Slashdot Mirror
The Law of Disassembly
An anonymous reader writes "Smalltimes has a story by Douglas Mulhall, author of Our Molecular Future, which discusses molecular nanotechnology (MNT) disassembly, and argues for what he calls the 'Law of Disassembly,' that 'every MNT product must be disassemblable by at least one [of several possible methods].' The article ends with some good suggestions for raising awareness of this important issue. Gratuitous quote: This is disturbingly reminiscent of "nuclear power will give us clean limitless energy, and don't worry, we'll deal with the byproducts later because we'll have the tools by then.""
And weren't they right? Nuclear power does give us clean, limitless engery and we can deal with the byproducts no problem.
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Absolutely any thing that can self-replicate will be subject to the laws of evolution. So if some supposedly self-limiting replicator has any variants that can replicate faster (and pass on that variation), then that variant will become more prevalent. With each succeeding faster variant comes the potential for run-away population growth (to the limit of available resources). And any variant that can consume alternative resources (having consumed the initial set of resources ) will also become more populous. The result is the gray goo disaster that people fear.
Attempts to build in self-limiting features (replication delay clocks, kill switches, error-correcting DNA ROMs, special only-replicates with a special nutrient, etc.) will only present an obstacle to evolution, not an insurmountable barrier. You can add 9s to the probablity that gray goo won't happen, but you can never get to 100% if self-replication is permitted.
That said, you could also create a balanced nano-organism ecosystem with both predators and prey and boost human/animal/plant immune system to fight off nanoorganism attacks. (There is a reason that bacteria have never taken over the world.)
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Another problem is that nanotech could possibly have the ability to create a human-infecting virus, since they'd be able to manipulate things at a molecular level... we don't want anybody going there.
This is disturbingly reminiscent of "nuclear power will give us clean limitless energy, and don't worry, we'll deal with the byproducts later because we'll have the tools by then."
Hey cummon, nuclear power will provide us will clean limitless power, once we have fusion. And if the-powers-that-protest hadn't given the world nuclear such an ugly stain, we'd probably have it by now, as there'd be a shed-load more research being done.
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
People keep forgetting that all this so called waste is recycleable, for more power than the orignal action to produce it.
I know nothing about the state of UK's power, but I find it hard to belive that you couldn't make a profit in the free market with nuclear power. What other choices do you have for your power? Wind and tide sound like good ideas, but just don't produce that much. Import coal/gas/oil? Not enough sun to make solar worth trying on a large scale. Not enough land to grow a renewable source (see solar above). Or do I just not understand the UK, something I'll admit to.
Although the grey goo is a problem that is constantly hovering about the use of nanotechnology, we have to consider that we have other far more developed methods of mass destruction. Nuclear, radiological, and especially biological weapons are potentially as destructive as the goo, and require far less technical expertise to manufacture and distribute. More troubling, they allow us to be destroyed with current technology, rather than a bothersome wait for nanotech to catch up. On the bright side, those suicidal people that feel the inclination to do away with all of us are a bit psychotic and thus less able to organize something like a mass release of a weapon of mass what-have-you. I'm not worried about anything besides the price on the first tickets up that space elevator.
------- "A true friend stabs you in the front." -Eliot
"nuclear power will give us clean limitless energy, and don't worry, we'll deal with the byproducts later because we'll have the tools by then."
And we did it too! We now have ways to safely dispose of nuclear waste. Unfortunately, the politics of the situation means that we are forced to continue storing it in leaking metal drums...
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
What's interesting about the protests about the project is that the political types that represent the area where the hole is are fine with the project... it brings plenty of jobs to their area, and they're convinced of the safety.
You are so fucking wrong it boggles the mind. I'll challenge you to read this article and think before you support bullshit like this in the future.
And as a resident of Las Vegas, may I personally say, fuck you.
"Come on, let's go drink till we can't feel feelings anymore."
I don't understand how so many slashdotters can be convinced that we will experence global armegeddon at the hands of nanomachines that will reduce us to 'grey goo'.
I hope what I type here might help dispel some of this parasitic meeme!
In the event that we mannage to make 'room temprature' nanmachines that are not instantly destroyed by a slight breeze, can break down even terminally simple matter for use in replication, and somehow get released into the world with a malicious intent (or through a glitch)- they will not be too much of a threat!
Ultimately unless some methoed of making semi-conductors and computer circurtry that dose not involve electricity at all comes along, each and every single active nanomachine will be vunerable to a simple EMP, and EMPs can be easily generated by sending massive voltage through a coil- hence even a 'barnyard warrior' fighting a nanomachine threat could rig up his disel truck to take out the microscopic buggers (that might make a good movie though!). In the event that we do find a way to making non-electric computer circutry it would have to be immue to dosens of other things that can mess with computer circuts (for instance a theoretically 100% optical computer could be fried by massive ammounts of UV radiation)
And lets not forget the technical overhead required to overcome those first few problems! Any nanomachine made of metal will be victim to rust, small bits of object rust much faster then large ones- hence a swarm of iron nanomachines could be killed with a simple spray of salt-water! Diamond ones would be extremely brittel (diamond is strong, but shatteres rather then bending) so sound waves would be an effective weapon (True for any crystaline structure; and a crystaline structure is required for optical transmission!)
Next is the ability to reprduce using simple matter, I mean, a lab is a very different enviornment then the real world, we'll probablly see self-replicating nano-machines that work in specifically temperature controled vats long before we see ones that can do it in the real world: Why, even if you can get a machine so sofisticated that it can tear apart simple carbon atoms, and whatever else it needs (and figure out what's carbon and what's not) and build a copy of itself, it's likely to loose it's tiny manipulators with every major temprature change, as the particles grow and contract while it tries to move them along!
Next someone will have to be able to get a hold of these things, and reprogram them to do somethign bad (that may actually be the easiest part: as all you have to do is REMOVE code that will be telling them to do other things besides replicate), but it will still require a multi-billion dollar lab to access there tiny circutry and reprogram them on such a basic level (the equivalent to taking out chips in a modern computer, but requireing a nano-manipulator!), so this is not something a 'backyard terrorist' is going to do, and if a government dose it, they will put a reasonable 'off' time in them, which will probabally put them into the same catagory as other WMDs.
-Millions of Monkeys, Millions of typewriters, 6 hours of sorting through faeces encrusted pages to find: This post
He may be an ubergeek, but he's still a shortsighted tool.
Writing your own bootloader is a pointless endeavour.
Writing your own OS is pointless.
Rebuilding a 1970s MOPAR classic is pointless.
In the first days of crude oil refinement, gasoline was considered a waste product. People eventually found a use for it.
There are literally thousands of exapmles in history of a product being completely useless (or producing a useless by-product) that later turned out to be more valuable than what the inventor originally intended.
Even at the very least, the technological advancement needed to observe a single molecule motor is impressive. Add to that the tech needed to manipulate something that small and what you have is nothing less than amazing.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
In most cases, a little simple planning might have prevented these wrecks, in others, a thoughtful application of technology might have prevented the possibility of disaster. We're at the threshold of being able to do amazing things with matter and energy, and we've already been seriously burned by technodisasters from Chernobyl to Bhopal. The real possibility of global disaster, demands that the intelligence be put in the technology from the beginning. The technology must be;
We've already constructed technologies that have left behind environmental disasters. It's not like we don't already know how that process works. The threat is to do precisely the same thing with a technology that is perfectly capable of sterilizing a city, state, or nation. We can no longer afford the trade of expediency over sanity. The cost just got too high.
Genda Bendte
--"Don't come running to me when the gray goo eat's yer feet off!!!"