Arranging Atoms

We make moral judgements about how atoms are arranged. A living butterfly is better than a paste of blended butterflies (ignoring the blending).

This isn’t just about complexity: we could take the exact complement of butterfly-atoms and arrange them in a solid glass with no long-range order, which requires more information to describe than the living insect. The butterfly is preferred to the glass in addition to the goop.

For any complement of atoms there are preferred ways to arrange them. Preferred by who? Based on what criteria? By conscious beings; and, to increase the well-being of them and other conscious animals. 

Humans are the only species that has figured out how to purposefully re-arrange atoms using technology. Not just moving them through space, but breaking and reforming chemical bonds (primates and sea otters smashing stones and shells are capable of the breaking part). This started with fire about 1.5 million years ago, then progressed through technologies like dyeing, tanning hides, pottery, fermentation, and metallurgy.

Re-arranging atoms requires a source of energy and a technology or mechanism. Over time we’ve progressed from muscle-based energy to stored chemical energy in wood or peat or oil to devices that more directly harness solar and nuclear energy. The re-arranging technologies got much better too.

But in 1729, Stephen Gray discovered a path that would eventually pull civilization above atoms when he shuttled electrons down a wire in the first demonstration of electrical conductivity. That was a neat trick, and about one hundred years later it found its first practical application in the telegraph. Fast-forward another hundred and we got finer, more precise control of electrons, from vacuum tubes to transistors to microprocessors. We figured out how to better arrange atoms as a substrate for this electron decoration layer. It’s not correct to say we abandoned atoms for bits, but rather, since around 1970 we’ve put much more of our atom-attention into arrangements that increase the vigor and efficiency of these electron veneers.

You can’t spoon up and eat electrons, or create a Van Gogh self-portrait from them. Has the detour into compute been a distraction?  Robert Solow: “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics”. Matt Clifford: “There are no AI-shaped holes lying around”. Jon Haidt: “The mass migration of childhood into the virtual world has disrupted social and neurological development”. Christine Rosen: “But what began as a slow bleed of reality on the edges has now become a culture-wide destabilizing force”.

For this not to have been a distraction, we need to turn this now-intelligent electron layer back on the atoms. Re-arranging atoms requires an energy source and a mechanism, so these are the two obvious areas for focus, with the recursion that harnessing energy itself involves devices made from re-arranging atoms.

This should be the goal for AI: electrons in service of atoms, in service of conscious beings. Synthetic biology is the easiest place to work: the CHNOPS bonds are malleable and evolution has produced rich tools for molding them. Inorganic chemistry is arguably more important, but with Drexler-style molecular assemblers ruled out, the gains will be slower and harder fought.  

None of this implies a paperclip future. The well-being of conscious beings is increased by highly diverse atom-arrangements, from foodstuffs and shelter at the bottom of the hierarchy to rich interactions with other forms of life higher up.

Once we acknowledge the moral aspect of arranging atoms, it makes sense to ask questions like how many and which atoms are needed for each human or animal to thrive. And as better arrangements are identified, it’s arguable there’s an imperative to harness the requisite energy and atoms, and improve the mechanisms to shuffle them into place.