
You have the military level, which is like supposedly it's always been around 10 to 12 years out from where the consumer level is.
Then above that you have the sort of the black level, which is stuff that only a few key people really know about and is fed under extremely controlled conditions for certain key homes.
My question is listening to you to, or as Carl, I think, expanded your reality concepts and all of our reality concepts is that I just wondered, have you ever thought maybe this is a natural evolvement, if this has happened before, that we can't really believe that, yes.
Well, I was wondering if we could use the nanotechnology to help clean up the mess we've already made, like little critters that could munch up oil spills.
These are, well, it uses a process called L-system for apples, and I won't bore you with a bunch of math talks.
But the point is, we have, Bruce actually invented this language called NERV, which is a hybrid of vermal, and it has special little hooks in it so you can embed neural net and genetic algorithms within the vermal script.
And you go in, you plant a seed, and this thing sprouts.
There is a world out there.
Listen to this.
There's a world out there right now.
I talk about the virtual terraform.
I'm not kidding.
There's Alpha World populated with over 100,000 people.
I'm one of them.
You can visit me anytime you like.
You can drop into Avatar, say, hi, Charles.
I've got a house called the Temple of Chaos.
There are whole cities.
There's actually a guy that did a satellite, and you can log into the website and see from 50,000 feet up, there's a 5 trillion square meter virtual terraform.
There's cities and there's roads and there's rivers, and people go there.
And they brought the stuff to us and said, okay, what do you think about this?
And we go, well, the best solution we come up with at the time was taking these rods and breaking them up and making little pellets out of them, and then encapsulating them in a special kind of borosloak of glass that would last as long as a half-life of the material.
And then you put these pellets of glass inside of a steel container that doesn't line them up.
And then you bury these pellets.
Well, that's the best we could do at the time.
That's 20 years ago.
And that's probably the solution we're going to go with for a while.
Well, here, and I don't want to get into a physics lecture, but the point is, besides the table of elements, there's a table of nuclides.
These are called the daughter elements.
And when you go into a decay pattern, the reason you're giving off radiation is because there's an imbalance between the number of protons and neutrons in the atom's core.
You could synthetically, I mean, this has never been done that I know of, but I think, again, it's because of energy limitations.
In other words, if you had sort of an infinite energy bandwidth to work with, then you could just break the nuclei apart and put them to where they would decay to the rest form.
I'm calling from inside the Beltway, just across the river from our nation's capital.
Okay.
I've been a regular listener for about two months now.
I guess I'm an Art Bell junkie, and I've heard you talk about some scary stuff, but this is one of the scariest things I've ever heard for a couple of reasons.
Yeah, when it begins dawning on you what you're hearing.
unidentified
Yeah, and Dr. Osmond, I really don't find, I'm not a scientist at all, but I don't find the physics and the science of this all that difficult to follow the way you've explained it tonight.
I mean, I appreciate that because that's what I try to do.
unidentified
Yeah.
The thing is that two things really struck me about this discussion tonight.
The first one is that how quickly the excitement of discovery overwhelms the very great need for reflection about what all this means and what its implication is for us, for the race.
I'm not sure that you guys are the right ones to answer that question.
I mean, in a sense, I might look at you as the military of science, and I might suggest that there needs to be a civilian ethical moral control over you.
How do you respond to that?
That you are not the right ones to be the judge of the ethical control.
As a matter of fact, the course I'm teaching at SF State, which starts in about a month, or not a couple months actually, sort of looks at this.
As I said before, I'm writing this book called Age of Convergence, and this is part of that whole scenario.
In other words, if we do not match a social, philosophical, and even spiritual growth and empowerment grid, if you want to call it, or a fabric that matches the rate at which the technology is growing, then yes, that represents in and itself a failure point of this evolutionary test.
Yeah, but see, I guess I'm suggesting, again, that you are not the right guys to do it because you guys, for the most part, if it can be done, you're going to do it.
Well, some of which I honestly can't even say at this moment.
But there are some folks out there who blindly, in fact, will just fly ahead, and I understand the mentality real well.
I've seen it myself personally.
And is there any methodology of control?
See, for me, there's a membrane here.
The membrane, the porosity of which is controlled by the following things.
If you have too much control where the people that have no scientific knowledge at all makes policy, and I think we're seeing some of that now, some very bad decisions get made and a whole bunch of nonsense occurs that you can't possibly unravel.
On the other hand, if you leave it only to the citadel of technology and they sort of, like the model I described earlier, the corporate power burgers kind of filter it through this little single government and the rest of us sort of subject to it, that could be a nightmare as well.
That gets a void around or cube.
So how do you find this sort of middle ground somewhere?
Pretty tricky question.
I don't claim to have an exact answer, but I think some kind of a governing board where you have a good representation from both sides where they can really agree to find policy that makes good technical sense but has a certain level of ethical quality to it.
You know, what would that governing body look like?
Who would actually create this thing?
What kind of a new bureaucratic structure would arise from?
These are what really, I don't have the answer, but I understand the question.
I wrote a paper once which had to do with I wanted to come up with a theoretical logical lexicon that described layers of complexity.
Imagine this.
And I think I can answer the question the following way.
There is a whole paradigm of what are called foglets and also Legos.
And they're going to go, well, no, no, please.
I'm not kidding.
Dr. Paul Stoddard, who's a professor of chemistry from Oxford, who I met, actually, a great privilege.
And also another fellow by the name of Dr. Shores Hall, who's the guy that invented the term foglet.
These are folks that have come up with these ideas about these ubiquitous nanites, like species of a multitude of species types that at the lowest possible, most highly granular level, can cross-connect and sort of form little clumplets.
And those clumps, as they become more specialized, the cross-compatibility goes down, the specialization goes up.
Those clumplets become macroclumps, which eventually become organelles.
The organelles have very specific functionality and very limited cross-species compatibility.
Those organelles then become sub-organ types, if you will, and you keep going up this ladder of complexity until at some point you reach a quasi-tension threshold, if you will, because you've really constructed the whole organism.
And in fact, after having written up this paper and sort of specified could a language, could a computer language actually be devised, and I actually specified what some of the characters would have to be, I got a phone call from a guy in NanIT of all places that said, I've got this thing called nano assembly, some nano script or something, and he actually sent me some samples of the code, and that's what he was doing.
He was actually writing this code to sort of make that possible.
Now, as it turns out, the reason I got involved with synthetic sensions as an internal process is because of my interest in self-assembly layers of complexity nanomodeling.
It's the end of, I guess I could construct a whole list.
And we would have a society at some point in the future where people didn't multiply, people didn't die, people had everything they needed at their fingertips.
And is that a good place that we will reach, or is it a horror?
Charles Ostman is my guest, the subject nanotechnology, the world inside.
The world that only a few are exploring right now.
Not the one that blasts rockets into space using solid fuel, but a world where you would manipulate molecules, create an artificial event horizon, and defy gravity.
A world where on the internet, organisms will begin to live and function.
Sentient organisms.
Organism?
Maybe the wrong word.
I don't know.
I'm way over my head, but it's fun.
A world in which farmers would be out of business because food would simply be ordered to be created from a sort of molecular soup.
A very different world indeed.
All right, once again, here is Charles Osman.
Charles, I'm going to ask you a question that must be asked.
Somebody sent it, Margaret sent it from Riverside, California, and it's almost a threat, but it's one that I understand.
She says, what your guess, I mean, you're talking about the manipulation of molecules, and you're talking about the creation of sentient life.
What your guest is forgetting is that the moment such a threat is felt, the millions of Christians and others who believe in the supremacy of God are going to unite, and that's going to be the end of any such threat as your guest is forecasting.
From the previous era, the woman who first talked about the stratification of classes, that'll harden that separation.
Do you think that the folks who really are at the inner core of these realms of development could care less about a bunch of a horde of religious, you know, whatever's out there causing some sort of mayhem?
Of course not.
Come on, wake up.
This is what makes this stuff what it is.
It's not a single box or a machine or even a single building.
It's a fabric.
just like the mycelia of a mold growing throughout the skin of an orange, there is no one thing that you're going to uproot and turn off the flesh and say, oops, we just turned it off.
We have a...
What is being spawned out there goes far beyond the connectivity of what happens inside of a kingdom human brain.
Well, this was the model I was trying to come up with a little while ago.
And again, because I'm working on convergence, you're working on quickening, you know, I'm looking at knowledge space or function space, and you're looking at time space.
Both of which are being compressed, and therefore, the traditional orthogonal models of this three-layered process where you have the consumer-grade technology followed by 10-tilers out from there, you've got this military domain, then 10-tilers from that, you've got this sort of black domain.
Well, that timeline may still be the same, but the complexity of functionality may exactly going up.
Well, even now, I mean, everything from the Clipper chip to all kinds of nonsense.
And I can't tell you the content, I'm sorry.
But they came to me and said, well, Charles, we know you know a lot about, oh, and by the way, you talked earlier about what was that guy's name Kramer, the guy who was doing the fractal compression stuff.
Well, there's a lot more to fractal compression than just compressing an image.
Converting something to a fractal set actually allows you to store a series of equations which themselves can be examined for certain types of key points without actually looking at the image itself.
Therefore, it's an encrypting as well as a content-addressable data streaming process.
And I said, well, there are technologies that have been designed that can fulfill this process, and it would cost X dollars, and I'd have to have some other engineers and so on.
But in other words, I've actually been asked these kinds of questions.
If you want to go up a step from this, I call it the ubiquitous data grid.
To me, the scariest thing for the micromoment is the national ID card that also becomes the electronic currency card into which you have then embedded your entire genetic code, your history of your family, any physiological and or even mental things that are part of your family's history.
That immediately gets fed into the matrix of the insurance process.
And we're starting from the bottom to build up with some ideas of what we can do with this technology.
And from there, we figure out more things what we can do.
Let's start from the top down.
I think as a human race, which hasn't caught up morally or socially with the technology, I think that we have to start asking ourselves, in a universal sense, what does the universe want from all its beings scattered around its space?
I have an answer for you.
And okay, and with this abstract, let me finish.
The idea of starting, okay, what is the main thing that we as the cosmos, becoming conscious of itself, looking back at itself, what do we need to do with this technology based on where we need to go to and then back engineer what our capabilities are on a molecular and atomic level to give us some sort of meaning in that sense.
In other words, give us guidance to go towards something.
I have spent many hours pondering this very question.
Yeah, so here's an answer that I'm going to offer just me, Charles, the guy, saying this is what I thought of.
And I have a friend of mine who's kind of my counterpart.
We're developing these self-evolving machines, and so we've gone for a lot of this kind of argumentation.
My thought was, why do we exist?
We have to have a purpose.
I mean, a bunch of matter came together, you know, this cloud of dust formed a star and some planetoids, and these light forms appeared and gray.
I mean, there's a reason for this process.
I do believe there's a macro intelligence.
I think we are, on a solar system level, like a cell within a much larger body.
And maybe that's what God is, this sort of macro superentity.
Fine.
We are the sensory organs of that God creature.
There is joy and sorrow extracted from the multitudinous experiences that we vicariously absorb and pass on to this sort of higher entity.
But the significance of this entire planet and all the comets and other parts of the ecosystem, it's a blink of the eye, a grain of sand in the beast.
If the entire planet stops tomorrow, okay, it'd be like a momentary loss.
Well, so I've got an order of experimental right.
However, I don't place that much importance, frankly.
If we fail as an organism, it's like a Petri dish where the formula wasn't quite right.
That's why this profound question has to be figured out before we do anything.
We know that we're on the brink of being able to do anything we want conceptually.
We need to be able to, and this is where Art's book comes in and the UFO question and everything else, we need either guidance or some information to know what is the most important thing this universe has to go toward and then figure out how we can be part of that in order to maintain our existence and not get ahead of ourselves.
Well, I wish that such a utopian thing were possible.
I must say that statistically I think it's a fairly slim, I think, you know, out there in the Gaussian curve, we're still like in the middle somewhere, and I think it's a lot few that kind of get past the filter as well.
However, the question that Art and I were debating back and forth previous hour about, well, if we were a dog to my map, what would be the point if they decided to drop in and say, okay, nothing authority, they could go one of two ways.
They could either in a very dictatorial fashion simply illuminate whatever the problem is, including us, and say, okay, that's that, we're done.
Or perhaps if they think it's enough here worth salvaging, and that's a good question mark, they might give us a little pra and say, okay, well, here's the purpose and why, and blah, blah, blah.
I think, though, that we're designed, that as part of the macro design, we're supposed to kind of swobble amongst ourselves and sort of make a mess and then see if we can clean up the mess and go, you know, clumsily, if you will.
And at the same time, it depends on what we can learn within a very short amount of time versus the learning tools that are being allowed to be fed into the public world now.
I mean, the school I'm teaching at, FF State, they've got this wonderful media lab there.
And the guy who runs it, a very nice fellow by the name of Terry Tommy, by the way, he's the technology director there.
He and I have a very similar focus on how he wants to use these conveyance tools, you know, 3D interactive environments and verbal and all these wonderful kind of content-based ways of delivering experiential content as a knowledge conveyance process that couldn't be had any other way.
You know, he heard me talking, he said, wow, you know, like, this is me.
We just had this sort of instantaneous recognition that this was the value.
If enough folks like that are in positions of academic interest, let's say, and they can open the doors to enough people that are the movers and shakers that are going to sort of construct the fabric of the virtual terraform, yeah, there is a potential where the benign aspects of this really can be brought to play.
I would at least like to be one of the participants on that benign side of the fence.
But from the hard, cold reality, as you put it, statistically, are we above the 50% mark?
As far as Art's question to you about how far down the line do you think that this sentient being is going to come into existence, I think probably five years back.
Actually, depending upon the particular qualifiers you would add to the form and to say this qualifies with a threshold, yeah, you're probably right.
And I can tell you why.
Because enhanced decision rendering under duress is a very, very specific target goal that a number of development teams was being paid a bottom-up pit budget to solve.
I can give you one example and others I can't because they're classified, but one that I sort of can allude to just tangentially.
At the ICS down in Los Angeles, I saw an example of a synthetic environment populated with, get this now, 10,000 synthetic sentient entities.
These were little dots on the screen, but they represented individual soldiers who, acting as autonomous agents, you know, were dealing with real battlefield-like conditions.
They had little squadrons with the commanders and the little groups that were running around and do things.
The model they're going for this year, 50,000.
That's a computational problem.
That's a real eyeball scratcher, but they're doing it.
unidentified
And can I ask, since you have such extensive scientific background, your opinion on someone, say like at the home brew level, for example, being able to access technology just from an electronic store?
It's going to be a functionality matrix that you connect to with a box that's smarter than the one that you've got now.
But the intelligence at the box size is only going to be to sort of facilitate the interface in the localized process engine that connects to an easily scalable process engine out there.
But what bothers me about all this now, if you project the present state of this growing web of the internet that we've got, and you were to project even a fraction of the number of troublemakers out there.
and what sounds like science fiction, but I can assure you is not, except perhaps in the minds of those who are hearing it projected to its natural future course.
Well, I call them belief barriers, and different types of belief barriers are driven by different types of cognitive cues.
So yes, a lot of work's gone under this.
I mean, there are some very serious efforts and then more light-hearted efforts in terms of game developers and people who want to create interactive remote environments in entertainment specifically.
When you go into an immersive environment, you go in there willingly, already sort of predetermined to want to sort of engage yourself with this other stuff that's out there.
And depending upon how well that environment was designed, it doesn't have to be photorealistic or anything like this.
It just depends on how your attention is drawn to a particular event.
And I suggest, even though the majority of interactive entertainment products up until recently have all been more or less for the adolescent male whose primary interest in life was, can I blow something up or can I drive the fast car or can I fly my airplane, the reward for participation was based upon some kind of score-driven, very rapid, very biokinetically-oriented strategy with a sort of a military overtone to it.
And I'm suggesting to you that in the very near future, the reward for participation is going to be the depth of emotional engagement with the other entities that are in this world that you've now decided to become part of.
And with that kind of a cue, believe me, the invocational rapture, as I put it, has a far more compelling, you know, it's like layers of an energy.
It reaches right inside of you, and you actually become really enamored to what's going on there.
This is the hope.
This is the kind of design strategy that people have in mind.
Well, if you want to hear the really sort of sleazy bottom feeders end of this whole thing, there are people out there that whose whole enterprises, how can we make a virtual shopping mall where the agent slash avatar entity uses very,
very clever sort of Roshar chart sort of psychographic measurement processes to kind of steer you through the store, get you to buy all this stuff, especially if you've got an online interactive real-time credit card transactional exchange movement, which is what they have in mind.
And people who are addicted to credit cards now are just out there in the physical world.
This is like heroin or something.
This is like pumping the needle right into the vein.
And do I like what I'm seeing coming along these lines?
No.
I mean, I agree that how does one craft some kind of content regulatory set of rules?
I cringe when I think about First Right Amendments being violated and so on, and yet I do understand all too well what this website of this coin could look like.
So I don't have an exact answer, but I think over time this is one of the tests that we are being collectively forced to endure.
I want to ask Dr. Osgood what he thinks the timeline is before these.
I'm sure many of these things are already occurring clandestinely.
What does he think the timeline is on something like the ability to spray one's roof with a substance that would be a photovoltic cell?
And what would happen to the power structure of the power companies, et cetera?
The amount of, the horrible amount of, they would be absolutely against this, the oil companies.
And I'm just wondering if the way to do it would be to put it out on the net like you have Microsoft Word, you download it, and you pay a certain amount, and that way we cut these buggers out of the picture.
They keep producing better versions of it because the lifetime of the material, it's UV sensitive and so on, degrades, rippley seasons of exposure, and it essentially falls apart, but it's so cheap that you can just replace it and throw the old ones away.
So that's just a matter of degree.
In terms of the larger picture, the decentralization of these control systems, and I think that's what the guest is.
I see it all as a series of gradients, that depending upon the type of commodity in question, there will be a certain surrendering to a less centralized process of distribution.
Now, the oil companies aren't necessarily going to be so bent on the photovoltaic paint, if you want to call it that.
Although it's not exactly the right term of words, the polymer really.
That's fine.
But the thing that might get their ire a little more on Edge, if superconductive motors could be made cheaply and effectively to the point where a very small couple of batteries like you would have in a car now, see the electric cars you have now are hopeless.
They're completely out of the picture.
They take 3,000 pounds of batteries and the motors are very inefficient and you get 100 miles of radius and that's about it.
It's completely stupid.
But if you had a motor with superconductive windings in it, hey, then all of a sudden a solar panel and a couple of batteries, you're in business.
Now that, that would really get the attention of a whole bunch of folks whose power base and status phone, yes, would be turned upside down.
Well, it performed the process of being a thermal to kinetic converter, i.e.
the crystals in the metal could be cycled between a hot phase and a cold phase and would perform work in both directions.
We built solar-powered motors.
I have one here in my basement.
It's one of the few that still exists.
We proved, you know, through a series of experiments that were quite valid, that given enough resource and a few more engineers and so on, we could essentially build engines that could run off of hot and cold water.
The thermal grating between a black body collector and, say, well water worked quite effectively.
But, I was there.
I physically was there.
I did it.
I actually have one since here in my house now, just a little small model of one.
They not only terminated the project, this is DLE mind you, they not only terminated the project, all records of its existence were scoured clean.
I mean, this was from this building called Special Projects, and they just, you know, the file counts were taken away, all the night and all stuff was taken away.
My friend who directed the project actually went off and started a company called China Alloy, where they now make, you were asking earlier some time ago, about the devices that go through the bloodstream and scour out plaque and that sort of thing.
Well, they make little micromotors and things of that size using the shape-changing alloy as the actuator component.
Well, you see, their actions imply that they understand clearly the implications of that technology, which implies to me that they already have that technology and they saw you coming up on something that they weren't ready for you to come up on.
Well, and I'm not suggesting you're wrong about that.
And to the caller's credit, I think what he's trying to get at is could the Internet be used as a kind of a liberation tool so that you don't have these controls.
Bless you for having people like Dr. Charles on that the intellectual flow.
If only we had friends around more that we could talk with.
There's a couple things here, and then I have a question for him.
But it's interesting.
About three years ago, I was talking with somebody that was talking about organic rug.
Rugs that if you dropped food on it, it would gobble it up.
Coming in the future sometime when we can get this whole thing more together, you see, it would gobble up dust, just small particles that wouldn't nibble your toes or anything.
Well, this is what Shor Hall's thing was all about.
Shore Hall, I'm sorry.
He has this thing called the foglet theory, and he has this whole paradigm, these little nanomechanical gases that are like dust particles themselves.
They just drift around, and they're designed to sort of like encounter something and neutralize it.
It could be microbes, it could be dust particles, it could be any number of things that these foglets are sort of designed to encounter and then in some way make them less harmful than they currently are.
He also, of course, has gone into quite a bit of theoretical concepts about how to have foglets that assemble on queue to a macro object that can sort of, you know, in a benign way do something, neutralize something else that's undesirable.
Nobody has done this yet, but at least the thinking has gone to the direction.
The only problem with that, of course, and the thing that worries me is, here it is, ladies and gentlemen, the rug that eats food that gets spilled, little particles of dust and all the rest of it.
But then somehow, ten years later, something horribly goes wrong with the rug and it kills every living thing on it.
And I mean, that might be kind of a comical example, but I can see where things like, and I've had people come to me with all kinds of ideas.
They want to have clothes where the cloth changes color like it's million.
I mean, in the nano world, sure, why not?
What the heck?
You could have shape-changing dinnerware that, you know, instead of a cup, it becomes a saucer or something.
Well, I don't know.
I mean, it's just completely ridiculous.
But you cross a certain threshold, and it's like, well, anything goes.
But as I said at the very beginning of the program, every time you encounter another one's increments, just remember, there's always a risk value, and the size of the gain usually is matched rather exactly by the size of the risk value.
About an hour ago, you had a caller from Inside the Beltway who was just gloom and doom.
He was frightened to death by these things.
I think that's a reflection of where he's located and possibly his job.
You know, a lot of these concepts have been covered in science fiction previously.
The Stardance trilogy by Spider and Jeannie Robinson comes clearly to mind.
The opposite of a terrorist is a rapturist.
The opposite of someone who would use these technologies for destruction is someone who would blithely use them to make everybody rich and make everybody happy.
And that's a sign of higher intelligence as far as I'm seeing.
Well, in a sense, I think you're right.
And the people that come to my class, I've given a number of lectures, and I've traveled or I've gone to other conferences and so on.
And when I give one of my talks, what interests me is this really broad and diverse range of people that come in from really completely seemingly unrelated aspects of life, from serious scientists to social workers to people that just do ordinary daily work, but they have a particular philosophy that seems to match and connect well with this vision.
And what you're saying kind of makes sense, i.e., if we weren't interfered with by powers that be that don't like their apple cartoning etc, yes, this could be the implementation task.
But this is kind of where the un and the end of this whole process comes in.
Technically, is it possible to enrich the daily life of the average person via this technology matrix?
Absolutely.
I'd love to do that.
But will we be allowed to?
Well, there is a bit of an already used the word war.
That could be a little strong, but yes, I kind of.
Yes, judging from what's coming out of Berkeley in the past, like, you know, the nuclear testing, the plutonium you stuck up to the black porter's leg, you know, that he had to live with.
He didn't even check up on him for, you know, 25 years he lived with it and finally died.
And then this ice lady from Lawrence Livermore lab on Hazel O'Barry's hearing.
You know, the black lady, his daughter was on there saying, you know, she doesn't want to hear how this guy was a hero for the Cold War.
And then her exiting statement there was, he sure was a hero of the Cold War.
This is what you people do.
Nothing is ever good has ever come out of Berkeley or Stanford.
If you look into the background of who those people, who those institutions are named for, your new spiritualism is sickening.
The curriculums that have come out of Stanford are totally sickening.
more Lytton's the one that popularized that synergism craft.
It proves that 2 and 2 is 5.
I'm reading it right here in the sovereign state of ITT.
I'm reading all these books.
You know, I missed out on the 60s.
I was blissed out or something.
But I'm going over this whole Earth catalog, this new Millennium edition, and every horrible, you know, this facilitator and group think and everything is this whole religion you're putting out.
Like if you're going to save the world, you never saved the world.
I can always say that I feel sorry for the caller because I think that she's been so overwhelmed, perhaps, by an incredibly diverse range of stuff that she's suddenly absorbed.
In other words, it's difficult to argue with anyone if, A, there's a lack of cohesive logic, if you will, and B, people have to be able to do that.
I think that people, because they see a symbol of something, they blom onto this entire world and say, oh, okay, that's the orifice to which all this evil comes.
The reality is, I'll follow, and I'm going to do the best I can.
unidentified
Where do you get your money?
You get your money from politicians and these corporate foundations.
Where do you get your money to do this horrible research?
I know how it is when people are sort of in an isolated world and they just see this huge plethora of something they kind of go like they can't grapple on.
They had an easy point of reference.
And the thing I might want to share, just to respond in the best way possible.
Well, she, look, she went off the deep end, but the one comment that I really thought was a relevant question, and one that you probably ought to think about yourself, was whether you are, in fact, the cancer, the virus.
When I was doing some work at Livermore and people that I knew from that environment, and we were designing components for some of the SEI switches, the thought was, oh, God, we're the death mongeres.
We're causing all this horrible stuff to occur.
And especially if somebody lives a bomb in the park.
The response is that no, we were the surgeons who were trying to create the best precise machines to neutralize the other machines that could be pressed upon it, that would, in fact, cause death.
Okay, but Charles, are you sure that that was not the delusional psychology that was delivered to you in order that you might do what you were doing, justify in your own mind what you were doing?
On the part of that lady, again, Charles, is there, do you acknowledge the possibility that the route you've been talking about, the science route, the one she complained bitterly about and finally lost it altogether, might be the wrong route and that the right route, the one we're supposed to be on, is not a scientific route.
It's not one that leads to molecular manipulation, but one that is spiritual instead.
And that's, I think, where that woman sailor from was.
She was so completely overwhelmed and just absolutely, you know, everything was this horrible thing.
Nothing is an absolute.
Things are always taken and balanced.
And I think that if you try to go down one path to the extreme exclusion of another, that in and of itself is a flaw, that's sort of like a design flaw, if you will, and that's the failure point of the organism.
And the whole idea of being able to contrive gravity well events, et cetera.
Well, I think in general, although again, this is not the area physics I'm familiar with, the theory being that once you've crossed into this other domain where you can sort of bend gravity and bend time, yeah, at that point, time and gravity are sort of interchangeable.
I wouldn't rule it out, but I'm not qualified to get it.
I think the interpretation that I'm willing to accept, and I've heard a whole handful of them, is that a black hole is sort of like a perforation into another dimension, or another dimension set, you might say.
I think it's another one of those sort of no-holes bars where once you cross a certain threshold and suck a Pandora spot, all these things happen on the side.
Well, I would just comment on that to say that it's a call to reality, no matter what you believe.
My purpose for trying to communicate this stuff at all, because I'll tell you flat out, most of the people I work with and or have become familiar with, they don't talk at all.
They see me as being kind of out there because I mean, willingly try.
I feel compelled to want to try because I feel it's an obligation to do so.
I feel like I'm coming from other worlds, almost like Marco Polo or something, or some other domain, and I bring little trinkets back and say, well, look at this little thing that I catch up as a kind of a symbolic reference to this other realm out there that you might want to know about.
I don't necessarily have to do this, but I feel if I've been allowed the privilege to have been experienced all these different parallel development streams, and there's a handful of folks that sort of have this kind of broad-based, multi-threaded technical background, but at the same time feel the desire and perhaps have the, I don't know, the sense of articulating to bring it out into the outside world.
If I've been allowed that gift, or whatever you want to call it, then I feel like it's my obligation to try to use it in some kind of way.
Well, I'd like to make two comments, if I may first.
Sure.
unidentified
Okay, well, it goes with the other callers.
Well, the one part is what I believe is that if Charles wasn't doing this and the people with Charles, there would be the other people, and everybody's looking at the bad things.
And I think that the folks that I hang around with her, try to hang around with her if possible, are the benign side, if you want to call it that.
I can say to the, on behalf of the woman who was granting raving, yeah, there is a really dark side out there.
I completely understand this.
And what made it so sad was that she was so blinded by that sense that she was completely incapable of trying to sort out that there are individual human beings that, God help us all, at least there's a handful of them in there, who do see that we have to correctly manage this arena that we're about to be thrust into.
Otherwise, all bets are off.
And so for all, you know, I try to encourage as many people as possible who might take an interest in some of this to become informed, underline the word informed, participants.
unidentified
And my other comment was, well, just sort of in defense or whatever of what I believe, that pretty much everything, and I don't mean this to offend anybody, but even religion, you know, can be scary.
You were asking some time ago about binding neural tissue to artificial devices.
This has been done for years now.
Gregory Pozak over here at Stanford at the Integrated System Development Group has been doing this for several years.
There's a person by the name of Peter Fromhert, the Maxwell Science Institute in Germany, who's doing this.
There's a company actually called, what's simply BCI Inspire, both as a service can now provide, if you walk in the door and say, here's a silicon device or some other device that has microscale features and I want to entice neural fibers to actually bond to these items and have them useful in some kind of sensory prosthesis or neural repair kind of capacity, you know, you just tell them the spec and they essentially manufacture the device for you on demand.
In fact, IEEE Spectrum published a piece about three and a half, four months ago on retinal implants.
That's an area I've been looking to myself for some time.
The University of Utah tried a teacher several years ago.
In fact, the NIH has been financing or supporting neural prosthesis systems going back 12, 13, 14 years.
The problems that are most often encountered, in fact, I just gave a talk in Texas along with a couple of other fellows, including the developer of the copier implant.
And we had a very long chat afterwards.
The talk was over, Dr. Robert Shannon is the name.
And the idea is not so much can we get the right biocompatibility interface between device X and tissue X. Usually, particularly with nerve bundles, can we find the right nerves and quickly get them to hook up in the right way?
And I've noticed the last few months, ever since I first heard the term the quickening, I guess my first thought was that it was something out of Highlander the movie or something.
But once, I mean, since the months have passed on, I do definitely see what you're talking about.
First, with the discovery, well, I won't call it a discovery, but the whole deal with cloning and everything and the whole ethical issue behind cloning.
I wonder how quickly someone would say, no, it's wrong, it's bad.
Speaking of nanotechnology, if they were faced with some kind of deathly illness, you know, something that could kill them, and maybe they've lost an arm or something like that.
What you're trying to say is it's very easy to armchair and say, okay, because of these high moral standards, you have to obey law expert for me personally, well, I want that arm.
There was a public service announcement that was running not very long ago, folks, that said, and I'm going to have to paraphrase it, but it was a guy who needed a heart transplant.
And he was discussing, so I bet you heard this.
He was discussing with his doctor about the heart transplant.
And he said, oh, just, Doc, one thing.
I don't want a heart from a Jew.
I don't want a heart from a black guy.
I don't want a heart from an American native.
You know, it's got to be a white guy's heart.
And the doc said, well, then you're going to die.
And he immediately did a little rethinking on the subject.
You're saying, my gosh, if we hatch a clasybrow component for intracellular corrective chemistry, could the thing mutate and suddenly end life as you know?
Those are the risks versus, and I'm not saying we should do that.
I'm just saying in the ruminations of theoretical considerations as to how things could be done, viruses do provide an interesting framework with which to build some kind of molecular scale machine that could perform tests.
I'll tell you what scares me about that kind of a scenario.
And that's not that far off from the kind of scenario I personally have kind of trepidations about.
Here in this country, or let's say in most sort of stabilized Western countries where you have some motto of everyone within the community sort of knows each other, there's a sense of community sort of, more or less, in that domain, probably not.
It would definitely be something where somebody might be playing inside of a secure facility, but they would just play and get that far.
But in some other country, perhaps, where the standards weren't quite that tightly maintained, where the interstitial bureaucracy that deals with this kind of stuff.
Iraq, or whatever.
God help us.
In that environment, I could see a biohazard suddenly popping up where they don't particularly care if the results are benign or not.
They just kind of want to make a go of it and see how it turns out.
That to me is really, you know, we have enough, you want to get scared about something.
Right now we have from the former Soviet bloc, especially from Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, areas of that nature, this unbelievable flood of nuclear components and former nuclear scientists.
I mean, the Pandora, talk about Pandora's blocks, we've gone way beyond that edge.
And this is really frightening.
And I think that we have any number of Tinhorn dictators and or their cohorts that even now, you know, they've got some stuff bashed away.
If they wanted to make a bomb, they probably could under duress.
I mean, it's not only ridiculous, but it kind of, how am I going to phrase this carefully, it shows how inept we are in even understanding what's at stake.
Wildcard line, you're on the air with Charles Osman.
Hi.
unidentified
Well, hi, good morning, Art.
Good morning.
This is Bob in Las Vegas.
Hello, Bob.
Charles, I've been interested in nanotechnology for four or five years now.
The one question that I don't think you've answered yet tonight, and I'm really curious about, is how do you go about manipulating the molecules and the atoms at that level that you can't see them?
What kind of answer is that you can't come up with a very good question that I have to answer for you.
From the Internet, growing into what it's going to be shortly, to nanotechnology, which would seem to have no limit in terms of discussion about what we can do.
The AFM is an atomic force microscope, and the STM is a scanning tunneling electron microscope.
In both cases, well, okay, I have to differentiate now.
In the case of the STM, imagine, if you will, a conical-shaped tip, almost like a needle that you use for playing on a phonograph record, or vinyl record, Yes.
Only on a much smaller scale.
Now, as it turns out, electron flow, or electrostatic charge, if it's a better choice of words, through open space...
has an extremely linear relationship between the distance between the two conductive surfaces and that charge surface therefore if you have a feedback loop that controls a device that can move this tip up and down in extremely precise increments by keeping the charge constant you really can draw a topographical feature map of whatever it is that the thing is standing across up down to the molecular and atomic level.
Now by changing the charge status ever so carefully you suddenly can pick up the molecule in question and sort of rest it out of its little mess that's embedded in it.
Now where things get a little bit fuzzy is one tip at a time, that's a real slow way to do things.
But if you have an array of tips, thousands, perhaps millions, all actuated simultaneously, the problem there has been up until recently, I underlined the word until recently, maintaining atomic precision on a tip-to-tip basis.
In other words, each tip has to have almost identical features, topologies, size, volumetric displacement, et cetera.
But recent discoveries at Caltech and elsewhere have made the commonality of feature sets between tips much more manageable.
Even now, as we talk, we're talking about arrays where they have hundreds of tips, and I happen to have a personal friend who's right in the very middle of all of his work.
Well, you've just answered the riddle of the atomic force microscope because the ASM, instead of measuring charge status as a control feedback process, it instead uses a little, this is hard to explain, but it uses a very, very small, and I do mean small, bendable cantilever at the end of which you can attach the molecule of choice.
That molecule will then have an attractor-like effect upon the other molecules they're interacting with, and particularly for biological procedures, this is a wonderful way to go.
You can use peptides and enzymes and all kinds of things.
Now, there's a third sort of in-between stage.
There's a company called Cellular Robotics, Los Alamos.
I just happened to know the folks that started the company.
And they're using laser light to perform molecular scale, sort of like what you might call sezzing and reattachment.
It used to be that if you're going to do gene splicing, you've selected enzymes to sort of break apart the gene pair of choice and reconnect it again.
But it's kind of sloppy and kind of messy.
It's a solution-based process.
It's a laser light, you really, on an almost a mechanical basis, shine light at the right molecular junction site, and you really do either take it apart or put it back together.
So all three of these processes can work together depending upon the assembly process.
And the point I think that the caller really exposed, and this is appropriate, is that we're right at the very threshold of being able to build machines that build the other components of the machine.
And yes, when we cross that threshold, yes.
That's where the real velocity, the quickening occurs.
If I had been sharper, I would have probably caught onto that.
unidentified
Yeah, but also, you know, it's like there's it's not I can't think of how and it's not a personal thing at all, but I don't understand how you can use reality to disprove reality.
You know, just and I guess in a sense, I'm just trying to understand, is this technology the people who are in charge or in control of this technology, are they going to be respectful of the individual's rights on the earth or is it going to be dropped away for the better of this science?
And again, this is sort of like the obvious question of question is because, again, we're not talking about a single thing or a single, you know, like one company made this gadget and suddenly changed the world.
It's not like that at all.
It's the extreme opposite.
It's an incredibly diverse plethora of different technologies which converge, hence that's why I'm writing the book, Agent Convergence, because that's the process I'm trying to describe.
And the rate of convergence is an acceleration record, just like Art harps upon the time factor.
I harp upon the convergence factor, and the two synergistically interact, by the way.
But the point is that it's this synergy grid that allows a bunch of different laboratories using 12 different types of technologies to sort of like invent a technology matrix that could not have existed even, say, five years ago.
There is no single authority or body.
Now, what may come out of this, potentially, is certain classes of technologies, which have unusually far-reaching implications, may end up being, you know, sort of taken over by some entity that says we want to now control such.
But the way that this is evolving, as I see it to be, the Internet is kind of like a model, it's like a training session, if you will.
We're being trained because of the fact that we're being drawn to this Internet in the essence with the human species.
And it is such a decentralized, interconnected series of functionalities that the nano domain is kind of like that as well.
In other words, you're not going to see, as in the case of oil, these giant, you know, huge, multi-billion dollar facilities that have to drain oil out of the ground to refine it.
No, it's the exact opposite.
I could have a nano foundry sitting here in my living room the size of a shoebox or less.
And there could be endless numbers of them in all different types.
Well, that's the essence of how I see this being played out.
unidentified
I understand, and that makes sense.
And I'll tell you, I and a lot of people that I know stand, I can speak for a lot of people listening right now, we stand very firmly with our bell as individuals, but also in step with our bell.
And if you can prove to us the same thing that you will respect the rights or respect humanity and not be above it or below it, we'll stand by you too, because it's an incredible science and art.
You're going in the greatest directions.
I'm so glad that the way things are going.
And I'm not going to ask you how you're doing either.
You have, I mean, certain categories of stuff I could say, well, in the biological range, sure.
I mean, there should be some way of registering.
For instance, just the one slim little area of synthetic organisms, should there be a regulatory, like the FDA or something, that says if you're going to invent an organ that has to be registered, and is it some sort of codified classification process?
Yeah, sure.
I mean, obviously, I think that we, clearly in the realm of the biologicals, there's a lot of, I think, pretty standard sorts of regulatory practices that could be deployed.
Where it gets a little fuzzier, of course, is when we start inventing things that are really, really different than the kinds of things we're normally used to now.
And this is kind of the area that I was trying to allude to some time ago.
It's not just that we can replicate something or kind of make a somewhat different version of something that we currently have.
It's when we start inventing things that just don't exist at all, you know, new classes of materials, you know, very, very complex machines that are partly organic and partly inorganic, and they have self-propagating properties and, you know, whatever.
I mean, it's just a wide puffer of things.
How you invent a bureaucracy system that tracks along with the evolution.
I mean, right now, even with the most mundane technologies, It's taken years for, say, the patent office to sort of catch up with the current day world of things.
We've had tremendous problems with the State Department being bright enough to sort of understand what a supercomputer is versus what a desktop computer is.
I remember earlier times, and this seems laughable.
But these are mundanely simple things compared to the kind of stuff that will be inventable in the near future.
Should there be some kind of nano-authority registration system that you could define if it had X amount of nano-related processes in its manufacturing cycle, it therefore qualifies as a nano thing that therefore has to be subject to this bureaucracy?
And being somewhat computer illiterate, it even is more so.
But, you know, I was just wondering, being able to replicate a lot of things, like he was talking about, meat, for instance, wouldn't that make a lot of things obsolete?
I had alluded to earlier that as we transition into what I refer to as the virtual asset-based commodity economic system, which will be spawned from the virtual terraform, and I don't know how far, how many hours ago, I've been on the air now for five hours.
I think in hour number two, I was kind of coming about it.
Okay, well, again, I'm kind of fading away, so I can't go through the detail of it all.
But the point is that, yes, there will be, in my opinion, a layer of chaos.
We're going to be transitioning away from these orthogonal, hard asset-based, geographically defined, autonomous nation-state-based economy systems and going into a completely different realm.
But that transitional layer, and it may be chaos.
And there will be a lot of fallout.
It will be a lot of restructuring by it.
I already accept that to be the case.
And I know that this coincides with, just interestingly not, with the same time limit all the other prophecy folks are talking about with the European North Carolina.
Who knows what these things are going to coincide with?
But at least in my world, from the stuff that I'm aware of that I can theorize and draw charts and say, this I can prove because of these theorems, this is the world I'm familiar with.
And it is interesting that it does coincide.
I must admit, I hear these things and I go, well, is there a macro pattern to all this?
unidentified
Well, you know, as it is, I think people are bombarded with so much information these days that it's hard for people to process it all.
Well, this is what I was talking about in hour number three, about the concept of synthetic sentience becoming a common resource, a strategically necessary resource, because the volume and complexity of knowledge processing will go beyond human capacity.
That's precisely why we'll be drawn into a human Internet synthesis.
Yes, it has been a very favorite collection of folks, I'm not saying.
It is very.
I'm sort of a guest technology-based guy.
I started reading Scientific American when I was 10 years old, back in 66.
It blows my mind to this day that, I mean, a Scientific American used to be relevant for a good two or three years, so anybody who bought them saved them forever.
And now I look at the Scientific Americans that I get in the mail, and after a few months, they're sort of like, why bother?
It's obviously nothing.
I call it knowledge velocity.
Exactly.
This is part of the quickening.
I've got a question to pose to you.
It sounds a couple times you've made a sort of tangential reference to being somewhat ostracized in your own scientific community for taking a stand other than the majority.
Well, I do have certain, what I would call, ethical or moral criteria that I think should be rules that everyone would want to abide by.
But to the extent that a lot of folks, I mean, for instance, a lot of the folks that I work with or run into at various symposiums don't know that I write for magazines like Mondo and so forth.
And if they did, they'd be horrified.
So I really have to kind of play this rather careful, delicate game where I don't want to lie to anybody.
I never want to misrepresent anything.
But I might be careful about how I reveal what I'm doing just because it's the only way I can get access to the world that they are embedded in.
I understand.
I am in somewhat in the same realm where I deal in construction and law and technology and very comfortable in this year.
I understand the protocol that you're talking about.
But as I get older, I'm now 41, I realize that the technology I don't have to worry about because I can, if you sneeze today, the technology passes you by, but it doesn't take more than a few weeks to catch up on every week lost.
It's pretty simple that way if anybody's willing to study enough.
So I don't worry about that.
But I know one thing, that the moral, ethical, spiritual questions sit there silently and they will wait there until I'm done with my folly to address the real issue.
And this is perhaps part of the test that we're about to be tried by, i.e., and if you want to go into the...
I'm not a religious person by nature per se.
I mean I have my own personal internal spiritual belief system.
Just to kind of get an overview to see, you know, what were these things all about?
I noticed that there are certain common features.
No matter how divergent or culturally different by what lens their particular interpretation of the general rule system was, the rule systems themselves had certain common features, certain moral codes and ethics that were common to all cultures.
And, interestingly enough, almost without exception, even the Mayan books and so forth, they talk about this test point we're about to come to, which happens to be right about now, as a matter of fact, where this enormous global-scale change is about to occur.
And I look at all this and I go, just as an empirical data set, it's interesting.