There’s a report out at the moment regarding Chinese restrictions on gallium and germanium exports. Now that sentence might make your brain want to shut down in boredom or something. When I heard this on the radio this morning, it was reported as if the listener wasn’t expected to know what those elements were. Since I heard some computer bloke on YouTube yesterday calling the second element “geranium”, maybe they’re right, but reality check here: you do know them well, don’t you? Gallium is the metal in the aluminium group which melts below body temperature, basically due to indecisiveness, and germanium, which I admit I used to call “geranium” as a child, is in the same group as carbon and silicon and used to be the main material transistors were made of. This is now silicon of course. Germanium is also used to make mirrors for infrared cameras if I recall correctly. China extracts three-fifths of germanium and four-fifths of gallium for the global supply. Germanium is around the fiftieth most abundant element in our crust and isn’t found in large amounts in any widespread minerals, although it does accumulate in coal seams, I’m guessing because it’s similar to carbon. Consequently it’s found enriched in fly ash. Gallium is about as abundant as the likes of cobalt and lead but doesn’t form ores like theirs. Like germanium, it can be extracted from sphalerite. Both elements share with water the peculiar property of expanding on freezing.
China’s restriction is part of something called “resource nationalism”, which is also relevant to lithium ion batteries. This is the exertion of control over resources which are concentrated in a territory by that territory’s government, and it’s probably in the news because it conflicts with the interests of multinationals, which need a reliable global supply of such things. Now I would say that whatever’s bad for multinationals must be good for the world but there are a number of other issues here which need to be addressed.
Gallium arsenide can be used to make transistors which can operate at up to 250 GHz without overheating and it’s less noisy in the sense that there’s less unwanted fluctuation in signals passing through it. Hence it’s used in mobile ‘phones, satellite communications and RADAR. Gallium the metal has a number of niche uses. Because it has the longest liquid phase of any element, it’s used in thermometers for measuring high temperatures and it is of course far less toxic than mercury. Germania, which is germanium dioxide, has special optical properties which make it very useful as optical fibres and for wide angle lenses. It’s also used in solar panels and of course electronic chips. The fact that we use relatively rare elements generally makes our civilisation vulnerable to problems in supply chains and sustainability.
But what if I told you that the world has plenty of adequate solar power, intelligent devices, high-definition cameras, batteries, clean power sources, microphones, advanced computers, drones, full-colour displays, self-flying vehicles, and that all of this can be done without using these difficult to obtain raw materials? Because that’s how the living world operates. It has photosynthesis and organisms with vision (solar power), humans (intelligent devices), eyes (high-definition cameras), electric organs (batteries), clean power sources (respiration), microphones (ears), advanced computers (brains), drones (flying animals), full-colour displays (the skins of cephalopods and flatfish), self-flying vehicles (flying animals again). Life uses about two dozen chemical elements and much of the time it’s just riffing on organic compounds, though sometimes manufactured by catalysts which include other elements such as zinc.
One of the first posts I put on this blog was ‘The Plausibility Of Androids‘. You don’t have to follow that link, but basically it goes like this. There are physical objects in this world, also known as humans, which are intelligent and conscious, so we can be confident that it’s possible for there to be sentient objects. Our programming (after all, we’re droids) forces us to see each other as people, which of course we are, but the fact remains that there is a sense prior to that truth in which we’re droids. I say “droid” because we’re not all androids. There are also gynoids, but there’s an issue with that word and how it’s constructed because whereas an android is generally not sexualised, a gynoid is. Hence calling us “droids” is a not entirely marvellous approach I take to this. There is actually a Campaign Against Sex Robots to which I imagine this issue is relevant. The image at the top of this post is what you get if you type “gynoid” into the prompt field of a certain AI text-to-image generator. If you type “Android”, you get this:
. . . and if you type “Droid”, this happens:
That’s obviously based on R2D2, but is probably not gendered to most people.
It might be seen as anti-religious to make the claim that living humans are physical objects but, for example, Christian physicalism does exist . I’m not going into dualism or the mind-body problem in any great depth here because in fact the issue here isn’t really consciousness or sentience but the fact that there could be an ecologically sound object with highly sophisticated data processing abilities capable of doing any human work, simply because there are humans.
Moreover, this entails that self-driving vehicles can exist, among many other things. There are motorists. Functionally speaking, a motorist could be replaced with a device which drives a vehicle where the passenger gets in and types, speaks or signs her destination and the machine will simply take her there.
Right now, this device is largely a “black box”, functionally speaking. This may be an extension of the usual sense of the term. A black box is an electronic device whose inputs and outputs are known but whose internal workings are not. The notion is also used in behaviourism, the outmoded psychological and philosophical position that consciousness and the human mind can best be understood in terms of inputs and outputs, i.e. stimuli and responses. This is a very flawed way of approaching psychology, but it’s still true that that’s the main way a healthy mind can be seen as interacting with the world. I say “healthy mind” because the state of a mind can be altered by other things which happen to the body such as head injuries or interruption of blood supply.
We’re used to thinking of data processing as electronic. This needn’t be so. For instance, clockwork and abaci are not electronic, and there’s an hydraulic model of the British economy. We do tend to think of the brain as electrical but it also uses neurotransmitters and hormones and there’s neuroplasticity. It isn’t clear that the entire human brain could be completely replaced by electronic components and maintain its function even given its completely physical nature. Hence we can think of the brain as a computer-like machine but it may not be an electronic computer. Evolution does things in its own way, which has to take things from how they are initially and certain paths are ruled out because it hasn’t started from scratch. Nonetheless, there are many parallels between biological organs, organisms and processes on the one hand and technological devices and procedures on the other.
There are two obvious ways of using biology as technology, neither of which I feel are the right answer. One is simply to go back to old-fashioned technology using living things, such as horse-drawn carriages and wood fires. This is problematic for all sorts of reasons. One is that if it were done on the scale it is today, it probably wouldn’t be sustainable, although there are some things which would be preferable such as simply allowing urine to go stale rather than using the Haber process for ammonia production, if they could be organised properly. The other is that it very often involves exploiting animals in one way or another. I’m typing this in a polyurethane skirt and I wouldn’t want to be wearing a leather one simply because it’s biological because it would’ve been ripped off the back of some unfortunate beast. That doesn’t mean the environmental record of polyurethane is immaculate by any means. I’m sure it’s made using various nasty synthetic chemicals and techniques which harm the environment, and therefore kill animals indirectly.
The other obvious way is genetic modification. Although people talk a lot about the idea of this being harmful, and it is a bad thing, the reason it’s bad is not to do with the harm it might do to people or the environment so much as that the organisms in question are not ours to tinker with. Nonetheless it might sound like it makes sense, for example, to genetically modify an enormous animal who can act like a bus and temporarily swallow passengers while walking around on thirty legs and pooing them out at their stops. This makes sense from a practical perspective but it isn’t ethical, because the animal is purely being used and not respected as an end in themselves. Passengers might also feel like they’re being eaten, digested and excreted, which they might find it hard to get past psychologically. On a smaller scale, biotech without genetic modification seems ethically acceptable, although we might simply be less bothered because we can’t see what’s happening. But the production of ethanol, methane, carbon dioxide and acetic acid, for example, don’t seem problematic, and nor does the bacterial digestion of plastic.
Although all of that might make a contribution, it isn’t really what I had in mind. It’s more that we already realise we can make, for example, a camera from protein and lipids, and that camera wouldn’t use anything which might need a long supply chain anywhere in the world. Its sensors could be made originally from carotenoids, its lens from crystallins, which are proteins, but also silica or calcite as these compounds do exist in biology, and it could be blacked out using melanin. This would also be largely biodegradable. None of the biochemical pathways leading to the synthesis of these materials involves anything else which does have a long supply chain.
The point is really that there clearly do exist a wide variety of different methods whereby technological aims could be achieved which don’t involve mining, cosying up to dodgy régimes or pretending slave labour and war aren’t factors in making our toys and gadgets. If you look at the periodic table in terms of the elements actually used by living things, tungsten is the only metal in the third transition series and the next two heaviest elements are probably tellurium and iodine. Most of them could be extracted from sea water. This isn’t about using biology as such so much as observing that for some reason we seem to have developed the kind of high technology which tends to exploit people and the biosphere even though this must surely be entirely unnecessary. We practically know this is so because examples are all around us.
However, it isn’t as simple as switching just like that, because although it’s clear that the techniques are possible, we still don’t know how to do them. Biochemists, biologists and other scientists will be aware of the processes, to be sure, but only a few of them are used industrially or otherwise in technology. There needs to be another industrial revolution which uses such techniques, but the science isn’t yet there. For some reason, technology is currently biassed towards a kind of “path of least resistance” approach which unfortunately compromises the interests of most of the human race and the planet we live on. If this changes, apart from anything else it would shorten the chains that bind us to currently distant sources and, assuming no political change, would undercut resource nationalism. Nobody in the West would have any grounds for worrying about China or having to kowtow to oppressive governments in the Middle East, there would be no excuses for wars over resources and there wouldn’t be blood on our hands when we use a laptop or mobile ‘phone.
There are various fringe groups which accuse science of bias. This is, for example, used in climate change and vaccine denial, creationism, flat Eartherism, forced-birthing and homophobia. These particular phantoms are without substance and that kind of science bias does not exist. There is, however, bias in science. We are aware that it’s entirely scientifically plausible to replace most of the technology used today by more environmentally sound equivalents. We do not, however, have the whole picture with most of these and there are many steps missing before it would become practical. The way funding and research work, there is an inherent bias against the likelihood of this happening, and in that way yes, science is biassed. It’s like the idea of functional foods. If something is a proper, nutritional food, it just is functional. Food technology to produce items with extra nutrients in it is superfluous. On the other hand, food technology to produce items from vats of microörganisms to reduce our carbon footprint and the impact of agriculture is absent. I’m not going to say “to feed the world” as there just is enough food and the problems there are purely political.
I can’t quite put my finger on why this bias exists, but it seems to me it’d be a good idea to address it pretty urgently.
A Box Of Chocolates 