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The American business model can be well described as consisting of components relating to self-interest, market fundamentalism, the minimal state, and low taxation. Turn to the distinguished economist/business thinker John Kay and the celebrated objectivist/writer Ayn Rand for such accounts. They have been chosen because their writings are important and influential. They agree in describing the American business model as consisting of these four components. But they differ in their evaluative descriptions of the utility of the American business model. Kay explains what he describes as “the blind faith” (Kay, Citation2010, p. 44) that now constructs the American business model. Rand and her followers describe the American business model as part of objectivist philosophy and a guide to life.

John Kay explains the American business model in his The Truth About Markets (Citation2003) and in other publications, such as Obliquity (Citation2010). He writes that the claims about the American business model are indeed of four kinds. The first is that “self-interest rules—self-regarding materialism governs our economic lives” (Kay, Citation2003, p.44). The second is market fundamentalism—markets “should operate freely, and attempts to regulate them by social or political action are almost always undesirable” (Kay, Citation2003, p. 44). The third is the minimal state—the economic role of government should not extend much beyond the enforcement of contracts and private property rights. Government should not itself provide goods and services, or own productive assets. The fourth and last claim is “low taxation—while taxation is necessary to finance these basic functions of the minimal state, tax rates should be as low as possible and the tax system should not seek to bring about redistribution of income and wealth” (Kay, Citation2003, p. 44).

We have already suggested that the claim of economics to be a hard science is largely spurious. Most of its propositions can be neither refuted nor verified. If this is so, economic theory is opinion cloaked in the authority of science. We trust doctors because they have science behind them, though some theorists of power such as Michel Foucault have identified the medical system as, in part, a tool of social control.20 Economists claim the authority of doctors without the credentials of medicine.

Nevertheless, the Marxist charge is only partly true. The relationship between power and ideas is not a simple base-superstructure one. Not only does economics have its own agenda; practical people – politicians, businessmen, civil servants – are consumers, not producers, of ideas. This gives the producers of ideas considerable latitude vis-à-vis their users. The vested interests are in no position – even were they capable of it – to dictate the precise form of the intellectual defence offered for their preferences. Thus the economist’s justification of the free market is likely to be both more general and also more circumscribed than that offered by the business class. For example, economists have almost always opposed protectionism and monopoly, propositions often heavily supported by sections of business.

For many of us, conventional approaches to both economics and to ethics have become consummately dangerous. As many of the authors in this book point out, the rigid boundaries imposed by modern economists in answer to the question of what, exactly, is meant by economics are breaking down in our late modern, or postmodern, world. And it is so with ethics as well. Ethics—the question of how we ought to live— is in its modern economic context reduced to questions of property rights, of individual identity understood as autonomous action in markets, and of the good society as that which protects those rights and those markets. At least in the West, the actualization of economics has become synonymous with the machinations of capitalism, leaving those of us with normative claims to make about political economy at best at the margin of economics and at worst irrelevant to economics.

The crisis of the Left is a very real one indeed, and much of that crisis has to do with the struggle to find a critical wedge that might disrupt neoliberal capitalism enough to yield a space for economic voices other than conventional ones. Modern economics has not only conflated the term economics with the term capitalism (resulting in the politics of neoliberalism) but has for quite a while now reduced the human to a homogenous identity as what Dierdre McCloskey terms “that great stick of a character,” homo economicus. Additionally, the question of distributive justice has been effaced within the web of positive law and private property rights, the social has been reduced to the market, and the meaning of human freedom has been narrowed to the scope of economistic individualism.

Humans have the capacity to transform the world for moral purpose. That is economics at its moral core; activity designed to enhance the material conditions indicative of the good life, to move from the actual given to the possibly better, and to do so with and for ourselves and with and for others. We work together or apart, we share the world as constructed by others, and we are responsible for far more than our own welfare simply because our economic products shape the lives of others, just as the products of others construct our own lives. To return to Kant, the “real force” of economic power is often ephemeral, difficult to locate, but always subject to the question of its relevance to others. This essay seeks to nudge our understanding of economic life closer to a hermeneutical horizon where hospitality and welcoming might provide the scope for understanding economic responsibility in a new ontological and moral key, a key in which the damage that we do might be lessened and the good we seek enhanced.

Modern economic thought, particularly after it turned its back on political economy and divorced itself from normative questions, shares with many other social science disciplines a preference for parsimony as it works to “tame” uncertainty and chance. We can glimpse with Stephen Toulmin how the ambiguity and uncertainty out of which we living breathing humans do in fact construct our lives and ourselves as historical beings in community with others is not so easily tamed, despite the epistemic and scientistic “virtues” that have turned our humanity away from the humanities, a turning we must remedy: We can reconcile the twin legacies of the exact sciences and the humanities only by a change of direction; and, for that, we must first see clearly how the agenda of “modern thought” over-reached itself. By now, it will be clear that we need to balance the hope of certainty and clarity in theory with the impossibility of avoiding uncertainty and ambiguity in practice. But the received view of Modernity rested not only on the Quest for Certainty and the equation of Rationality with a respect for formal logic: it also took over the rationalists’ belief that the modern, rational way of dealing with problems is to sweep away the inherited clutter from traditions, clean the slate, and start again from scratch (Toulmin 1990: 175).

Michel Serres 7, professor of philosophy at Clermont-Ferrand, “The Parasite”

Goals. In theory, the first step in pollution abatement begins with a determination by Congress of the ultimate objectives to be accomplished through pollution regulation. In practice, these goals are often broadly and vaguely worded. Sometimes, as when Congress decides to press technology by setting pollution standards that it hopes will force industry to develop control technologies not currently available, the goals are deliberately made extremely ambitious as an incentive for vigorous regulatory measures by regulated interests. The principal goals of the CAA are, for example, to protect public health and safety. Vague goals are not as important in defining the operational character of a regulatory program as are the more detailed specifications for the setting of pollution standards, emission controls, and enforcement-the real cutting edges of regulation. Statements of goals, however, may be politically sig nificant as signals to the interests involved in regulation about which pollutants and sources will be given priority and how vigorously Congress intends to implement programs. The CAA goal of establishing national air-quality standards for major pollutants, for instance, was an unmistakable signal that Congress would no longer tolerate the continual delays in controlling air pollution caused by past legislative willingness to let the states create their own air-quality standards. It was also evidence that regulated interests had lost their once-dominant position in the formation of air pollution policy.

Taxation of US GHG consumption would be more complex still. This is discussed in more detail later under International Considerations. It is important to define policy objectives clearly. If a CT is planned and designed on the basis that its objective is to tax US GHG emissions, and it emerges later that its true objective is to tax non-mobile GHG emissions or US GHG consumption, it may be difficult to re-structure it to meet that revised objective in practice.

These predictions of disaster are exaggerated and are often detached from any specific policy detail. For example, many predictions imply that pricing carbon would have a disastrous effect on the economy, regardless of the amount of value assigned to each ton of pollution; the sources to which the pricing policy applies; the timeline on which the policy is established; the use of any collected revenue; and the ability to adjust or reduce less desirable taxes due to the increased revenue collected. A policy that prices carbon can be crafted in any number of ways—with a wide range of potential effects. Depending on the policy details selected, a price on carbon could either trigger rapid transitions in the energy sector or none at all. It could also raise significant revenue for the federal government or, alternatively, raise none at all. Indeed, during a recent debate in the House of Representatives regarding a resolution denouncing the concept of a carbon tax, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) said a carbon tax would have a “devastating impact” on the U.S. economy and would cost the U.S. “more than a million jobs.” Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-CA) called a carbon tax a “job-killing scheme.” However, the House resolution in question contained no specific policy details on which to base these harsh critiques. These policy specifications matter a great deal. Increasingly, as governments develop and adopt carbon pricing policies, they are finding acceptable approaches that internalize the costs of pollution. In fact, carbon pollution is already priced in a significant portion of the world without yielding dramatic harm to national economies. In total, about 40 national jurisdictions and over 20 cities, states, and regions on five continents—representing almost one-quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions—have placed a price on carbon. In 2014, 25 percent of the U.S. population lived in a jurisdiction where carbon pollution is currently priced and where nearly 30 percent of the country’s economic activity took place. The price on carbon in California is the highest of any state in the country at almost $13 per ton of carbon dioxide equivalent, and yet the California economy is projected to grow at a faster pace than the rest of the United States over the next two years.

The third design issue relates to trade in carbon-intensive goods. We argue that border tax adjustments for a carbon tax are necessary and appropriate. There is, however, no simple and clearly legal method of implementing a system of border tax adjustments to prevent so-called carbon "leakage," the shifting of production to countries without a carbon pricing mechanism. The key problem is that to set the border tax adjustment, information is needed about the particular production technology and sources of energy used to produce an item. In contrast, border tax adjustments under a value-added tax ("VAT") require only readily available data: for imports, knowledge of the item's price, and for exports, verification of export. n7 The necessary information may be difficult to obtain for a carbon tax. We consider a number of possible options and their legality, recommending a system of presumptive border tax adjustments that allow individual firms to provide evidence of lower emissions. The presumptive border tax can be based on average emissions from the production of like products in either the exporting or importing country. Using information from the exporting country is preferable, but obtaining that information may be more difficult, and using it raises additional trade-related legal issues. n8

With respect to the tax base, we show that collecting the tax upstream would make it possible to accurately and cheaply cover 80% of U.S. emissions by collecting the tax at fewer than 3000 points, and that it would be possible to cover close to 90% of U.S. emissions at a modest additional cost. n6 As the base gets broader, the collection costs increase; the tradeoff between the increased collection costs and the benefits of a broader base determines the optimal tax base. The main problem presented by upstream collection is that a tax credit or offset must be given for fossil fuels that are not combusted. For example, if the tax is imposed at the refinery and some distillates are sequestered into products such as asphalt, the tax will be too broad. We discuss how such a credit system would be designed.

IMPROVING POLICY DESIGN. Political resistance to carbon pricing in many jurisdictions, as well as the emergence of a piecemeal approach to domestic and international climate policy-making, means that it is insufficient to study merely how to price the climate externality in a “first-best” world with no other economic distortions. Although many existing “second-best” policies, such as efficiency standards and support for renewables, are cost-ineffective relative to carbon pricing (14), they continue to be implemented for political, distributional, or other reasons. Research must consider practical dimensions of optimally designing and implementing such policies. First, more rigorous ex post empirical analysis of energy and environmental policies will be critical (15). Policies such as carbon pricing schemes, tradable obligations, fuel taxes, renewable portfolio standards, and energy efficiency standards are already in use in different countries and will become more common as countries try to operationalize their pledges in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change process. But there is often little empirical evidence on individual- or market-level responses to these policies. Existing evidence suggests that behavioral responses to a given policy can drive a wedge between ex ante engineering estimates of program costs and benefits and ex post estimates of true costs and benefits (16). More evidence with rigorous analysis is sorely needed on a range of mitigation and adaptation policies. In the long term, the costs of addressing climate change using current technologies could be very large, which makes technological progress critical. A large body of work on the rate and direction of innovation exists, but research is needed on what combinations of R&D and climate policies shape innovation and difusion of low-carbon technologies (17).

Carbon taxes are a promising way to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases while avoiding unnecessary costs.1 One key design element of such taxes is how governments use their potentially considerable revenue. Budget discussions often organize them into the three familiar pillars of fiscal policy: new spending, tax cuts, or lower borrowing. From a broader policy perspective, however, it is useful to organize them into four alternative policy goals: (1) offsetting the new burdens that a carbon tax places on consumers, producers, communities, and the broader economy; (2) supporting further efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; (3) ameliorating the harms of climate disruption; and (4) funding public priorities unrelated to climate.2 Each approach reflects a coherent but distinct perspective on how best to use revenues from taxes imposed to achieve climate policy goals. We believe carbon tax discussions will be most productive if policymakers, advocates, analysts, and members of the public recognize this breadth of perspectives and develop strategies for using carbon tax revenues that deliver important social benefits while building the necessary political consensus for implementing and maintaining well-designed carbon taxes. Doing so requires an appreciation for the strengths and weaknesses of each approach.

Simply put, the carbon tax is a shell game. The range of designs, prices, rationales, and claimed benefits varies so widely — even within many individual arguments for the tax — that assessing the actual validity of most discrete proposals becomes nearly impossible. The insubstantial effect on emissions gets obscured by discussions of the fiscal benefits. The negative fiscal effects get offset by claims of environmental efficacy. The tax's simplicity and practicality are touted, even as new complexity is introduced to address each flaw. The same revenues are rhetorically spent to achieve multiple ends, even as the different promises made to each constituency would be rejected by the others.

This Paper considers the design of a tax on greenhouse gases ("GHGs"). The purpose of such a tax, which we will generally refer to as a carbon tax, is to internalize externalities associated with anthropogenic climate change. n1 Without a carbon tax, individuals face a distorted set of prices. Activities that result in carbon emissions are relatively too cheap because individuals will not consider the costs the emissions impose on others, including on future generations. A tax forces individuals to consider the full set of consequences from emissions. The theory behind using taxes to internalize externalities dates back seventy years to writings by Pigou, but there is little experience with the design of these taxes and almost none with a "Pigouvian tax" that covers a substantial portion of the economy, as would a carbon tax. n2 There are several existing carbon taxes, but all are comparatively narrow or are otherwise badly designed. n3 There have also been several proposed carbon taxes introduced [*501] into legislation in the United States, but only in skeletal form. n4 Although one can learn from these examples, they do not serve as adequate models for the best possible design of a carbon tax. We consider three central design issues: the tax rate (including distributional issues, the use of the revenues, and tax rate changes); the tax base (including possible offsets or credits); and international trade concerns. Although the theory behind setting the rate is well known -- it should equal the marginal harm from emissions -- there are a number of difficult design considerations. n5 The most significant challenge is the design of a system for ensuring that the rate changes over time as new information becomes available about the costs and benefits of reducing emissions. The central problems in addressing climate change include uncertainty about its effects and uncertainty about the costs of abatement. The best available option is to utilize a crude estimate of the optimal rate and adjust the rate as new information arises. We suggest a delegation or partial delegation of rate-setting authority to an expert agency, which will ensure that the tax rate is reexamined at appropriate intervals and will provide expertise in the relevant parameters for setting the rate. Given the size of the tax and the potential winners and losers from rate changes, full delegation may not be possible, in which case we recommend a number of intermediate regimes. We also discuss the use of the revenues, recommending a revenue neutral and distributionally neutral adjustment to the income or payroll taxes.

Dark matter is one of the biggest mysteries in all of modern science. Everywhere we look on large cosmic scales — from low-mass galaxies to the largest galaxy clusters, from the cosmic microwave background to the cosmic web that traces the Universe's structure — we can see the imprints and effects of its presence. For every proton's mass worth of normal matter, there's five times as much dark matter, out-massing and out-gravitating the conventional stuff that makes up everything we've ever directly detected. Even though we have yet to directly detect it, and even though we aren't sure exactly what its true properties are, dark matter holds a tremendous promise for the future of humanity. Ubiquitously located all throughout the galaxy and far beyond, dark matter could be the perfect fuel that makes our interstellar dreams come true. Here's the story of how. A logarithmic chart of distances, showing the Voyager spacecraft, our Solar System and our nearest... [+] star, for comparison. If we ever hope to travel across the great interstellar distances, it will require a technology that's superior to chemical-based rockets, and hopefully that will include the discovery of a fuel that can be replenished as we traverse our path through the galaxy. Whenever humanity sets our sights on exploring the depths of space, there are constraints we can't avoid: the laws of physics. In order to accelerate a spacecraft — or any mass — you have to impart an impulse to it in order to change its momentum. The larger the impulse, the more you can change an object's speed. All that determines the magnitude of an impulse is how much force you apply and how long you apply it for. In a conventional rocket, that impulse is provided by rocket fuel that undergoes a combustion reaction, which produces impulse in the form of thrust. Although this is the best method humanity has come up with for space travel so far, it's incredibly limiting. All of our past and current rockets are chemical-based, unfortunately, and that places tremendous constraints on how far we've been able to go. This 2015 engine test shows the firing of SpaceX's Raptor engine, which relies on an extremely... [+] powerful and fuel-efficient reaction. Unfortunately, it's still a chemical-based reaction, and converts only about one-millionth of the fuel's mass into energy. We will have to do better if we want to achieve our interstellar dreams on timescales of a human lifetime. The reason for this is simple: in order to produce thrust — i.e., in order to impart an impulse to your spacecraft — you have to convert that stored chemical energy in the fuel into kinetic energy that pushes your spacecraft. In order to generate that energy, however, you have to use up some of that fuel you're carrying with you. The key to getting lots of thrust, and therefore lots of acceleration, is fuel efficiency. Certain types of fuel are more energy-efficient than others, meaning that we can get more energy (and thrust, and acceleration) out of, say, 1 kilogram of some types of fuel. An easy way to think about this is through Einstein's most famous equation: E = mc2. If you had a perfect, ideal fuel, it would convert 100% of your fuel's mass into energy, enabling you to make the most efficient fuel imaginable. The launch of Cassini, on October 15, 1997. This spectacular streak shot was taken from Hangar AF on... [+] Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, with a solid rocket booster retrieval ship in the foreground. For all of our history on Earth, the only way we've ever reached space is through the use of chemical-based fuels. At most, though, chemical-based reactions are somewhere around 0.0001% efficient. The reason is as follows: chemical reactions rely on electron transitions between atoms and molecules. Most of an atom's mass is in the form of protons and neutrons, each of which have a mass that contains around 109 eV worth of energy. Electron transitions, however, are on the order of a few (typically 1-10) eV of energy. Even with all the chemical-based tricks we can perform, there are no known reactions that allow us to improve on this. Sure, we can go for some type of nuclear fuel, but that's only marginally better, achieving efficiencies of around 0.1%. It's a huge improvement, if we can realize it, but there's still a fundamental problem with accelerating to speeds that will carry you interstellar distances on reasonable timescales. The Tsiolkovsky rocket equation is required to describe how fast a spacecraft that burns through a... [+] portion of its fuel to create thrust can wind up traveling through the Universe. Having to bring your own fuel on board is a severely limiting factor as far as the speed at which we are capable of traveling through intergalactic space. Skorkmaz at English Wikipedia The key problem is as follows: whenever you burn fuel, you have to accelerate the entire mass of your spacecraft, including any fuel that's still on board. Read that again: including any fuel that's still on board. In other words, let's imagine you can shoot exhaust out of your vehicle at an incredible rate: 100,000 mph (about 160,000 kph), relative to the rocket itself. If you start off with a rocket where 99% of your initial mass is fuel, and you assume that your fuel is perfectly 100% efficient (as though it were pure matter-antimatter annihilation), you'd wind up with a final speed of 460,000 mph (740,000 kph). Even at this record-setting rate, it would still take thousands of years to reach the nearest star. All rockets ever envisioned require some type of fuel, but if a dark matter engine were created, new... [+] fuel is always to be found simply by traveling through the galaxy. Because dark matter doesn't interact with normal matter (mostly) but passes right through it, you wouldn't have any difficulty collecting it in a specific volume of space; it would always be there as you moved through the galaxy. On the other hand, there's another approach to interstellar travel that could — in principle — make our science-fiction dreams come true. Instead of bringing your fuel with you, what if you collected it as you went? Typically, ideas like this involve enormous magnetic fields that funnel charged particles into some sort of "trap" in your spaceship, allowing you to put nuclei and electrons together where you can then extract energy and perform further reactions with them. But dark matter offers a tremendous advantage over normal matter in this regard. Why? Because you don't have to do anything special to collect it. It's literally everywhere, distributed in an enormous halo surrounding and encompassing every large galaxy we know of, including the Milky Way. If we find ourselves anywhere in the galaxy, there's bound to be dark matter lying around. While stars might cluster in the disk and the normal matter might be restricted to a nearby region... [+] around the stars, dark matter extends in a halo more than 10 times the extent of the luminous portion. It is truly found everywhere humanity has dreamed of traveling in our own galaxy, and in many places beyond. The second tremendous advantage comes from the progression away from chemical-based rockets and towards the idea of a perfect fuel. For chemical-based rockets, 0.0001% energy efficiency is the best we can hope for. For nuclear-based rockets, fission power might get us up to 0.1% efficiency, and nuclear fusion might get us a little further: perhaps up to 0.7%. The ideal configuration would be to use matter-antimatter annihilation, which is 100% energy efficient. The downside of matter-antimatter annihilation comes with a terrible cost, though: it takes a tremendous amount of work, energy, and effort to create an extraordinarily small amount of antimatter. If you took all the particle physics laboratories ever constructed on Earth and added up all the antimatter humanity has ever created, from Fermilab to CERN, you'd wind up with less than a microgram of antimatter. A portion of the antimatter factory at CERN, where charged antimatter particles are brought together... [+] and can form either positive ions, neutral atoms, or negative ions, depending on the number of positrons that bind with an antiproton. If we can successfully capture and store antimatter, it would represent a 100% efficient fuel source, but many tons of antimatter, as opposed to the tiny fractions of a gram we've created, would be required for an interstellar journey. Sure, E = mc2 might be the most efficient way to extract energy from mass in the entire Universe, as it represents perfect efficiency. But even if you manage to contain and store your antimatter successfully and annihilate it only at the proper moment, you'll still have a finite supply of fuel that required an incredible amount of energy to collect. Once you use up this perfect fuel, you're all out, and all you can do is travel at a constant velocity through space for an indefinite duration of time. Even if we could generate an arbitrary amount, we'd still be fundamentally limited with an antimatter rocket. That's why the promise of a dark matter fuel source is so alluring. Not only might dark matter be an unlimited fuel source (in terms of abundance) that we don't have to carry on board with us, but it might have that perfect, 100% efficient matter-to-energy conversion potential we so strongly desire. Our galaxy is thought to be embedded in an enormous, diffuse dark matter halo, indicating that there... [+] must be dark matter flowing through the solar system. Although we have yet to detect dark matter directly, its abundant presence throughout our galaxy and beyond might provide a perfect recipe for the perfect rocket fuel imaginable. Robert Caldwell & Marc Kamionkowski Nature 458, 587-589 (2009) There are a multitude of experiments looking for the collisions of dark matter with both normal matter and itself. In general, there are two types of particles in the Universe: fermions (with half-integer spins) and bosons (with integer spins). If dark matter is a bosonic particle with no electric, color, or weak charge, that would mean it behaves as its own antiparticle. If you can collect two dark matter particles and make them interact with one another, there's a finite probability that they'll annihilate. When an annihilation occurs, they'll produce pure energy in a 100% efficient fashion: via Einstein's E = mc2. In other words, if we understand dark matter correctly, there's a free, unlimited source of energy everywhere humanity dreams of going. The XENON experiment located underground in the Italian LNGS laboratory. The detector is installed... [+] inside a large water shield; the building next to it accommodates its various auxiliary subsystems. If we can understand and measure the particle properties of dark matter, we may be able to create conditions that coax it into annihilating with itself, leading to the release of energy via Einstein's E=mc^2, and the discovery of a perfect spacecraft fuel. Because dark matter is everywhere, we wouldn't even need to carry it with us as we traversed the Universe. As far as we understand it — and admittedly, we need to understand it a lot farther — dark matter could truly deliver our dream of the ultimate fuel. It's abundant all throughout our galaxy and beyond; it should have a non-zero annihilation cross-section with itself; and when it does annihilate, it should produce energy with 100% efficiency. Perhaps, then, most of us have been thinking about experiments seeking to directly detect dark matter all wrong. Yes, we want to know what makes up the Universe, and what the physical properties of its various abundant components truly are. But there's a science-fiction dream that could come true if nature is kind to us: unlimited, free energy just waiting there for us to harness, no matter where in the galaxy we go. Mastering dark matter is the endeavor that just might make it so.

The study of time is a somewhat barren field. It became the focus of many scientists after Einstein bound the concept of time to the concept of space (creating spacetime). However, physicists have found it challenging to probe further into how time works. But one physics professor is stating his mind when it comes to time. Professor Richard Muller of UC Berkeley has published NOW: The Physics of Time, which explains his view of how and why time flows. It all started with one question: Why does the arrow of time flow inexorably toward the future, constantly creating new “nows”? Muller's theory on the flow of time merges two ideas: the expansion of the universe, and the concept of spacetime. The universe is expanding, but not because the stars are flying away from each other. Instead, the fabric of spacetime is expanding, while the stars stay put. Just let that sink in a moment. Space has been expanding ever since the Big Bang. Muller theorized that, as space is expanding in the universe, so is time. “Every moment, the universe gets a little bigger, and there is a little more time, and it is this leading edge of time that we refer to as now,” he writes. STUCK IN THE PRESENT This concept has some interesting consequences. First, it invalidates travel to the future, since there is actually no future yet to travel to. Travel to the past is also next to impossible, since you would have to destroy some space in order to turn back time. This does occur when a black hole evaporates or a star explodes, but the impact is so small that it wouldn't matter. Essentially, Muller is killing all of your childhood science fiction dreams. Muller's theory even led to a collaboration with Caltech theoretician Shaun Maguire and a paper that proposes a way to test the theory using LIGO. If the scientists are right, then when two black holes merge and create new space, they should also create new time (one millisecond, to be exact) which would delay the gravitational wave signal LIGO observes from Earth. Muller is optimistic that in the next few years LIGO will verify or falsify his theory. “I think my theory is going to have an impact on calculations of the very early universe,” Muller said. “I don’t see any way that it affects our everyday lives. But it is fascinating.”

The team at the University of Cambridge, however, monitors energy on a more extreme level as they try to approach absolute zero—the coldest temperature allowed by the laws of thermodynamics. Absolute zero, technically known as zero kelvins, equals −273.15 degrees Celsius, or -459.67 Fahrenheit, and marks the spot on the thermometer where a system reaches its lowest possible energy, or thermal motion. There’s a catch, though: absolute zero is impossible to reach. The reason has to do with the amount of work necessary to remove heat from a substance, which increases substantially the colder you try to go. To reach zero kelvins, you would require an infinite amount of work. And even if you could get there, quantum mechanics dictates that the atoms and molecules would still have some irreducible motion. Quantum mechanics also means that the closer these researchers creep toward absolute zero, the weirder a substance’s properties become. At low enough temperatures, liquid helium, for example, morphs into a superfluid—a liquid that flows without the resistance of friction. As a result, it can spontaneously flow upwards and out of a container; seep through molecule-thin cracks; remain perfectly still while spinning at high speeds; and—most surprising to physicists—coalesce into one “super-atom,” known as a Bose-Einstein condensate. Working at around just 1 to 10 millikelvins, or thousandths of a kelvin, the Cavendish team is in the process of surveying a variety of other materials that also show funky quantum behavior. And the technology that the group uses to reach such frigid temperatures is almost as complicated as the behavior it’s trying to induce.

BROOKS: People always want us to fight, but we don't really. I think, although I agree with the general themes that Andy talks about, I think it's very easy for people who are not deep in the technology itself to make generalizations, which may be a little dangerous. And we've certainly seen that recently with Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, all saying AI is just taking off and it's going to take over the world very quickly. And the thing that they share is none of them work in this technological field. So let me explain why—and they're all smart people, but I think they're making a fundamental error and it gets to NEIL, actually. THOMPSON: After taking down Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, he's going to take down the Dalai Lama. Please continue, Rodney. BROOKS: So let's go back to an example from the '90s, when IBM's Deep Blue beat Kasparov, beat the world chess champion. And Kasparov got up and said, well, at least it didn't enjoy beating me. That was his—holding on to his humanity. And now, today, you can get programs that run on—and that was on a supercomputer and now you can get programs that run on laptops. There's about twelve of them that have a better chess rating than any human being has ever had. So people see that -- MCAFEE: It's so bad now—let me underscore what Rod is saying. It's so bad now that they asked human grand master a couple years ago how he would prepare for a match against a computer and he said, I'd bring a hammer. BROOKS: So they can play chess really, really well. And I think people generalize that in the way that if a person can do some task really, really well, they can do adjacent tasks quite well. But none of those chess programs can play tic-tac-toe. Imagine a chess grand master who couldn't play tic-tac-toe. It doesn't make sense. None of those chess programs can give advice to an aspiring human on how to play better. All they can be is a sparring partner. MCAFEE: That program couldn't play tic-tac-toe without being substantially redirected, right? BROOKS: Right. So people, I think, are seeing some of the image labeling that's going on, for instance. Google came out with image labeling, which is a great commercial problem for them. They want to be able to label images. And one of the examples was, that Jeff Hinton shows, one of the chief scientists, is, it's a picture and it says there's a baby holding a teddy bear or doll in there. You look at it, it's a baby holding a teddy—a doll. But then if you ask the program, where is the baby? All it can say is, well, this pixel has 10 percent probability of being a baby, this pixel has 80 percent. And people have done experiments. You have a mashup of, you know, a grotesque mashup of baby parts and it says it's a baby. It's a baby. It's got all the parts. But a person says, no, that's a grotesque mashup of baby parts in the image. THOMPSON: But Abhinav, you've solved this, right? GUPTA: No, no, no. BROOKS: Well, he's working towards-- GUPTA: So, can I-- BROOKS: He's working towards it because it's such a hard problem. GUPTA: Yeah, OK. Thank you. So since we are talking about images, I think I should chime in a little bit and tell you that—so what Andrew is talking about, that we have made big advances, again, they're very, very specific tasks. Given an image, tell me what label can you put on that image? We have gotten really good at this task. Some people claim even better than humans. I don't buy that, but let's assume that even better than humans. But that doesn't mean we can do anything else apart from that exact task. And that's what Rodney was talking about. They have no idea that—what does baby mean? What does having a baby mean in those images? No idea. You, as a human, would know, OK, if I'm saying there's a baby, it has a lot of meaning inside. You get a lot of meaning out of that thing. So while we have made significant advances in the last two years, I want to boil it down a little bit and say we still are a long, long way to go but Elon Musk or Bill Gates, everyone is talking about, we still have a long way to go. But there's hope, and that's what I think we have to see here. Two years ago, if you asked me can computers take an image and solve this problem, I would say I have invested seven years of my life but if you give me a random image, it will not work. And now, given a random image, it will work. So all it -- MCAFEE: This was the guy who was doing this for a living and if you asked him two years ago would this happen, he would say, no. This progress is weirdly fast and is surprising insiders in the field. GUPTA: Yeah. I agree. And I'm an insider in the field and I'm very surprised, I have to say. Now, at this point of time, I am like living in an awe of myself, in some sense, that—but it was like Rodney told—Rodney told us that in thirty-five years he never thought he'd do this all. I also thought some of it, like that, for thirty-five years, I will not solve—see this kind of classification performance. But as I'm saying this, still a long, long way to go and much harder way to go. What—where all the kind of gains have come from is the data. And I think—so technology, this like deep-learning technology has been there from '70s and '80s. Don't misunderstand that this technology came two years ago and everything's changed. This has been there for thirty years. It's just that for the first time in our technological advances we have data for this deep-learning technology to learn. MCAFEE: Let me jump on this because I think the three of us are really agreeing, instead of disagreeing. I chose my adjective pretty carefully. I said these advances are going to be economically significant. I completely agree with Rod that they're not going to be existentially significant on any timeframe that we really need to worry about, for exactly the reasons that you're bringing up. One way to think about this, the way I try to get my mind around it, is there are, from what I've been able to take in, there are something like between ten and twenty really fundamental challenges that these guys and their discipline have been working on. Common sense is a really great example of that. As I've looked around, these breakthroughs that we're seeing seem to be—kind of indicate that we're making real progress on one of those challenges, the challenges of learning in a pretty unstructured environment. That's a big deal. There are lots of other fundamental challenges in the discipline where the progress has not been as fast, and these are the ones that you're working on.

There are ways to mitigate the actual dangers//// Given that most objects that will be manipulated into crawling, flying, and replicating machines will be at or above the nanoscale (and not atomic in scale, or even remotely close), there are definitely going to be numerous people working to deal with the threat of "runaway" nanotech. Nanobots would need to be self replicating in order to be effective on any massive scale, and as such, nano-factories will have to be contained, protected, and have an external computer and power source. An external power source would limit the potential for "swarms" to escape into the real world. Further, the alarm bells have been raised by Hollywood and the popular press. It's highly unlikely that any sort of large scale nanotech design will slip past media scrutiny.//// In addition (and perhaps most importantly), nature has its own built-in self regulation mechanism. Here's Mike://// "Simple: Bacteria will eat them. Microbes are nanobots with a billion years of refinement. They are very good at eating things made of graphene and nanotubes, and working with the limited energy and resources available in their environment. This is why nanobots work best in a controlled environment - they're very useful, but couldn't survive in the wild." Special shout to daelyte on reddit for the original idea of bacteria as nature's defense mechanism, too.//// If extremely small scale, self-replicating robots indeed prove to be feasible, cosmic rays from space, simple terrestrial wind, organic bacteria, and other naturally occurring evolutionary defense mechanisms on planet earth (including Brownian motion!) will be fully capable of tearing apart "nanobots" at the atomic scale all on their own.//// Conclusion//// The bottom line: the amazing things we can do with nanotechnology - from hidden sources of energy, to very small devices in our bloodstream capable of policing our immune system, to Drexler's "factory in a box" idea - will far outstrip the potential risks, particularly with nature's built in mitigation system, and with a tremendous amount of care and concern. The media tends to play on our darkest (and most unlikely) fears becoming a certain reality, and nanotech is no exception.//// Here's Mike to wrap things up:."

In 2004, the Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering (RS-RAE) in the UK published the report Nanoscience and Nanotechnologies: Opportunities and Uncertainties1. At the time it was widely speculated that the report arose from concerns expressed by Prince Charles over the possibility that nanotechnology could lead to a ‘grey goo’ scenario where self-replicating ‘nanobots’ destroy life as we know it2. Outlandish as the alleged motivation was (and Prince Charles was quick to downplay reports of his grey goo concerns3), the resulting report set the pace for the next decade of global research into the potential impacts of nanotechnology — and how to avoid them. //// Around the time the report was commissioned, concerns over the potential unanticipated consequences of nanotechnology were beginning to gain wider traction4. Essays like Bill Joy’s ‘Why the future doesn’t need us’5 were raising concerns in the public domain, and professional interest in possible human health and environmental impacts of nanoscale science and engineering had been growing steadily for the previous decade. As far back as 1992, for example, the journal Nature published a Correspondence raising the issue of possible asbestos-like behaviour of carbon nanotubes6 — less than a year after Sumio Iijima published his seminal work on the structures7. And during the 1990s, particle toxicologists began revealing increasingly unusual biological interactions associated with certain nanoscale particles8. //// During this period, the US and other countries were beginning to invest heavily in nanoscale science and engineering as an engine of economic growth9. Alert to a potential public backlash against the technology that could undermine this public investment (nanotechnology at this point was riding hot on the heels of a widespread European rejection of genetically modified foods), research agencies began investing in the possible implications of nanotechnology10. In the US, the National Nanotechnology Initiative pulled together expertise on the possible impacts and benefits of the new technology11, and health and environmental impacts were integrated into the country’s national research and development strategy12. It was, nevertheless, the RS-RAE report that emerged as the defining document for research into the potential impact of the field. //// The report was ostensibly focused on evaluating both the opportunities and uncertainties of nanotechnology. Under the leadership of Professor Dame Ann Dowling — head of the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge — a select working group of experts from multiple fields set out to define what is meant by nanoscience and nanotechnologies; to summarize the current state of knowledge; to identify specific applications; to carry out a forward-look to see how the technologies might be used in the future; to identify what health and safety, environmental, ethical and societal implications and uncertainties might arise; and to identify areas where additional regulation needed to be considered. The working group received input from over 200 experts in nanotechnology development, use, safety, ethics and governance from around the world. Based on this input, and their own expertise, the group produced arguably the most comprehensive and accessible assessment of nanoscale science and technology at the time. //// Despite their broad remit, however, the working group skipped over the many potential benefits of nanotechnologies in their recommendations, and focused almost exclusively on the potential risks and uncertainties. Of the 21 recommendations arising from the report, 19 of them addressed potential implications of the emerging science and technologies. Some of the recommendations were specific to UK investment in nanotechnology at the time, but others responded directly to the global dearth of knowledge on potential risks alongside hints of potentially harmful behaviour. The message was clear: whatever you might think about the economic and societal benefits of this new suite of technologies, extensive further investment into possible applications would be foolish without direct investment in research and action on potential implications. //// Since 2004, peer-reviewed publications addressing the health and environmental impact of engineered nanomaterials have skyrocketed. A search of the nanoEHS Virtual Journal13 (a database of articles related to the environmental and health impacts of nanotechnology that have been published in different journals) returns 139 peer-reviewed papers related to nanomaterial risk published in 2003; the same search returns 1,326 papers published in 2013, with a rapid increase in the rate of publication occurring in 2006 — just two years after the RS-RAE report (Fig. 1). Although it would be disingenuous to suggest that this increase was solely due to the report, the document clearly stimulated global movement towards investing more heavily in research around potential health and environmental implications of engineered nanomaterials. //// The result of this investment is an understanding of the impacts of nanotechnology that extends further than anyone might have imagined in 2004 14. An extensive body of published data on the human and environmental impacts of mainstream metal and metal oxide nanomaterials now exists, and recent research has shed important light on the potential health effects of carbon nanotubes15,16 — a field that was all but ignored between 1993 and 2004. Global-risk-research approaches for nanoscale materials have been addressed by a number of organizations, including the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development17. And chemical safety regulations in the US, the EU and Australia have been evaluated with respect to their applicability to engineered nanomaterials18. //// Although this has been a global effort, there is no doubt that the RS-RAE report was a catalyst for action: a voice of scientific reason and social concern at a time when speculation could have scuppered the nanotechnology enterprise or, worse, led to materials and products that showed a blatant disregard for health and environmental risks. But the report’s legacy is more complex than this. As research into the health, environmental and societal implications of nanotechnologies has grown, the relevance of this research has become less clear. Spurred on by fears of novel and unique behaviour, millions of dollars have been invested into the risk research of materials that — although they show toxicity at high exposures — don’t always seem to hold the dramatic risk surprises that some thought they would. This isn’t always the case — carbon nanotubes again stand out as a material that needs to be used with caution. Yet substances like silver, titanium dioxide and cerium oxide nanoparticles are failing to show unambiguous indications of substantial and unusual health and environmental impacts, encouraging researchers to dig ever-deeper to discover the assumed-to-exist evidence of novel risk. //// This is the darker side of the RS-RAE legacy — and one that probably could not have been anticipated. Legitimate questions were asked by the RS-RAE working group over what could possibly go wrong with these new, and esoteric, materials. But this set the global risk research and regulation community on a path that has, over time, worn a rut that is proving hard to get out of. The speculation of possible risk has developed into an assumption of as-yet-to-be-discovered risk. //// This is not to say that there are not significant risks associated with nanoscale materials — as research continues to show, nanoscale materials can and do interact with biological systems in unusual ways. Yet by focusing on only a small group of materials that grabbed headlines early on, researchers run the danger of missing emerging materials and products that may present greater challenges than those initial nanoscale materials. //// Ten years ago, the RS-RAE working group admirably turned speculation over grey goo into a solid foundation of an evidence-based approach to plausible nanoscale material risks and realistic risk avoidance strategies. Today, amidst the undeniably important progress that has been made following the report, it has to be wondered whether researchers have created a new, metaphorical grey goo in their quest to respond to speculative nanomaterial fears. If so, maybe it’s time to once again use speculation as a lever to shift research and action on risks and benefits towards evidence-based approaches to the next generation of advanced materials and products emerging from nanoscale design and engineering.