What precautions can we take to ensure safe development?

While molecular manufacturing will facilitate control over the structure of matter, we must ask ourselves who will control the technology itself? The chief danger may not be a devastating accident, but instead, an abuse of power. We live in a competitive world, and one that is accelerating toward the development of this set of capabilities.

This concern about control issues encourages us to argue against secrecy. Combating the dangers will be greatly aided if we all have access to information about progress in the laboratory. If we reduce the number of projects being developed in a military black box, we will probably increase the number of people working on molecular manufacturing. Having more people involved in the field will mean that we are better able to defend ourselves in an emergency. We might see increases in the number of additional projects working on medicine, manufacturing, and the environment. Openly focusing on projects that aid people should go a long way to ensure that information remains available to the public.

We must also remember that there are dangers from both accidents and deliberate misuse. Much can be done to prevent accidents through the promotion a consistent ethical system and a system of accountability for those who develop and employ new technology. Trust will remain a central issue as molecular manufacturing research comes closer to deployment in the commercial world.

There are those who propose that trust is in short supply and that development guidelines should take into account that there will always be subversive elements. In this case, steps can be taken to prevent the abuse of nanotechnology through the application of, say, exotic environments, whereby a machine will only operate under specific laboratory conditions; and if applied, a machine released into the "wild" would cease to function.

Irrespective of trust issues, there are also concerns that replication errors may arise. We must work toward the creation of systems that reproduce information with as few errors as possible, ideally with no errors. Some suggest that it is also a good idea to design systems to limit internal evolution.

These elements and more are discussed in the Foresight Guidelines on Molecular Nanotechnology, which were created to begin addressing the need for a coherent plan for developing nanotechnology in a safe way.