The Dwarf Lords: tiny devices, tiny minds and the new enslavement

However I firmly believe it is the responsibility of those who research in these areas, and especially those who govern the research, to communicate not only their immense potential for benign application - all the lives they will save and enhance - but also their equally immense potential for wicked misapplication and for the elimination of accepted freedoms.

I believe it is absolutely their responsibility to ensure that, besides doing the science, we also do the ethics. It is their further responsibility to hold dialogue with society about these new powers, how they are to be used, and how circumscribed.

It is no good waiting until the technology arrives, entrains and enchains us. It is arriving continuously. The time for such a dialogue is now. Which government, which official, which employer can resist the temptations of such power? As Juvenal, perhaps thinking of the praetorians, remarked “Quis custodet ipsos custodes?”

In the nanocracy, who will guard the Dwarf Lords? And how will they do it?

Nanoscience should proceed by informed public sanction - and public sanction arises from dialogue and mutual understanding. It also arises, rightly, from caution and from moral suasion.

The public needs not only to know about nanotechnologies, but also the many ways - good and bad - they can be used. It needs to be assured that the good ones will prevail and that strong protections against the bad are in place.

There is a further thread to my scenario I wish to explore - the potential impact of the nanocracy on human evolution.

Many people are by nature explorers of new ideas, adventurers, challengers of accepted wisdoms, reformers, liberals, researchers, creators and innovators. They have been among us since we first emerged onto the African savannah from the dying forests four million years ago. They have led every major phase of social and technological advancement since civilisation began. They are the foil to our natural conservatism and apathy.

In the nanocracy such people will be easily picked out and “discouraged”. If they are not censored by the Dwarf Lords, they will self-censor rather than invite scrutiny.

Historically, reformers and dissidents often pay a high price, from Socrates and Jesus to Galileo, Martin Luther King and Mandela. In the nanocracy they won’t be given the opportunity. They can be quietly swept up and hushed before they have a chance to cause trouble, like Soviet geneticists were under Lysenko.

A race deprived of its radicals, visionaries and adventurers is a poor sort of humanity. A lobotomised species, more like a termite mound than a society. It may be stable and industrious, but it will also be less competitive, less creative, less progressive and, as Darwin might point out, less fit for survival - because it would suppress the warning voices.

In the nanocracy, the ability to control everyone could signal a profound fork in the path of human evolution.