Nano Dove Organization
From Wise Nano
This proposes a new style of organization, aimed at mitigating human problems and filling unmet needs without charity, coercion, or commerce. Modeled on the Free Software and Open Source movements, this organization would produce freely available designs for construction by nanofactories. It seems likely to act as a stabilizing factor in arms races, as well as supplying basic necessities to those unable to participate in the commercial system.
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Why we need a Nano-Dove organization
Molecular manufacturing will bring immense potential for "livingry," to use Buckminster Fuller's word. Livingry is the opposite of weaponry -- it's whatever technology makes life better for people.
There will be a lot of security/military/Guardian organizations creating weaponry, and sometimes using it. Without a stabilizing element, competitions between Guardian organizations could easily spiral out of control. But this stabilizing element can't be just another Guardian organization; the only stable all-Guardian configuration is global domination by one massively oppressive group.
There will be a lot of Commercial organizations creating whatever will sell -- including weapons -- and only selling to people who can pay. This will not supply livingry to the people who are most in need of it.
Charitable organizations probably are not the answer. Frequently, they disempower the recipients of their charity. And they will probably be too slow and inadequate in comparison with the challenges (both avoiding problems and maximizing benefits) that molecular manufacturing will bring.
A new style of organization
After thousands of years of cultural and technical development, it has only been in the last few decades that humans have finally created an engineered commodity that is truly "too cheap to meter." That commodity is copies of digital information. At least in regions with modern infrastructure, you could send emails all day long and your ISP wouldn't even notice.
Even in the early days of computers, when a CPU filled a room and cost millions of dollars, students who used these machines recognized their potential. The "hacker ethic" was born at MIT in the 1950's. The early programmers knew that information did not have to cost money, and that the more it was shared, the better off everyone would be. This was not Communism or even Socialism. No one was forced to give away their information, but programmers did so anyway. Nothing was lost in giving away one's latest computer programs, and something was gained -- not money, but reputation. Concepts from the Guardian and Commercial realms did not apply. The Hacker Ethic did not concern itself with secrecy, security, theft, payment, territory, or intellectual property. It was mainly concerned with being a better programmer, gaining recognition for that, and improving the general state of the art.
In the decades since then, tens of thousands of programmers have chosen to work for fun and glory rather than money -- at least as a hobby. This is not altruism; altruism implies self-sacrifice, and programmers have joined the hacker, then Free Software, and finally Open Source communities not out of sacrifice but because they would rather have recognition than a wage. [Someone please cite the appropriate Open Source literature.]
Molecular manufacturing promises to create a manufacturing system that, if not literally too cheap to meter, will certainly be able to make priceless products for peanuts. The value of the products will be essentially unrelated to the cost of building them. Just as in software, any design that is freely available will enrich the world.
Where traditional militaries have rigid hierarchies, and businesses have somewhat looser hierarchies, Informational groups are more or less like herding cats. This is appropriate for organizations that are based on free and wide sharing of information. An organization designed to take full advantage of the ability of nanofactories to create livingry would not be planned top-down; instead, it would be most productive if any member could start a potentially valuable project on a whim, and projects that gathered users would attract contributors: an efficient Darwinian competition without middlemen such as money or management.
Informational groups are new in another way: their openness. Whereas Guardian groups accept deception as a tactic, and Commercial groups, although not supposed to deceive, frequently find secrecy useful, Informational groups are transparent. Anyone can see what they are doing, and criticize or contribute. It is difficult to keep secrets in a networked world; Informational groups don't even try. Instead, they use their information to attract more information.
The purpose of the Nano-Doves
The individual purpose of contributors is to invent products that will be useful to people; this activity fulfills the collective purpose, which is to make life better for people. No participant has to be altruistic or even idealistic. Developing products that fill unmet needs is a good way to gain reputation. The more urgent the need, the more users a designer will gather. Thus benefit to humanity emerges from self-serving individual choices.
Nano-Doves vs. the military
There are several reasons why nanofactory-enabled arms races could be far less stable than the nuclear arms race was. Proliferation will be easier; monitoring will be harder; weapons will be easier to control and to use; development and obsolescence will be far more rapid. An arms race between nano-enabled powers is likely to end in a devastating war, unless some stabilizing factor can be found.
The openness of a Nano-Dove organization makes it wholly unsuitable for most military work. However, it may be quite suitable for developing defensive technologies. These defensive technologies would be available to all sides in a conflict, and could serve as a stabilizing factor. As with nukes, an attack on a nano-enabled nation is likely to be answered with a devastating counterattack -- assuming that the attacked nation survives the initial assault. Defensive technologies would increase the chance of survival.
Defensive technologies are likely to be widely deployed, while weapons may be stockpiled more than they are used. This implies that people with Informational motivations will be more likely to work on defensive than offensive technologies, in addition to whatever ideals they may have.
It seems unlikely that people actively involved in weapons R&D would be allowed to work on Dove defensive technologies. This implies that people who are drawn to the Dove organization may be less likely to engage in weapons research. If the organization became large enough, it might have a side effect of reducing the pool of potential weapon designers, thus providing an indirect stabilizing influence.
Nano-Doves and the market
In both the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movements, valuable programs are given away for free. This puts some price pressure on commercial software. However, Open Source software has not yet managed to make much of a dent in commercial software. One of the main reasons may be user-friendliness. FOSS programmers have tended to write programs that only programmers find easy to use. This may be because of their engineering mindset or their orientation toward approval by other programmers, or because a slick user interface takes a lot of time to produce, and there isn't much glory in the work. FOSS programs form the backbone of the Internet, but many end users never see one.
Programmers who are employed in standard commercial businesses frequently do FOSS work as a hobby. This does not present the same conflict of interest that it might in military contexts, because instead of one over-arching goal that can be betrayed, commercial software tends to be special-purpose. It probably would not be hard for commercial engineers to contribute to Nano-Dove activities.
FOSS activities have made many concrete and secondary contributions to commercial software. In programming, it is difficult to re-use code, but it is easy to recognize and re-use a good idea. Thus, any source of good ideas improves the entire endeavor, FOSS and commercial alike; as noted above, the basic protocols of the Internet, and several of the key programs, were developed by FOSS. FOSS is less hampered than commercial activities by incentives to lock out competitors via incompatible standards. In fact, the more inter-operable a program is, the more people will use it. Similarly, we could expect that a thriving Nano-Dove effort would provide a highly valuable source of ideas for commercial nano-product design companies.
There are at least two points of contention between business and FOSS that may point to similar conflicts between business and Nano-Dove. Intellectual property is a major difference. FOSS work is not owned -- it can be adapted and re-used by anyone. Because each programmer gives away one person's work -- their own -- and benefits from thousands, they are happy to participate in this system. But software patents can pose substantial problems for projects without a revenue stream that could be used to license patents. It should be noted that the American software industry did not have software patents until the mid-1980's; before that time, programs could only be protected by copyright and trade secret, and the industry flourished. Europe has been even more resistant to software patents.
The second point of contention is related to the first. Large companies tend to become anti-competitive, sacrificing the benefits of competition for the benefits of stagnation. Although Informational organizations do not compete financially, they do impose price pressure simply by making good products. Modern concepts of intellectual property are explicitly anti-competitive, and could be used to prevent Informational efforts from working in an area.
