Congress and Credulity

April 2, 2007

The report just issued by the Joint Economic Committee of Congress (a combined House/Senate group) makes bizarre reading.

Like some of the other surreal documents that have resulted from the efforts of the National Nanotechnology Initiative, it is hard to read it as a statement concerning the real world – or integrated with other aspects of that world. Which is not in any way to doubt the truly extraordinary potential of nanoscale research and development to transform large areas of the economy. But is to doubt the sanity of much of what has passed for policy discussion around that potential. The multi-volume book series on “converging technologies” that has been in various ways sponsored by the NSF’s nano leaders continues to run its zany course. And here we have our congressional leaders not simply buying the highly optimistic gloss that some of those leaders have put on the development and prospects of the technology, but adding as a coup de grace Ray Kurzweil’s “singularity” as phase 5 of the nano roll-out -to be expected in 2020.

Is this report issued on the same planet as anguished discussion of “the deficit,” hand-wringing over the costs of war, and occasional bursts of bipartisanship on the need to do “something” about our burgeoning social security responsibilities? Because, of course, if the “singularity” is postulated in just 13 years time, many years sooner than assorted economic projections that are routinely made, all bets are surely off.

Which is to say: we have to find some rational way to develop S and T policy, so it is not dependent upon the unbridled enthusiasms of scientific civil servants in the agencies, or the uncritical adoption of their projections by lawmakers.