Slashdot Mirror
Dyson On Grey Goo, Bioterrorism, and Censorship
Phronesis writes "In "The Future Needs Us," Freeman Dyson reviews Michael Crichton's Prey. After disposing of the bad science (The Reynolds number of nanobots 'the size of red blood cells' would limit their top speed to 2 mm/sec, which would make it hard for them to swarm or chase people; Solar power would provide no more than 20 nanowatts, which would not be sufficient for the activities the book describes; etc.) he turns to the more general theme of fearmongering about nanotechnology and biotechnology, comparing Prey to Nevil Shute's On the Beach ('Prey is not as good as On the Beach, but it is bringing us an equally important message')." Read on for a few more notes from the story, which makes an interesting followup to reader cybrpnk2's positive review of Prey .
"Dyson notes Joy's oddly prescient comment in April 2000 that
I think it is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation-states, on to a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals.but objects to Joy's recommendation that we should 'relinquish pursuit of that knowledge...so dangerous that we judge it better that [it] never be available.' After a discussion of the actual history of biological warfare and bioterrorism, Dyson quotes Milton's Areopagitica in defense of intellectual and scientific freedom, concluding that 'Perhaps, after all, as we struggle to deal with the enduring problems of reconciling individual freedom with public safety, the wisdom of a great poet who died more than three hundred years ago may still be helpful.'"
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
Micheal Crichton in this book, describes HOW these nanites are moving. Yes, they have fibres to move and by themselves could only go 2 mm/sec (not enough to chase people) but he goes on to say how through these emergant behaviours that they were working as groups. They were developing propulsion that was designed around multiple units working at once. Increasing the totally speed of the swarm. There was a lot of very detailed explanation on exactly how these units moved, how when wind came up they had to fall to the surface to escape the velocities.
With the exemption of the ending which I wont spoil here it was a very plausible book.
You have to understand that with solar power in nanite groups, you're not just generating electricity, but also heat which causes convection etc and nanites could control this force among others naturally present in the environment.
Its exactly this kind of emergent behaviour that crichton was talking about and this guy has seemed to miss the point.
$.02
The narrative in Prey is boring and childish. Crichton shows no more command of English expression than your average freshman composition class. Events in the book which deserve some fear and some dread are treated without any emotion at all. Doesn't a descent into the subterranean world of a pulsing, mechanical evil demand some exposition? Crichton doesn't think so, and dismisses this climactic scene in at most twenty large-type, double-spaced pages.
There is so much good literature in the world that I regret having spent even the few hours I did reading Prey. Certainly don't buy it, and if you got it as a gift, try selling it to you local used shop and picking up something worthwhile.
The point is that in Science Fiction, if you are straying from current scientific "truths" (regardless of the fact that truth is a function of time), that you have to provide an explanation why. Else it's not science fiction.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
Crichton seems to be a reasonable writer. I say this in the sense that his style is readable and engaging. The topics are rarely boring. The characters seem to be plausible.
The problem is that he gets details in science often wildly wrong. Almost all the geneticists I spoke to flinch at _Jurassic Park_. The supercomputer people I work with smirk about his treatment of our field. The situation is not unlike how the military people and defense contractor engineers read Clancy: it's a good read, but don't expect anything like reality from it. (re my own experiences having worked @ one of the laser test ranges in NM and comparing it to _Cardinal of the Kremlin_ or the reactions from engineers to people that cite Clancy on sci.military.naval or rec.aviation.military).
The good question is...is this a service he's doing for us, the scientists and engineers? Or is it a massive disservice? The weighing that needs to be done is whether or not the service of bringing up the fact that people need to pay attention to new technologies and their implications vs the really bad extrapolations and wrong impressions the guy gives people about what we are able to do or even how the stuff works at all...
People will react with "This is only fiction..." but then most people don't often read about the real science and get caught up, do they? They find it dull and, thus, get their impressions from these works...
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
I've never really understood the title of Joy's essay, "Why the future doesn't need us", and likewise for Dyson's rejoinder. Joy mostly wrote about how we could wipe ourselves out through technology. Of course this has been a concern for decades. But nobody before expressed it as whether or not the future "needed" us. It was rather a question of whether we would be around!
Why did Joy adopt this curious phraseology? What does it mean for the future to need us? How can the future have needs at all? It's like saying that Left needs us, or Up doesn't need us. I've never understood it.
So our fate is not in our hands because we have plumbing, electricity and the telephone? He had to kill three people to give us this vast wisdom? Maybe he could have used this magical long-distance communication, like you are, and just posted this online. Actually, he didn't want to, because there is too much 'noise' online so he had to threaten to kill people to get 'respectable news sources' like the NYT to print this tripe instead.
Try reading (in one of those new fangled book thingies) some history about life before and during the industrial revolution. The 'average man's fate' was much less in his own hands than it is now. How can you choose your own fate when life expectancy is like like 30 years? Ever heard of slavery, serfdom, kingdoms, or indentured servitude? How would life be now without technology.. no antibiotics or other medical procedures besides leeches, no printing presses, no advanced learning available for 95% of the population, transportation by animal with no roads, no microwave, no space travel.. you get the idea. Sure technology can be intrusive and even dangerous, but there's no way I would want to go back to the way the things were.
One other minor point, Ted Kaczynski made a good show of living with no water or electricity, but where did his food, typewriter, paper, bomb equipment, address lookup, mail delivery or even clothes come from?
What makes Science Fiction such a compelling genre for the discussion of ideas (particularly important social themes) is the fact that the environment of the story is unencumbered by the limitations of human understanding.
It provides a rich framework, with enough truth, and enough speculation, so as to remain interesting to the reader, and yet allow the author to explore complex issues which may or may not be just around the corner, and these issues are the point of the story. The science itself is window dressing.
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
Freeman Dyson is a very smart guy with a lot of good, difficult and original work under his belt as well as the ability to write for the general public. Dawkins is just a tactless popularizer of other people's theories.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
This fear-mongering of science has to stop. They keep talking about the potential for this and that.
Politcal THEORY has killed millions of people in the last century. Hitler, Stalin, Mao and many, many others directly caused the deaths of millions of people, based on their politcal theories.
Why not shut down the political science depts at universities? Political theory has been PROVEN to be far more dangerous than science.
I'm going to protest outside the poli sci dept. Who's with me?
The difference between statements made in history limiting man's abilities and those made by Dyson in the book review are that Dyson's are based on absolute physical law. Previous assertions such as man never being able to fly faster than the speed of sound had nothing to do with physical laws so much as underestimating mankind's engineering ability.
Even when curmudgeons were declaring that a craft heavier than air would never get off the ground you only had to look in the sky every time a bird, or an insect or a piece of paper flew by to know that it had to be possible. We knew back before the days of the Chuck Yeager and the Bell X-1 that objects could break the sound barrier. Bullets did it all the time and it was just a matter of engineering to get past the hurdle.
OTOH, the increasing effect of viscosity on smaller objects in a fluid media is a known physical law. More energy might mean faster movement but that leads us to the problems of the amount of the maximum amount of energy contained in sunlight. Like Dyson stated, the energy is just not there - there's no engineering problem to solve. It would be like trying to get 5 gallons of gasoline out of a 1 gallon container.
That is what annoys me about arguments such as yours. They don't take into account what we know about the physical universe versus what people in the past thought they knew about man's engineering limitations.
I think the grandparent's point was that a moratorium on a technology isn't going to stop the sort of people who would use said technology for evil from researching it. For example, we could agree all we wanted to that we aren't going to try to find security holes in IIS, but that's not going to stop Mr. l33th4x0rs|>13 from finding those holes.
Hence the security through obscurity reference - while it may take bad people longer to figure it out without our help (it's obscure, and they won't have a lot of help), we're going to be totally unprepared for it when they do. We won't even have an inkling of an idea of how the exploit/virus/nanobug/magic death box/whatever works, and we'll be fucked as far as finding a fix quickly goes. If we had researched it, we might have found a fix already, or at least we'd have an idea of where to start.
While Mr. Dyson is quite right in this observation, it seem almost absurd that he didn't see it fit to mention that post-Nixon USA also resumed research and large-scale production of biological weapons. For example, all evidence indicates that the "weapons-grade" anthrax sent through US mail was a strain developed by US weapons labs. What that anthrax scare revealed is just how many US military labs are working on the further weaponization of anthrax and other, more deadly biological agents.