"Diamondoid bacteria" nanobots: deadly threat or dead-end? A nanotech investigation

Evolution managed to spit out some impressively complex technology at both the cellular level (e.g. mitochondria), chemical level (e.g. venom, hormones), and macro level (e.g. birds) via random iterative mutations of DNA.

Human designers have managed to come up with completely different kinds of complex machinery (internal combustion engines, airplanes, integrated circuits) and chemicals which aren't found anywhere in nature, using intelligent top-down design and industrial processes.

I read "diamondoid bacteria" as synecdoche for the obvious possible synergy between these two design spaces, e.g. modifying natural DNA sequences or writing new ones from scratch using an intelligent design process, resulting in "biological" organisms at points in the design space that evolution could never reach. For example, cells that can make use of chemicals that can (currently) only be synthesized at scale in human-built industrial factories, e.g. diamond or carbon nanotubes.

I think such synergy is pretty likely to allow humans to climb far higher in the tech tree than our current level, with or without the help of AI. And if humans can climb this tech tree at all, then (by definition) human-level AGIs can also climb it, perhaps much more rapidly so.

I'm open to better terminology though, if anyone has suggestions or if there's already something more standard. I think "diamondoid mechanosynthesis" is overly-specific and not really what the term is referring to.

I'm not sure how to put this, but while this post is framed as a response to AI risk concerns, those concerns are almost entirely ignored in favor of looking at how plausible it is for near-term human research to achieve it, and only at the end is it connected back to AI risk via a brief aside whose crux is basically that you don't think Yudkowsky-style ASI will exist.

I like a lot of the discussion if I frame it in my head to be about what it is actually arguing for. Taking it as given, it seems instead broadly non-sequiter, as the evidence given basically doesn't relate to resolving the disagreement.

Offtopic: I find it hilarious that professor Moriarty is telling us about the technology for world domination.

As a historical note and for further context, the diamondoid scenario is at least ~10 years old, outlined here [LW · GW] by Eliezer, just not with the term "diamondoid bacteria":

The concrete illustration I often use is that a superintelligence asks itself what the fastest possible route is to increasing its real-world power, and then, rather than bothering with the digital counters that humans call money, the superintelligence solves the protein structure prediction problem, emails some DNA sequences to online peptide synthesis labs, and gets back a batch of proteins which it can mix together to create an acoustically controlled equivalent of an artificial ribosome which it can use to make second-stage nanotechnology which manufactures third-stage nanotechnology which manufactures diamondoid molecular nanotechnology and then... well, it doesn't really matter from our perspective what comes after that, because from a human perspective any technology more advanced than molecular nanotech is just overkill.  A superintelligence with molecular nanotech does not wait for you to buy things from it in order for it to acquire money.  It just moves atoms around into whatever molecular structures or large-scale structures it wants.

The first mention of "diamondoid" on LW (and by Eliezer) is this [LW · GW] from 16 years ago, but not for an AI doom scenario.

This is just a version of "grey goo", a concept which has been around since 1986 and which was discussed here in April [LW · GW]. 

DMS research is fairly dead at the moment

I have learned that there are at least two, maybe three private enterprises pursuing it. The "maybe" is the biggest, Atomic Machines. 

>For example, in 2003 the Nanoputian project successfully built a nanoscale model of a person out of organic molecules. They used cleverly chosen reaction pathways to produce the upper body, and cleverly chosen reaction pathways to produce the lower body, and then managed to pick the exact right conditions to mix them together in that would bond the two parts together

As a chemist by training, I don't think this is actually that impressive. They basically did a few Sonogashira couplings, which are rather easy reactions (I did them regularly as an undergrad).

If you want something impressive, look at the synthesis of vitamin B12: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_B12_total_synthesis

It's good to hear from an actual expert on this subject. I've also been quite skeptical of the diamondoid nanobot apocalypse on feasibility grounds (though I am still generally worried about AI, this specific foom scenario seems very implausible to me).

Maybe you could also help answer some other questions I have about the scalability of nanomanufacturing.  Specifically, wouldn't the energy involved in assembling nanostructures be much much greater than snapping together ready made proteins/nucleic acids to build proteins/cells?  I am not convinced that run away nanobots can self assemble or be built in factories at planet scales due to simple thermodynamic limits.  For example if you are ripping apart atoms and sticking them together in some new diamondoid configuration, shouldn't the change in gibbs free energy be sufficiently high that energy becomes a limiting factor?  If this energy is greater than what could be obtained from nuclear or solar power in some reasonable amount of time, it would rule out most "grey goo" nano-apocalypse scenarios.

My back of the envelope calculation is that there's about 10^20 moles of CO2 in the atmosphere, and it takes about 390 kJ to turn one mole of CO2 into a diamond.  The earth receives about 10^17 watts of power from the sun.  If we use all of that energy to make diamond bots as fast as we can, then it'll take thousands of years before even 1% of the atmosphere is converted to nano machines.

Granted there's a lot of unknown variables here, and my modeling is probably quite stupid, but I feel like some one must have considered these situations and come up with some way to roughly estimate how much energy would be required to turn the world into a diamond nanobot swarm to check if its even feasible given the energy available on earth (via sunlight or whatever).

My current gut feeling is that its probably more efficient at the end of the day to hijack existing biological materials and processes to build self replicating machines than using covalent bonds to resynthesize everything from scratch, but I don't really know enough to estimate that precisely.

No, but . . . you don't need "diamondoid" technology to make nano-replicators that kill everything. Highly engineered bacteria could do the trick.

High quality quantum chemistry simulations can take days or weeks to run, even on supercomputing clusters.

This doesn't seem very long for an AGI if they're patient and can do this undetected. Even months could be tolerable? And if the AGI keeps up with other AGI by self-improving to avoid being replaced, maybe even years. However, at years, there could be a race between the AGIs to take over, and we could see a bunch of them make attempts that are unlikely to succeed.

Very interesting. A few comments.

I think you mentioned something like this, but Drexler expected a first generation of nanotechnology based on engineered enzymes. For example, in "Engines of Creation", he imagines using enzymes to synthesize airplane parts. Of course the real use of enzymes is much more restricted: cleaning products such as dishwasher detergent, additives in food, pharmaceutical synthesis. It has always seemed to me that someone who really believed Drexler and wanted to bring his imagined future about would actually not be working on anything like the designs in "Nanosystems", but on bringing down the cost of enzyme manufacturing. From that perspective it's interesting that you note that the most promising direction in Drexlery mechanosynthesis is DNA origami. Not quite what Drexler imagined (nucleic acid rather than protein), but still starting with biology.

Also, I think it's very interesting that silicon turned out to be easier than diamond. While I agree with Yudkowsky that biology is nowhere near the limits of what is possible on the nanometer-scale due to constraints imposed by historical accidents, I disagree with Yudkowsky's core example of this, the weak interactions holding proteins in the folded configuration. Stronger bonds make things harder, not easier. Maybe the switch from diamond to silicon is an illustration of that.

Editing to add one more comment... Drexler's definition of "diamondoid" is indeed strange. If we take it literally, it seems that glass is "diamondoid". But then, "diamondoid" microbes already exist, that is, diatoms. Or at least, microbes with "diamondoid" cell walls.

I think you're somewhat downplaying the major impacts even just human level (say, as good as a talented PhD student) AGI could have. The key difference is just by how much the ceiling on specialised intellectual labour would be lifted. Anything theoretical or computational could have almost infinite labour thrown at it, you could try more and risk more. And I'd be really surprised if you couldn't for example achieve decent DFT, or at least a good fast XC functional, using a diffusion model or such, given enough attempts. AGI coupled with robotic chemical synthesis labs (which are already a thing) could try a lot of things in parallel. And if the time horizon for the research was really 60 years, a "simple" speedup of 6X makes that a decade. That's not a lot, and that's just this avenue of research, and assuming no ASI.

For significant speedup of computations, super-advanced AI needs new computational medium, and nanotech could be such medium. 

But this creates a problem of chicken and an egg: to invent nanotech, the AI has to be able to perform significantly more computations which are available now. But it can't do this without nanotech.

This creates an obstacle to the idea that first AI will be able to rush to create nanotech. 

The LessWrong Review [? · GW] runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2024. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year.

Hopefully, the review is better than karma at judging enduring value. If we have accurate prediction markets on the review results, maybe we can have better incentives on LessWrong today. Will this post make the top fifty?

I found this very interesting, and I appreciated the way you approached this in a spirit of curiosity, given the way the topic has become polarized. I firmly believe that, if you want any hope of predicting the future, you must at minimum do your best to understand the present and past.

It was particularly interesting to learn that the idea has been attempted experimentally.

One puzzling point I've seen made (though I forget where) about self-replicating nanobots: if it's possible to make nano-sized self-replicating machines, wouldn't it be easier to create larger-sized self-replicating machines first? Is there a reason that making them smaller would make the design problem easier instead of harder?

https://youtu.be/9c2NqlUWZfo?feature=shared

It seems very weird and unlikely to me that the system would go to the higher energy state 100% of the time

I think vibrational energy is neglected in the first paper, it would be implicitly be accounted for in AIMD. Also, the higer energy state could be the lower free energy state - if the difference is big enough it could go there nearly 100% of the time.