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.'"
I've read a few of his books over the years, and would put him up there with Richard Dawkings. Great read, even for the non-scientific.
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
The problem with this is that knowledge (or even simply ideas) once taken out cannot be jammed back into the can. Nor should it. Security through obscurity is never really secure... if you know what I mean...
00101010
Yeah, "Prey" might scare the beejeebees out of people, but maybe get a few interested in real nanotechnology. For that, they can take a look at Small Times, which has covered the environmental issue extensively both in this article and in its upcoming dead-tree-edition cover story.
Dyson & Bill Joy both relate to the Unabomber Manifesto,
which has some stunning sections on technology:
Industrial-Technological Society Cannot Be Reformed
Restriction Of Freedom Is unavoidable In Industrial Society
The 'Bad' Parts Of Technology Cannot Be Seperated From The 'Good' Parts
Technology Is A More Powerful Social Force Than The Aspiration Freedom
The complete manifesto is here
BEFORE YOU REPLY, please read a bit.
He has some ideas that are VERY similar
to ideas that get posted here on slashdot.
One excerpt here...
While technological progress AS A WHOLE continually narrows our sphere of freedom, each new technical advance CONSIDERED BY ITSELF appears to be desirable. Electricity, indoor plumbing, rapid long-distance communications . . . how could one argue against any of these things, or against any other of the innumerable technical advances that have made modern society? It would have been absurd to resist the introduction of the telephone, for example. It offered many advantages and no disadvantages. Yet as we explained in paragraphs 59-76, all these technical advances taken together have created world in which the average man's fate is no longer in his own hands or in the hands of his neighbors and friends, but in those of politicians, corporation executives and remote, anonymous technicians and bureaucrats whom he as an individual has no power to influence.
Return a Time/Space anomoly to normal.
Seal an atmoshpere about to get ripped away from a planet.
Stun some nasty aliens.
Adjust the harmonics of a warp drive.
But, how can this be? It's not possible they say.
Get over it and just have fun.
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
I can state with no doubt that you did not read the article.
One of the most intereting conversations I've ever had was with a fellow who was pursuing a career in particle accelerator work.
According to him there used to be similar "Grey Goo" arguments surrounding some earlier particle accelerator work. There was some worry that an experiment, by chance, might create a form of matter that was more stable at lower energies, causing a chain reaction that would convert normal matter into this more "stable" matter, plus energy.
I really don't know enough about the field to flesh this out better. However, rather than being frightening, the conversation really captured how exciting fields on the edge can be.
I always had trouble with the grey goo concept, on which Crichton bases this book, on the grounds that I have a hard time figuring out what the damned things do for food.
The dominant energy source around us is organic matter. You can't get much energy out of eating inorganic matter (rock) because, aside from carbon (coal, graphite, diamond), it's mostly well-oxidized and sitting in a free-energy minimum. That's why we don't burn rocks other than coal in the fireplace. This means that the nanobots would be competing with natural life forms for organic matter and I doubt they would do well in the competition.
The machinery by which living things extract energy from organic matter is quite sophisticated and I don't see any prospect for engineered nanotechnology out-competing basic bacteria on this front.
Similarly, if most of the energetically favorable raw material around is organic, if the nanobots are to reproduce, they will likely be built of organic compounds, so they are again competing with bacteria that have a 4 billion year head start in optimizing themselves for the environment. If they are built of inorganic compounds or make much use of elements that are not generally found in living matter, then they will need to use much of their metabolic output to fighting entropy as they purify (reduce sand to silicon, for instance) and synthesize the necessary building blocks.
Until the question of where a nanobot gets its food and how it reproduces are plausibly explained (we don't need reduction to practice, but some plausible background is necessary), I will not take scenarios involving huge swarms of malevolent grey goo seriously, even in fiction.
A-ha-ha-ha-ha.
Now then, Dmitri. You know how we've always talked about the possibility... of something going wrong with the dust. The dust, Dmitri. The nano dust! Well, now, what happened, is... ah, one of our scientists, he had a sort of... well, he went a little funny in the head. You know, just a little... funny. And, ah, he went and did a silly thing. Well, I'll tell you what he did. He ordered his dust... to attack your country. Ah, well let me finish Dmitri - let me finish Dmitri... Well listen, how do you think I feel about it?! Can you imagine how I feel about it, Dmitri? Why do you think I'm calling you? Just to say hello?
Of course I like to speak to you! Of course I like to say hello! Not now, but anytime, Dmitri. I'm just calling up to tell you something terrible has happened. It's a friendly call, of course it's a friendly call. Listen, if it wasn't friendly... you probably wouldn't have even gotten it.
They will not reach their targets for at least another hour. I am... I am positive, Dmitri. Listen, I've been all over this with your ambassador, it is not a trick.
Well, I'll tell you. We'd like to give your HVAC staff a complete run-down on the targets, the flight characteristics, and the defensive systems of the dust. Yes! I mean, i-i-i-if we're unable to denature the dust, then... I'd say that, ah... well, we're just gonna have to help you destroy it, Dmitri. All right, well listen now. Who should we call? Who should we call, Dmitri? The, wha-whe, the People... you, sorry, you faded away there. The People's Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning Headquarters. Where is that, Dmitri? In Omsk, right? Yes? Oh, you'll call them first, will you? Uh-huh. Listen, do you happen to have the phone number on you, Dmitri? Whe-ah, what? I see, just ask for Omsk Information.
Ah-ah-eh-um-hmmmmm.
I'm sorry, too, Dmitri. I'm very sorry. Alright, you're sorrier than I am! But I am as sorry as well. I am as sorry as you are, Dmitri. Don't say that you're more sorry than I am, because I'm capable of being just as sorry as you are. So we're both sorry, alright?
Alright.
Yes, the main page has been slow for me as well; it's probably not your admin.
You should post questions such as yours in the user-created discussions section.
No, I think you have completely manages to miss the point of Dyson's article. It is not an article geared to impress the masses on his command of science, rather, it is one meant to point out the serious, very serious, flaws that people like Bill Joy and Crichton have with their outlook on nanotechnology. When you read into their arguments and "forecasts" about nano, it becomes clear that Joy and Crichton really don't have an inkling on what they are talking about. The result of their writings, based more on emotion than hard logic, is the disillusionment of the masses against a science that is not properly understood. I find it of great annoyance that a popular author, such as Crichton, is willing to put himself in the position of being one to predict how the future of nano will unfold. The reality is that by applying fundamental rules of physics and chemistry, one can quickly dismiss the dream-land nanotechnology scenarious proposed by people such as Drexler, Joy, and Crichton, as the stuff that fairytales are made of. Kudos to Freeman Dyson!
This is plagiarized from an Amazon.com member review to get karma points - scroll down to the 6th review on that page - I think the comment should be moderated redundant
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.
Forget all the tech arguments(it's *fiction*, folks) this guy has some serious issues - he seems incapable of writing realistic female characters. Jurassic Park - the little girl was constantly whining and crying - at least Spielberg gave her some intelligence("Hey - this is Unix! I know this! :) ). Andromeda Strain- I only recall some nurses. Now, in Prey, the hero's wife goes to the dark side and conjures up some Clones(see: Attack of).
Mebbe Mr. Critchton should go for a little sensitivity training?
Dyson rocks, though.
DT
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.
Like any other sane person, it is the yoctobots that I fear. Devices so small they can masquerade as a hydrogen atom to escape notice. They would float around on superstring loops, adjusting quantum spins on our very molecules!
What happens, when a swarm of these things invades your brain, and suddenly changes some unobserved quantum value to another unobserved quantum value? Your entire SOUL could change, and there is nothing you could do about it!!! Even if neurological science progesses to a fantastic level, upon examination, no one could conclude that your mind had been tampered with...
This is why I propose a worldwide ban, without exception, on yoctotechnology experimentation. We can't act soon enough!
Freeman Dyson postulated the idea of a Dyson Sphere, which is basically a planet that was built as a shell surrounding a sun, using all the energy it radiates.
Also mentioned in the TNG episode Relics.
"TK-421, why aren't you at your post?"
Tacheon beams are apparently the 24th century equivelent of duct tape.
Technoli
Blood Music, by Greg Bear: One of the original grey goo stories. The short story version is somewhat different from the novel, both fascinating. Queen of Angels and Slant deal with nano/bio modifications to people.
Deception Well by Linda Nagata (also The Bohr Maker, and Vast, the prequel and sequel -- though DW reads fine on its own). Nano-infected planet holds keys to all kinds of mysterious stuff, including how this not-quite human person is able to live among the humans.
Limit of Vision by Linda Nagata. OK, I reallyreally like her stuff. This one is closer to present-time, and doesn't quite hit the grey goo phase... but avoids it narrowly. Not her best, but still very entertaining.
Truly, NanoSF is a bit passe. Blood Music dates from '86 (according to Amazon). Current cutting-edge SF tends more towards bioengineering, plagues, eco-crashes (Dust), or truly wonky time travel (Chronoliths).
Design for Use, not Construction!
We have the means to stop this onslaught, a lovely piece of legislation called the DMCA and an army of lawyers to back it up.
Any badass nanite that tries to replicate itself will be doing so without paying the appropriate copyright fees to the original creator and will summarily get slapped with a nice lawsuit and some jailtime to cool it's heels (erm... cillia? flagella?).
Just in case that does not work, we have Senator Disney who will make sure that these abominations have DRM technology built into them from the get-go, so self-replicating nanites will come pre-spayed and neutered for our protection.
We need not even go that far. The very fact that such a beast is being created is a violation itself, since it's its own circumvention device.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
I'm not entirely certain whether I agree or disagree...
There are a number of different styles of science fiction. We've got the kind you describe, where amazing technology exists solely because the author wants it to be there. The author wants something to happen, so he waves his hands and says 'it's all because of science.' There's no deeper meaning, and there's no attempt at any sort of realistic theory behind things. These stories are nothing but suspending disbelief and enjoying the ride.
Then there are the books that, while quite possibly written for entertainment as well, also go about playing the 'what-if' game... These are the sort of stories that, even if it isn't the main premise, wind up bringing up issues and trying to answer the question "If we had technology to do X, then what sort of things might happen to us..." These aren't trying to explain how the technology itself works, but rather how the having that technology affects people.
Finally, there are the science fiction books that actually try to propose valid explanations for what is going on...
There can be mixes amongst the categories(frequently something explains a theory and tries to analyze how it might affect people), but it's pretty easy to find examples of all these different types of books in SF... And it doesn't mean any one type is inferior to the others.
That said, while I haven't read this particular book, one of Crichton's recent books, Timeline, annoyed me with one particular trait. If it had been written as an 'enjoy the ride' style story, it would have been fine(though a little predictable, but that's a separate issue). The problem arose in that he spent large portions of the book quoting and referencing scientific papers and books on science trying desperately to justify and explain something, while he really didn't have any sort of grasp on the subject matter. Trying to pass yourself off as explaining the technology in SF, when you don't have a clue as to how the subjects your discussing work is something I find rather grating. If he'd just waved his hands and said 'and the scientists discovered time travel,' then I would have found the book significantly better...
Then again, this is just my opinion.
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.
The "dude, it's fiction" thing only goes so far. Imagine some really stupid mistake that anyone would catch -- say, a novel set on the Atlantic coast of Kansas. Don't you think that would interfere with your suspension of disbelief, just a little? For people with any significant degree of scientific knowledge, dumb science mistakes are just as jarring.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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.
I don't know if anyone else had come up with a similar law before I thought of it a number of years ago (thanks mostly to the brilliant work of none other than Ivan Stang), so I'll put a flag in it right now and call it Wee's Law of Tinfoil Hats.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
The very fact that such a beast is being created is a violation itself, since it's its own circumvention device.
Not only did the slashdot poster use both "its" and "it's" correctly, but (s)he did so adjacently!
I do believe that this is a slashdot first, folks. Any other poster would have confused possessive pronouns with contractions. The only possible explanation is that rworne is not a real slashdot poster, but rather a sentient nanite himself!
"Some science fiction writers have wrongly given me the credit for inventing the idea of an artificial biosphere. In fact, I took the idea from Olaf Stapledon, one of their own colleagues:
"This passage I found in a tattered copy of Stapledon's Star Maker which I picked up in Paddington Station in London in 1945."
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.
Not sure that too many people really believed that scientists could soon have dinosaurs rampaging through their back yard.
I think you've hit on an important point here: there's no reason to believe that anyone will take "Prey" any more seriously than they did Jurassic Park. In that sense, I think Dyson's entire piece is misguided. If he wants to argue with Bill Joy, he should do so directly, rather than dragging a piece of unrealistic irrelevant pulp fiction into it.
Dyson's comparison to "On the Beach" doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The consequences of a major nuclear war would not be very different, in the most important respects, from that described in On the Beach - i.e. unthinkable numbers of people would die, and life on Earth would barely be worth living. The situation with nanotech is nowhere near so clear.
Dyson claims he's trying to combat myths that might enter the public consciousness as a result of "Prey", but it's not clear that the public is going to be any more worried about the realistic consequences of nanotech, than it is about scientists cloning killer dinosaurs.
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.
. . . sentient nanite himself!
You know, back when I made nanites, I told them to--
Aw, forget it. This joke is played out.