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The Dangers of Nanotech
Krees writes "Small Times talked with the Foresight Institute's Christine Peterson, Ralph Merkle of Zyvex, and Ray McLaughlin of Carbon Nanotechnologies about the potential of nanotechnology, which has benefited greatly from open source research methods, and nanotech weapons in particular falling into the wrong hands. Recent recognition of potential abuses will likely lead to incrased secrecy in nanotech research." This topic comes up every so often - what happens when nanotech falls into the wrong hands? I think that's a "when", not an "if", as that happens with almost everything.
It looks like everyone has already brought up the point that the danger in putting a "self-destruct" mechanism in a nanite. With millions or billions of nanites, even if the odds of one of them surviving that self-destruction are one in a million, those odds are too high. And if that nanite is designed to construct other nanites (or, worst case, copies of itself) then you have a problem on your hands.
If nanotechnology ever reaches the total control of matter, self-replicating machine, Diamond Age "Seed" level (I don't have enough information to argue either way, but it seems to me that it'd be easier to create macroscopic Von Neumann machines than microscopic ones, and we haven't even done that yet) we're going to need more protection than a self destruct mechanism.
What I'd like to see, in a world swarming with potential nanotech viruses, is an analogous nanotech immune system to take care of them, nanites which can be set to recognize and rip apart other nanites which meet certain parameters. Got a rogue oil-spill cleaning nanite ripping up asphalt in San Francisco? Get the standby security nanites in Oakland to kill it.
There was an interview with a somewhat apocalyptic tech giant (a veep at Sun? I forget) who believed that the ever increasing technological power available to humanity (nanotech, biotech, and AI being three examples I remember) would cause the world to be ripped apart by terrorism in the coming century. He likened it to an airplane in which every passenger had a "Crash" button in front of their seat, and only one psycho was necessary to bring everyone down with him.
I don't think it will be that way. With nanotechnology specifically, if our available defenses are kept up to the level that our potential offenses would require, then having a small set of nanites go rogue wouldn't be a concern; they would be overwhelmed by their surroundings. Going back to that analogy, if everybody had a "Crash" button in front of their airplane seat, but the plane was guaranteed to survive unless 50% of the passengers voted to crash, that would be the safest flight in history.
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
Bill Joy, cofounder and chief technologiest of Sun Microsystems, wrote an article for Wired awhile back called "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us."
He said there were three looming dangers to humanity's future: genetics, robotics, and nanotechnologies, largely because they were so accessible to those with less money than it'd take to, say, develop a nuclear weapon.
The article is one of the most well-reasoned examinations of the issue of nanotech and the dangers in the future of technology I've ever read, and it's given extra weight simply by the position and history of the author himself. Check it out at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html. It's long, but it's certainly worth the read.
I belive that is the term used for it. It is a theory that states if one nanotech bot is formed incorrectly and reproduces at a much faster rate the entire world can be turned into whatever it is supose to be fixing. IE: If the nano's are creating a certian protien the whole world would become replicas of the protien (and nanos changing eachother into them). The biggest problem would be how to stop it since putting it into conatinment would just turn the containment into the protiens as well.
But what do we do if they hijack the ship and ressurect the crew? They'll never believe me when I try to tell them that they all died millions of years ago when Rimmer caused a leak in the reactor...
Oh, never mind.
Sham on
Wait until we evolve into a race of psychic super beings! Able to stop a mans heart with a thought. Bending time and space to allow us to travel to distant stars. The ability to read a man's mind will render the entire Judicial system obsolete!
Sorry, futurists annoy me.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
While Human nature is one thing, I think the past 60 years...maybe 100 years have started to show a shift from using "ultimate weapons" whenever you have them, to only using them once in a while.
Chemical Weapons - Used in mass during the First World War, then used against civilian prisoners during the Second World War. Mass produced by members of NATO and WP during the Cold War, but not used that much except by Third World nations since the Second World War.
Nuclear Weapons - Used only twice by the United States during combat, even though the US had them for 56 years at this point. Never used in combat by any of the other nations to have them (USSR/Russia, South Africa, Israel, India, Pakistan, France, UK, China).
Biological Weapons - Not used in combat by any nation-states that we know of in the Modern era. (Simple biological agents have been used for centuries, but nothing like the modern biological weapons have been used).
I think that the West would not use/abuse nanotechnology unless someone else moved first. For an example...only three time since the Second World War have US political leaders or Congressmen spoke about using a nuclear device until a few weeks ago. Those times were the Chinese attack against the UN in '50, the Siege of Khe Sahn/Siege of Hue and a proposal in '81 for the US to fire a "warning shot" high above the Inter-German border.
Mankind is getting better, slowly but surely.
Exploited this topic. Of course, I can't actually find it to give you a title (just moved and I have around 1000 books to unpack still)
.... the team is killed. Immediately an elaborately orchestrated effort is made to 'retrieve' a sample of whatever is over there... and the idea of a 'clean' work area is presented.
... don't count on it. But if you want to know it and post under here ... i'll look for ya ;P
Basically, a strange object has started 'growing' on the backside of the moon, and when people are sent to investigate
The fascinating aspect of the clean room is that it contains a series of self-interlocking mechanisms that, as a fail safe, can dump enough power into an XRay apparatus to sterilize everything with the building's sheilds. This is the ONLY allowed method of handling nanotech, and they claim it's extremely immature compared to what's going on on the moon
If I can find the title I'll post it, but
Who said that it was in right hand right now..?
I thought the point that Americans are meant to be noticing is that it is low-tech which is a real danger, not high-tech. Osama bin Laden took out the WTC with fanatics, box-cutters and commercial airliners, not cruise missiles or stealth operations, or even a bomb.
Assuming the anthrax is even down to him (which is far from certain), it is not being distributed with cluster bombs, overhead sprays or even by infecting the water supply. It is simply put in some powder in the mail.
The point is, high-tech can be defended against. Computer systems can be secured, fighter jets can be shot down and bombs can be defused. The real danger occurs when something that is taken for granted, something that is very low-tech and forms a basic part of society, is used for ill means.
No doubt that nanotechnology could be used for war purposes. But I consider it far more likely that a Western power would do this than Osama bin Laden.
Security through promiscuity is no better than security through obscurity.
If all the science was open, then everyone could have an understanding of all the risks and work together to prevent anything terrible happening. If governemnts/scientists/corporations try to keep it secret, they can't. With the Internet and fast transfer of information, any small leak will be immediately available to the world.
Instead of putting the effort into protection, put it into prevention.
It is unrealistic to prevent information to be hidden in our modern would, instead we need to control how it can be used and by who.
Impossible if you dont have an unlimited energy source. This is why the energy source for nano technology should be RESTRICTED to say solar energy, or special laser based energy so it only works in certain lighting.
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The Cowboy Bebop movie now playing in Japan is very poinient with this issue.
The first use for nano technology will set the tone for the type of technology it is.
We have laser technology but i dont see people using laser guns which burn through bullet proof vests. WHy? Because lasers arent usually USED for that.
Nano Technology should be used for hospitals, to heal people, to ACT as the bullet proof vest meaning, realtime cell repairing, this may make it so people are harder to kill, but isnt that the point of all technologies? To extend and improve the quality of life?
If you have Nano cell repair and Nano technology in hospitals, Nano structures, then making a nano virus or weapon is going to be hard as hell, your best bet would be to exploit bugs in the current nano defensive structures such as turning a persons cell repairing nano bots against them.
Then it will come down to, repairing bugs, instead of a virus problem where we are caught off guard.
In this way, yes people will still die, but it will be freak accidents instead of millions of people dying over a nano plague
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Most people who are evil arent intelligent enough to create a nuclear bomb or use genetic technology
but in the information age, this all changes, evil people become genius's.
Nano technology will be as simple as writing a computer virus,
The best way to control this is to write anti virus, create nano bots which have no purpose at all but to destroy other nano bots
When a nano virus hapens, release the destroy bots which simple using say magnets attach themselves to nano bots and in the same way that a virus attacks human cells, this can attack nano bots which are bad, attach to them, and either reprogram them, or make them cease to function somehow.
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I can't think of anything more rediculous. First of all, how are you going to build a self-replicating machine? The obstacles are so large as to be practically insurmountable. Consider that we've never even come close to building a machine that can make duplicates of itself in the macro-sized world, even using pre-machined parts, and then think how complex it would be to make a microscopic machine that could replicate. First of all, data storage would be a problem. The machine would have to have incredibly advanced molecular-level storage technology, and incredibly advanced tiny molecular storage reading technology to read the information. Then it would have to have a computer to process this information, and very sophisticated sensors to tell where it was, and some sort of locomotion device that worked in three dimensions somehow, and some sort of advanced grabbing arm to move stuff with. Just the grabbing arm itself would be an achievement. How do you expect this machine to grab atoms? With other atoms? It would be a clumsy arm that was built with the things it was supposed to move! Plus, the arm would have to build itself as part of the replicating process, so it couldn't include any components that would be too small for it to build itself.
And the final requirement: Power. Where is this machine going to be powered from? It's going to have to have a lot of power in order to grab atoms, since it will have to break atomic bonds to move the atoms around. It must be a steady, reliable source of power, one that is available everywhere in the world if it is going to turn the whole world into gray goo. Sunlight you say? What is going to collect the sunlight? Solar panels? These solar panels would need to be made of certain atoms which wouldn't be available everywhere. How would the machines replicate if they couldn't find the correct elements to build their solar panels? Remember that these are tiny machines that can only roam tiny distances, they can't go out searching for the elements they need.
One must only look at nature to see what can be accomplished in terms of molecular-sized self-replicating machines. Cells are masterpieces of design, with ingenious mechanisms that are still out of our realm of understanding in some cases, and certainly way out of our ability to design and create on our own. And yet algae is in no danger of turning the whole world into "green goo." It only survives under certain conditions. I don't think man will be able to out-design nature for the forseeable future.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Are we reading the same article? The one Bill Joy admits was inspired by the Unabomber manifesto?
As it stands today, humanity will only be around for a limited time. In the best case, we'll be around until the sun expands and swallows the Earth. More likely, a stray asteroid will finish us off first. Even if we decide to abandon technology, humanity will cease to exist one day.
So, do we want to make the most of the time we have, or not? We won't do ourselves any favors by becoming Luddites. We can only maximize human potential by the continuing to advance science and technology. That's the only chance we have for long-term survival as a species; and it will make the lives of individuals a fuck of a lot more pleasant along the way.
If you have a problem with my views, REPLY, don't moderate!
Telepathy will be possible soon with brain to computer interface, and this connected to some nanites could do EXACTLY what you are talking about.
Programming would be as simple as THINKING it, the whole art of programming would accellorate so fast that millions of programs would be written by one person in a day.
imagine if programs were created via the speed of thought and these programs could materialize via nanites.
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If you have a problem with my views, REPLY, don't moderate!
First of all, how are you going to build a self-replicating machine? The obstacles are so large as to be practically insurmountable
Yeah, men will probably walk on the Moon before we build such things!
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
This danger occurs with any technology. A while ago, when the most advanced weaponry was things like knieves and swords, a crazy person could only kill a few. Then came the gun, then the bomb, then chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, and prospects for mass destruction got worse. No technologies can be restricted forever, and they never have been in the past.
Thus, we must be extremely careful with what we invent. We must also search for ways to defend against them in the inevitable possibility that someone will attempt abuse them. I worry that in the future everyone will need to wear suits to protect against things like this because you could have invisable nano agents attempt to hurt you or have something that looks like a fly and flies around but then injects you with something or releases something at you.
"I have not failed. I've simply found 10,000 ways that won't work." --Thomas Edison
Anyone played the Playstation RPG Xenogears before? The game has some very interesting issues brought up on Nanomachines... and their potential for abuse.
o duct.asp?pf_id=152239&mscssid=EAVNTR7HB6V18GHFJHQA 2RMRRE4X48K2&
http://www.ebgames.com/ebx/categories/products/pr
Men believe what they want. - Caesar
That's what I think. A long time before.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
First of all, how are you going to build a self-replicating machine? The obstacles are so large as to be practically insurmountable.
It's easy to demonstrate that it's possible and to put an upper bound on the complexity of a replicater by looking for existing examples. Bacteria are self-replicating machines capable of synthesizing a wide variety of things, and while they're quite complex, understanding them is far from being an insurmountable challenge. Ditto understanding enough to design our own similar machines from scratch.
Well, isn't that what all Berkeley students historically study (albeit from a somewhat detached perspective)?
I'd consider Jets to be mid-tech actually -- considering most of them have been in service for atleast 20 years, some quite a bit longer than that.
There certainly isn't anything new about them, and they are certainly taken for granted.
Rod Taylor
I'm not denying that it may eventually (in the far, far, far, far future) be possible to build machines on the complexity scale of living cells. What I am denying is the absurd premise that we will somehow be able to create unstoppable self-replicating machines to turn the world into gray goo. Cells aren't even close to being able to do that. We aren't even close to being able to make cells.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
The nanotech attack has already happened. It isn't a matter of when - it is a matter of history!
Culturing, preparing and releasing Anthrax was a nanotech attack!
Future nanotech is more likely to be successful starting with biological systems than with bottom-up silicon engineering, and as such is just a logical extension of biological engineering.
The only good weather is bad weather.
Wishing that the hypothetical airplane has a "crash button critical mass" of 50% is comforting but not completely realistic. Remember the Japanese cult a few years ago that released Saran gas in the subways. Its easy to forget that their ultimate goal was to end all life on earth [not just the lives of those who were different from them]. It was part of their "religion" so don't expect that we could understand it. With the right technology you only need one such cult.
The terrorists we're facing right now only want to destroy us. The Japanese cult wanted to kill everyone. They're both terrorists but there's a significant difference. Once we get a "lets-commit-suicide-for-everyone" cult with nanoweapons then all bets are off. Any technology as powerful as this one can and eventually will be turned against us just as every one before it.
Secrecy and other safeguards may not be 100% effective, but they have the potential to fare better than wishful thinking. Since I don't see any guidelines or safeguards in the near future I hope I'm wrong.
I was just reading The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurweil, and I ended with a brief discussion on nanotechnology and terrorism. He brings up points that are very important to consider. Nanotechnology can be one where it is self-controlling. It can self-replicate, but embedded within that a means of destroy the negative components. I do not have the book handy, but it is a good read and Kurzweil explains it so simply, my mom could understand it.
100% Insightful
Them: You should be afraid of nanotechnology getting into the wrong hands!
You: Well, ok...Why? Whats there to be afraid of? Isn't the whole idea circumvented by...
Them: Nanotechnology. Be afraid.
You: Huh? That doesn't answer my question.
Them: You should be afraid of nanotechnology.
You: Err...What?? You're just repeating yourself!! You haven't given me a reason why I...
Them: Yes. Nanotechnology--It could get into the wrong hands. Osama Bin Laden's hands!
You: How on earth is nanotechnology a threat to anyone? What, you think someones going to introduce some sort of synthetic nano-machine virus into the water supply? Come on.
Them: You need to be afraid of nanotechnology falling into the wrong hands. And the water supply
You: FINE. OK. Jeezus, lets say for the sake of the argument that some "evil organization" learns how to develop nanotechnology. Fine. What good is it going to do them? What are they going to build that would be such a terrible threat to anyone? Why not simply use standard, boring old chemistry tricks to kill people? Hasn't it ever occured to you that the idea of "death by nanotechnology" is about as sensical as "And now, Batman, I will spend millions of dollars to construct a machine that lower you very slowly into a pool of imported Burmese pirahna!!"
Them: You should be afraid of nanotechnology falling into the wrong hands.
You: Hasn't it occured to you that a single drop of benzene is enough to kill a room full of people? All Benzene is, is just a ring of 8 carbon atoms. It doesn't require a knowledge of nanotechnology to make a whole bucket of....
Them: You should be afraid of Osama Bin Laden, and nanotechnology. And benzene. And mail. And muslims. And cryptography. And steganography. And bridges. And...
You: {click}
Bowie J. Poag
If you were to give a present-day person a time machine, he'd be totally wowed by all the possibilities that opened up before him. He would probably take over the world pretty freaking quickly.
If you were to give everyone on the planet a time machine, all at the same time, nobody would be able to take over the world.
The same can be said about computers, nanotech, giant robot spiders of doom, any technology that has a single source or a single user can give its wielder great power. Give it to everyone and they'll be able to handle the grey or red goo problems on their own time.
Nanotech will start out like the atom bomb, automobile, cotton gin or the microwave oven. First only an elite few will have this great labour-saving device, but after a while, everyone will.
"Look at me, I invented the stove!" -- Ben Franklin
The commonly cited "gray goo" scenario is a sort of nanotech worst case: nanites that can convert almost any naturally occurring matter (including biomatter) into more identical nanites. Robert Freitas has done some analysis concluding that gray goo would either work very slowly, or throw off a huge amount of heat which could be detected by a thermal monitoring system of geosynchronous satellites. Drexler has observed that making a gray goo nanite is likely to be an enormous engineering challenge.
These kinds of topics pop up on sci.nanotech with some frequency. Here are some discussions: November 1996, March 1997, September/October 1997. My own thinking is that we want to ensure that the development of defensive measures outpaces the development of offensive weapons. A step in the right direction would be for the good guys to maintain a development/design/simulation effort that clearly outpaces anything the bad guys can do. (This obviously sidesteps the issue of who gets to define "good guys" and "bad guys", and whether the good guys become corruptible given a commanding technological lead.)
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
I'm getting really tired of all of you talking about nanotech like it's already here. "They are too dangerous because they could get out of control"; "What about nanobots that can generate exact copies of real objects, what then about copyright law?"; blah blah blah...
Nanobots are science fiction. We are probably only slightly closer to nanobots than teleportation, and it's definitely further away than flying cars. Oh shit, hold on... I gotta cut this post short - My holo-phone is ringing. Damn, what do you guys think about the ramifications of someone being able to see how fat my ass is on the phone?
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
Yesterday, California Gov. Davis said bridges on the entire West Coast were going to blow up. The week before that, Anthrax was everywhere making already testy US Postal Employees, with the 2nd Amendment right to bear arms, a little more edgy in mass wearing disguises. I am not even going to start with jumbo jets plowing into buildings 3/4 miles south of my apartment a month ago.
Now, thanks to Slashdot, I am freaking out about things I can't see without an electron microscope (yea like I got those laying around like cue-cats) crawling around my body screwing up my DNA! With the way the technology industry is dominated and my luck, I could end up ingesting a Microsoft Nanabot NT for the Intestines and end up with the Blue Skin of Death.
Can't we have more fun stories about people that cover their cases in PETA approved faux fur, obviously photoshopped, fake Apple combination PDA/MP3/GPS prototypes or someone running a beowulf cluster of Aibos powered by the disco beat of the Bee Gees. I got enough forwarded e-mail in my mailbox to freak me out for quite a while. On a positive note, at least no malls blew up on Halloween like that woman from Mississippi/Oregon/Florida/Arizona with the Saudi/Iranian/Iraqi/Palestinians/Egyptian/Sudanese boyfriend (that left abruptly) told her sister/mother/hair stylist/local sheriff would happen.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
If all the science was open, then everyone could have an understanding of all the risks and work together to prevent anything terrible happening.
First of all, science already is open. While individual implementations of a technology may be proprietary, the basic research underpinning it all is public (browse the journals section of a university's library some time).
Secondly, you are assuming that people a) are able to keep up with and understand all facets of science, b) are willing to do so, and c) are able to tell that someone's growing anthrax in their basement in time to do something about it.
a) can't even be done by scientists. This is why experts exist. Even within a fairly bounded discipline there are far too many papers and references for one person to keep up with - so people specialize in a niche that interests them and keep current with directly related topics.
Joe Average would have a much harder time of it.
b) Given that keeping up with even a niche in science in enough detail to truly understand it is pretty much a full-time job, and that most people already have full-time jobs and don't read scientific papers for leisure, I doubt that most people would be willing to keep abreast of all of science.
c) There are a wide range of diabolical terrorist plots that look surprisingly innocent right until the end. Concealment is easy. Detection is hard.
So, the populace at large will have a hard time policing itself. You could delegate the problem to a team of experts... which gives you something that looks a lot like the existing police force plus the various special agencies. In other words, we're already implementing what's probably the most pragmatic approximation to this ideal.
It is unrealistic to prevent information to be hidden in our modern would, instead we need to control how it can be used and by who.
The problem is that in most cases such control is also not feasible to implement in practice.
That leaves us with deterrents as a disincentive, and damage control plans for the inevitable few who are not deterred. Clever and nasty terrorist attacks will continue to happen, with a wide variety of technologies (basic and advanced). The best that IMO can be done is to attempt to minimize them and deal effectively with them when they do occur. Others, of course, will have widely varying opinions.
The article states that "There's no question that if Osama bin Laden had access to nanoweapons that he'd use them."
That's quite a statement my friend. Let's be dreadfully honest here. What is terrorism? Terrorism is violence. Violence against a group of people who are unlike us. What defines "us"? Ladies and Gentlemen, we were infected at a very early age. With a dreadful virus, a virus of the mind. From here on I will refer to a virus of the mind as a meme.
We have all been infected with a very specific meme. The meme of race. The meme of Nationalism. The memes of "We" and "Them".
We are all alike. Even the most beautiful and glamorous of us is forced to take a large foul-smelling crap from time to time.
When you are born, your parents induct you into a society. They tell you the story of your Forefathers, your culture, your heritage. You are given a sense of pride in your genetic lineage. Don't panic. You have been infected. From then on, everyone around you is different. The "We" and the "Them". You can't be part of them, you're part of "Us", part of "our" "we".
When confronted with one of "Them", you meet an alien for the first time. Where your own eyes are round, the alien's eyes are slanted. Where your skin is black, his is white. Where your hair is lusturous and black, hers is fine and white, or red, or green. See what just happened? You fell into the trap... You have denied your shared traits, your shared behaviours. You saw the differences between you, and fell into the trap of racism.
Racism is a negative idea, Not because of the violence and hatred it breeds, but because it is wrapped up in the meme of race. The Twin memes of "We" and "Them". How am I different from any Muslim? How am I different from any Jew? How am I different from any Catholic? We all eat to survive. We all take big smelly shits. We Pick our noses and stare at our boogers. We Fart and blame it on the Dog. We all become aroused. Which incidentally brings me to the first cure for Racism.
We all need to fuck each other.
You heard me, say it yourself. You'll feel much better.
"We all need to fuck one another."
If the words taste funny in your mouth, it's cause you haven't acquired a taste yet. Try it again...
You may be asking me now, "But Kauai_Geek, we're gonna be having a whole lot of fun with this, but how will it cure racism?" The answer? By eliminating the Visual differences, it is impossible to differentiate yourself from your neighbor. He looks just like you. He has your cocoa skin, your exotic eyes, your tall lanky frame, even your acne. He. Looks. Just. Like. Me. He is me... How can I hate myself? How can I hate my brother? How can I do naught but love my sister? My Aunt? My cousin? My Father? My Mother?
It's okay if you still have that foul taste in your mouth. This is a difficult, and sometimes distasteful idea to stomach. How could you ever fuck a Nigger? A Chink? A Jap? A Wop? A Filthy Fucking Jew? You may not taste the sweet nectar of lust when you contemplate the differences of another. For you I have another cure.
You are going to have to kill everyone. Well I shouldn't say that. You won't have to kill Everyone . Just those who aren't part of your "We". Gives you a funny feeling in your stomach? Wrap all of that silly queasyness in a bundle and throw it over your shoulder. You're not a Murderer. You're ending Racism! And what a glorious gift your god has given you. That's right Your God. Don't let yourself down after everyone who looks different than you is dead. You and your similar brothers have much more work to do! You've got to kill everyone one who isn't a Catholic! Who isn't a Baptist! Who isn't a Muslim! Heck, even those who aren't Buddhists! You've got a whole bunch of Jews to kill. Go on, don't be hesitant. Your God said to love all your brothers. How can you love with the unsafety of difference between you and your brothers? Go on, keep killing.
Good work. You've killed everyone who does not share your melanin levels. Good work. Now take a good long look around. Hey.... Waitaminute John's eyes are blue. Mine are brown. Fuck, there's still a little bit of racism left to be purged... Smoke that blue eyed fuck! And his Daughter! That bitch with the Red HAIR!!! Slaughter that BiTch! Fucking murder hate kill enemy destroy slaughter maim, bite kick kill punch!
Thank goodness, there's no racism left. Funny, weren't there more people around here? Hmmm this is interesting. You seem to be All. By. Your. Self.
Well at least there's no more of those racist fucks left.
As for me? I'd rather get laid in a bed of cloth than a bed of dirt. Which do you choose?
Surfing is religion
you are silly
I Hack You! - Ninja Fish
To us, jets aren't some kind of exotic rarely-seen technology. They may be hi-tech but they are familiar hi-tech, and that familarity is what makes them dangerous. Rather than nanobots, what if somebody developed a virus that made pigeons become homocidal. That would be the equivalent.
...
And I think most of us had thought at some point "gee, a suicidal person could crash a plane into something and cause a lot of damage. I wonder why it doesn't happen". Just idle speculation
Try
Or
Or
What do you think? Is there any technology that is so inherently dangerous that it's in our best interest to closely guard it? To make it secret?
Me, I don't think so. But I welcome opposing viewpoints.
Cheers
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
Now it's well more than half of my friend's worst-case estimate later. We have nothing approaching any of those things. What we have is exactly one thing, C 60, also called buckminsterfullerene. It's a very interesting thing, but it's a material, not a machine. Its co-inventor, Dr. Richard E. Smalley, explained in the Sept. 2001 Scientific American that the Drexler assembler is and always will be impossible, because molecules are not tinkertoys that you can put together an atom at a time.
In his 1999 Senate statement, Dr. Smalley said this about potential natural security ramifications of nanotechnology research:
As you can see, it promises some incremental advances, but no basic revolutions -- certainly nothing on the level of the atomic bomb. Stronger armor, lighter planes, faster computers, smaller missiles, absolutely. But hordes of nanobattlebots? Get real.
The Drexler revolution has fallen flat on its face. We do not yet have even a semi-autonomous microbot, much less any kind of nanobot. Even at the microscale it turns out the laws of mechanics are too different from the mesoscale to allow for something as standard as a gear, and the nanoscale is much more different than that. We do not have anything vaguely resembling an assembler, and chemists say that the assembler will always be impossible.
Yet for some reason people are still concerned with these fantasies. It's just bad science fiction, like warp drives and human-animal hybrids. It's not important. We will have nanotechnology but it will be far more modest and less dangerous than the whacked-out speculations of fake futurists. Start dealing with the technology issues we really do face, like cloning, nuclear proliferation, and social monitoring. They're important. Drexler and his cult are not.
Tim
Yes, but I think you're missing an important point:
You should be afraid of nanotechnology. It might fall into the wrong hands!
And the water supply.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Think about it, if a nanite that could construct more of itself went rogue and began making more rogue nanites like itself, it would overwhelm the area before humans could even draw five measured breaths. Unless, that is, it is built so that it cannot replicate more often than every x time period - and what if that measure "breaks"?
The only protection would seem to be to have security nanite completely saturated in the surroundings (ie., the entire world), and then what if a security nanite breaks or goes Rogue? Which nanites watch others, and which watch the watchers? There needs to be a more concrete answer to this before we go releasing nanites into the wild.
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
It's a shame; I'd love to see one--but it's time to get used to the idea that it's just not gonna happen.
spork
Your argument amounts to: if evolution wanted us to fly it would have given us wings, therefore it is unfeasible to create a flying machine.
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What you are talking about is building super bacteria. This is biotechnology. I agree that scary things could be done with biotechnology, and that this is the most likely form of "nanotechnology" to be seen in the next hundred years. But it's not what most people working on "nanotechnology" are working on, nor what Drexler et. al. call nanotechnology.
If anything I think the worry is arse-about-face. It's the technologically advanced countries that are going to perfect nano weapons first. So if we are scared, the people of Middle Eastern countries should be terrified. Imagine a nano virus 10 times more powerful than Anthrax, geneticly keyed to only kill those of Pashtoon blood, or in order to get Bin Laden, those of Yemeni blood! It would be like using a smart nuclear bomb that would only hurt your enemies.
Oh yeah that's a good idea! You'll have to get something that's really virulent and spreads everywhere of course. And then within 5 years every genetic script kiddy will have easily obtained a sample and modified it to take out their favourite pet peeve ethnic group. Great plan!
Imagine what could happen if weapons like this or the technology to produce them, got into the hands of western white supremacy groups, or christian fundamentalists!
Frankly, I'm more worried about the Israeli Zionists. They have the knowledge and technology. They are effectively involved in a war and might rationalize to themselves that it's justified.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
> You: Hasn't it occured to you that a single
> drop of benzene is enough to kill a room full
> of people? All Benzene is, is just a ring of 8
> carbon atoms.
Benzene is C6H6. It's no more toxic than aceton or asbestos. One drop of benzene cannot kill a roomful of people. You can wash your hands in benzene, swallow a small amount of it (certainly a few drops) and suffer no immediate health problems. Benzene MAY cause cancer in some people. Just like asbestos.
Gray Goo is not a "key part" of Foresight's story. It's not even all that important. You may want to take another look at Foresight--it sounds like you haven't looked at them for several years.
I think you're right about self-replication not being so important. A single desktop factory with fractal converging assembly lines is much easier to program than a mass of individual free-floating assemblers. And in fact, in Nanosystems (written in 1992) Drexler proposes just such a factory.
Chris
Ask me about Nanotechnology, Dyslexia Correction. Tell me about A.I., robotics, infrastructure.
Actually, that sounds like the book! :P
I dunno, I work with people that work with nanotech. I found it as 'out there'.... but if its your field, who am I to judge where it will be in 50 or 100 years?
There's your answer all.
I still say it was a good (and annoying, yes...) read.