Slashdot Mirror
Drexler Clarifies Grey Goo Scenario
b00le writes "The BBC says that the scientist many regard as the father of nanotechnology has backed away from his famous claim that runaway nanomachines could turn the planet into 'grey goo'. Eric Drexler now says nanomachines that self-replicate exponentially are unlikely ever to enter widespread use. So that's all right, then, but he also said 'tiny machines would need close control' - which not everyone would agree with. I always imagined some kind of emergent behaviour would, er, emerge." Bill Joy is still suitably pessimistic.
Straight from the Outer Limits episode. These "nanobots" turned a man into something of a jellyfish and he had gills as well. Of course as in any good Outer Limits episode, the "abort" command issued to the nanobots failed. But then, thats just a television show, right? These nanomachines couldn't REALLY churn through every nanogram of matter on our planet, RIGHT? IHMO, the Martian Sand Kings episode was way cooler, I mean they ate a dog for christs sake. Those beasts would mangle some nanobots. Thats it...we just need a bunch of sand-dwelling cockroaches with fangs on methamphetamine to regulate the reproduction of nanobots.
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"
... whatever you do, don't let director Roland Emmerich get ahold of this article!
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
WE will turn the planet into grey goo. Maybe the paranoids need to construct self-replicating machines that actually BUILD instead of consume.
I'm about to enter graduate school at Rice, specializing in nanoscience (like you can specialize in that broad an area!)...it's good to know I won't be grey goo-ed one day while in the lab.
When you outlaw exponentially self-replicating nanomachines, only outlaws will have exponentially self-replicating nanomachines. That's just not a world I want to live in.
We are borg, resistance is futile, you will be turned into grey goo! or not... well, we realy don't know!
The biggest problem with the grey-goo scenario is that it requires an astonishing amount of work (tearing apart molecular bonds and using the resulting material to make an extremely complex machine) without taking power consumption into account. Getting energy to a machine that small is extremely difficult (your body has to basically immerse it's cells in fuel to keep them going). A machine that small recieves an absolutely puny amount of sunlight, and Tesla style distributed power doesn't work over long distances. Worse, the energy potental of almost every material on the planet is far too low to be useful in powering a tiny machine (you can't power a robot with dirt).
This problem, coupled with the fact that the nanotech people have barely demonstrated anything even remotely close to grey-goo yet, lets me sleep easy at night. There's no need to get so worked up over vapor.
I read the internet for the articles.
This article such a great example of how chicken-littling about nanotechnology and the like is really pointless...because, well, it's vaporware (in the work that they envision).
Then you have technology vultures like Crichton who totally spit in the face of science and physics to make his money using that same old irritating style he banked on Jurassic Park with.
No doubt nanotech will creep up in many applications, but we always see this sort of thing happening with anything that could be a detriment as well as a benefit.
If they could turn the world to grey goo, bacteria would have already? Well, I suppose it's multicoloured goo really. But wouldn't anything that can reproduce uncontrollably be just as affecte by the pressures of the environment as any other living organism?
folks did nobody read PREY, by Michael Crichton... little nanorobots, evolving and becoming WAY too smart for our own, good... thank goodness for parallel processing
Should be "The BBC say that the scientist many regard as the father of nanotechnology..."
Can you people speak english?
...damn, there is *always* a tone change in the front page stories when Michael is up to bat. This is not a troll; it is an observation. When he is at the wheel, it's all end-of-the-world, privacy, government related stuff. Go ahead, check his history.
As for nanobots, honestly, we had this discussion and i hold the same view: tread lightly. You and i both know that if something were to become easily synthesizeable by the layman, nanoweapons in this case, and were to be exponentially self-reproductive, then...well, the human race would not survive it. Think about that, no one person in the human race could have "a bad day". Most are not intelligent enough to have a healthy respect for the miracle that is human life.
When I was a kid we were obsessed with large robot machines. Now these few short years later we are concerned with the tiniest of machines.
I'm going with the big ass machines. I'll always win the mine is bigger than your contest.
Evolution or ID?
We're all just human. 50 years ago, they predicted that we'd be zipping around in flying cars-- and no one at all predicted the huge impact of the Internet. We don't know if self-replicating nanobots will ever enter the market. For that matter, we don't know if the grey goo scenario is possible or not. When they first tested the atom bomb, there were those who feared that the blast would ignite the atmosphere itself-- and until we tried it, we couldn't be sure if it would or not. Today's particle accelerators are creating heretofore-unknown forms of matter, and for all we know, they could create a new sort of matter that would destroy the world. We're just people-- we aren't gods. How can we say "This will happen" or "this won't happen"? All we can say is "We don't think this will happen"-- but that is no guarantee.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
The primary limitation on even arbitrarily sophisticated nanotechnology which could prevent a runaway grey goo reaction is the lack of a sufficient source of energy. A nanomachine wouldn't be able to get much energy out of eating inorganic matter such as rocks because, aside from a few exceptions (coal, for example) it's mostly well-oxidized and sitting in a free-energy minimum.
Wikipedia
It would seem that nature's methods of self-replication work best.
Prey had a really dumb ending anyway :(
The problem is the goo wouldn't be grey but more of a feusha.
Evolution or ID?
building requires consumption of raw materials which is what the grey goo scenario was refering to... the self replicating machines need raw materials to replicate, and the point was that the machines would exponentially reproduce, (doubling at the rate it takes to build a new nanobot) they need material to produce that, they take that material out of whatever is nearby... turning the earth into grey goo...
... whatever you do, don't let writer Stephen King get a hold of this post! I can just see an unwatchably painful miniseries coming out of this...
i am the drexler. i speak for the nanobots.
-ninjaneer
just want some stargate and see what trouble replicating robots/nano machines could get us in..
We do not have to build something smart enough to take over the world.. We don't even have to build something smart enough to learn..
A single machine programmed to take over another machine ( A nice tech to be developed for the military ) is all it would take.
Machine A, Trys to hack machine B. In the combined code has the abilitys of both.. Repeat over and over again and in time it might be able to think and act on its own.
Its sort of kin to programming and various other human tasks..
Take 2 people with 2 diffrent skill sets. Together they could build something that neither could build apart. There tech together might make a doomsday weapon, Apart they are useless.
Personal Website
As long as the scientist says that those tiny little things that repicate exponentially are UNLIKELY to ever enter widespread use then they get my vote. What about if a little bit gets stuck on someone's sweater?
If I promise to be a good boy can I have some better karma?
this image is frightening.
the potential for error with something like this is huge: whoops, programmed the little bugger wrong! sorry, you don't need that hemoglobin, anyway.
Get drunk without a hangover.
Why doesn't the article mention the reason Drexler thinks the "Gray Goo" scenario won't happen? It simply says why he initially wrote about it and that in his latest paper he proposes "a manufacturing model in which nanomachines could duplicate themselves without the risk of runaway replication."
He even goes so far as to say that the threat "is well within the realm of physical law."
So what's the change here? There may be some voluntary standard to prevent this from happening? This doesn't sound like a reversal to me.
How Politicians Lie: http://www.factcheck.org/
It only takes one.
"Asleep at the switch? I wasn't asleep, I was drunk!" -- Homer
Anyone remember that movie?
Hmmm.
Animals have the ability to continously procreate until all resources are consumed, however, most don't. There is a type of population control that exists for most species, and even though humans have continously gained in population, we have only done so because of our knowledge to fending off population control diseases/disasters/etc.
Would machines follow this same type or universal standard of population control or would they just envelope every item they could?
Who knows, not me.
Anyway, stupid plug for a new website im working on, GroupShares.com. If you are into the stock market and want to see a live journal, etc, then check it out. Of course everything is free.
Thanks,
Aj
-------
artlu.net
It was called "The Blob"
Many people regard him as the father of nanotech? Like who? The media likes to play him up as somehow being more important than he is (such as having him publicly argue with Richard Smalley), but in reality he is a crank. His real peer-reviewed papers are publications from 20 years ago. His "famous" books are simply regurgitations of already well known physics and chemistry. He appeals to non-scientist well-wishers and visionaries (he seems to have a fascintation with life-extension, in an unhealthy way), but to actual scientists, he is a crank. Plain and simple.
Are you BioCurious?
While your post is mostly blather, it is the first (and only, afaics) explanation here of why a bullshit artist would change from one nonsense speculation to the opposite.
Thanks.
Surely it would have to take some idiot to actually program a nanobot to do nothing useful and just replicate itself for the grey-goo senario to take place... i mean, unless some script-kiddie of the nano-world uses the latest micronano exploit to code one - and that assumes its easy enough to even interface with these things.. which business would make nanobots that did this anyway?
Just keep Nano technology away from giant red mining ships and we won't have any problems, but if we can't even do that small task it's time to raid everyones sock draws
--- [Insert intresting Sig here]
(1) Machines only do what you design them to.
Mind you, people often design them wrong, and then the fail to function, but that isn't going to spontaneously create self-replicating machines. Besides, if the raw materials are not available in the right form, they cannot replicate.
(2) Self-replicating machines are prohibitively complex.
Have you had a look at the genome of a simple bacteria lately? How about the support machinery in the bacteria? Trust me, an evil mad scientist would not have the funding or resources to develop a self-replicating machine.
(3) The real problem with nano machines would be simple design flaws, not replication.
If your nano machines are supposed to identify cancer cells and kill them, but they mistake healthy cells for cancer cells, THEN you have a problem. That is a lot more realistic. But a decade of testing on any given design would happen before it was used in humans.
If the "grey goo" theory is true, just for argument's sake, how does the fact that these nanomachines would not be in widespread use change anything? Wouldn't it only take one batch (or one machine, for that matter) to set the exponential replication chain in motion?
I Am Not A Nanotechnologist, so there are obviously factors that I'm not aware of in play, but still....
In Soviet Russia, Chuck Norris will still kick your ass.
I was not aware that NanoTech had progressed so far as it has. I don't worry about the little beggers getting out of hand, there will always be ways to control them... However, with every technology, there will be "good" ones and "bad" ones...and all someone has to do is infect you with a bad one, and you are dead. Talk about "computer viri", more like "NanoTech Viri"
--E--
Look at third world countries, they don't have population control. They're suffering from starvation and diesease.
Just because here in land-of-plenty, it isn't so obvious doesn't mean the problems don't exist.
These nanomachines couldn't REALLY churn through every nanogram of matter on our planet, RIGHT?
The whole grey goo scenario is pure alchemy. Except instead of turning lead into gold, we're turning it into grey goo. We've got people inventing perpetual motion, too. Are the 1800s back? Can't we invent new scams?
After a few million years of evolution, we have enzymes. They are generally very large molecules, bigger than what some claim for nano-machines, and they are also very specialized. They do one thing. You don't get anything general-purpose or intelligent at the molecular level, there just isn't room for it.
or is Prey possibly the worst book ever written. Seriously, I could write my own 300-page book about why Prey sucked ass.
Organic life has already covered the planet, in green stuff.
I doubt that any man-made gray goo could compete with the Green Goo God made without a LOT of help. By the time we were good enough to make the gray goo beat the God's Green Goo, we would have already made safeguards such as Gray Goo Cops, little nanites whose sole job it is to rome the world looking for rogue nanites and eat them and reproduce more Gray Cops.
Organic based reproducers beat metals based ones before, and they will do it again if the silly puny little machines try to take over.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
you mean like
emerge -U behaviour
A psychopath can't tell the difference between right and wrong. A sociopath knows the difference - he just doesn't care.
Gey Goo
Gey goo? Don't be so closed-minded. Just because it doesn't apply to you doesn't mean there's anything wrong with it. Gey goo is just as much goo as any other goo....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
"Eric Drexler now says nanomachines that self-replicate exponentially are unlikely ever to enter widespread use."
Why is that still not particularly comforting? Just one tragically (intentional or otherwise) bad design is all it could take, theoretically. Not to turn the earth to "goo", but to seriously screw the conditions we humans deem useful to our existence.
Not a few decades from now, but a century or so down the road when this stuff really picks up and the tools are more accessible. With every step of our advance, we seem to merely reinforce the reality that we're really just fancy homonids with an ever-increasing number of dangerous gadgets, mashing the buttons on the controls.
Humans are so convinced we're a required part of the fabric of the universe. But *poof* Gone. Nobody would care beyond the occasional underpaid archeological student of the next dominant sentient life form.
Maybe I should start planning what kind of confusing fossil record to leave behind. Time to find some cooling lava and a pair of Godzilla shoes.
Imagine if this actually happened and it became as commonplace as foilage ...imagine having to mow your goo.
Guess who's using Scotts 1-2-3 on their goo?
Bill Joy, while clearly a genius, is (like any good genius) a nutcase. Seriously, the man is paranoid! He's a compulsive risk-mitigator:
This told to the reporter during the interview about nanotech risk-mitigation. Sure, it's a perfectly rational way to choose your movie library, but it's almost too rational. Most people don't consider watching a bad movie an outcome to be avoided at all costs. Mainstream critical consensus is a very conservative method of choosing movies. I've watched a lot of bad movies, but I've found a few that I really liked that were panned by critics. Is Mr. Joy so risk-averse that he needs his movies to be guaranteed satisfactory?
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
It is terribly hard to build your first few nanites. Then you have to look at the replication ratio. How many more of itself can a self-replicator build before it fails? You've got to get the ratio above one.
The likely scenario is that the self-replicators are not robust and we never develop the technology to the point at which the ratio is solidly above one. So civilisation potters along quite wealthy for 50 years, then problems with contanimation, vibration, temperature, something, result in the nanites dying off. It could take decades to recover the lost art of building the first few, decades of great hardship for a society that has come to depend on nano-technology.
wow, reason on /. - I'm shocked, really shocked!!!
...
on the other hand, the parent is still at 0, so the mods are working hard to restore my faith
room-temperature sea water fusion
I, for one, welcome our new nanobot overlords.
Prince Charles, too, has voiced his concerns about the potential risks of nanotechnology. Like anyone gives a rats a$$ about what Prince Charles thinks, especially with regards to the scientific community... See, things like this can ruin a perfectly good article. The amount of credibility this article had, in my mind, went from a good decent amount to almost ZERO. Can we give an Off-TOpic mod to the article for including Prince Charles.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
has made this too
in 'diamond' age he talks about
toner wars
basically nanotech spy equip that starts hunting the 'other sides' nanotech spies and as they kill each other these lil pieces of dead nanotech falls from the sky
back in the day we didnt have no old school
By the time we were good enough to make the gray goo beat the God's Green Goo, we would have already made safeguards such as Gray Goo Cops, little nanites whose sole job it is to rome the world looking for rogue nanites and eat them and reproduce more Gray Cops.
"That's the beautiful part, the gorillas will simply die in winter"
Well, hey, I didn't spend all those years playing Dungeons and Dragons and not learn a little something about courage.
Why would he back away?
People are dishonest and corrupt. (and lazy)
Some Nigerian spammer will probably be the responsible for the programming glitch that eats the world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_U.S._Election_c
The problem I see is the difficulty in producing a machine that can not only reproduce itself, but do something useful as well.
I think a much more likely scenario would be producing a solution consisting of two machine species. One species does useful work. The other species makes copies of the first species.
The two species would depend on different keyed source chemicals. If you wanted to increase the rate at which you build load-bearing bots, you increase the availability of one chemical. If you wanted to increase the rate at which you were doing useful work, you increase the availability of the other chemical.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Why not just make the nanobots out of nutritious materials so that bugs and animals can just eat them?
someone has been watching the Matrix trilogy a few to many times...
"Just Smile and Nod." --Huck
REPLICATORS! AHHHHH!
Sorry, couldn't stop the sarcasm fount.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
This behavior can't be changed simply by increasing voter turnout (which is itself not a trivial undertaking). The only way to fix it is with electoral reforms, such as instant runoff voting (IRV).
...in my kitchen grout. A little bleach took care of it.
These tribbles are everywhere!
- Thomas;
___ This sig is in boldface to emphasize its importance!
... is that it is the ultimate straw man.
It's the most ridiculous possible argument against nanotech. It's like being afraid that a nuclear reactor will turn the Earth into the Sun. And once everyone dispels the straw man argument, we go happily about our merry way, la la la, it's nothing to worry about.
Let me give you some scary: nanobots that go down to the bottom of the ocean and mess with the clathrates, spilling all of that methane out into the atmosphere - there's enough energy there to get that done. Nanobots burrowing into the Earth's crust along fault lines in a long chain, using the temperature gradient to make a heat engine in order to drive any kind of mucking about with tectonic plates. Nanobots carefully and quietly sabotaging subtle but key parts of the ecology.
It's easier to destroy than to create. And nanobots would be able to replicate, with probably greater (but not much) efficiency, anything you could dream up via genetic engineering, because nanotech is going to look a lot like biology plus some nifty physics. And it will be a biology freed from some of the constraints and old hacks Nature imposed.. They could also use physical properties perhaps not accessible to mere biology - how about something really wacky, like point fusion? Nature did a lot of clever tricks, but there's much optimization that could be done.
Yes, grey goo can't be taken seriously, due to physical constraints. The bad guys don't need to destroy the entire planet - they just need to make it unlivable so that $MESSIAH can come. And it wouldn't be tough to spend a few afternoons dreaming up doomsday applications that are not energy intensive.
On a related note, consider this readable account of how genetic engineering to insert IL-4 into an otherwise fairly innocuous mousepox transformed this disease to where it would effectively kill all the mice, even those mice that had been previously vaccinated to protect them against mousepox.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
All this discussion of constraints and monitoring is really moot. As much as we would wish different the market forces will drive the direction these machines evolve.
If it is possible and money can be made by doing it it will be done. It can be slowed down, agencies can try to monitor it, but if large sums of money are available to be made, someone will do it.
There are many examples: drugs, nuclear technology, biotech, genetic engineering, piracy, porn, etc.
welcome our grey goo overlords.
Drexler *never* said that "grey goo" would consume the biosphere. What he actually said was "Dangerous replicators could easily be too tough, small, and rapidly spreading to stop - at least if we made no preparation." (emphasis mine, see Engines of Creation Chapter 11). It has been known for more than a decade that there are easy solutions to the problem of designing "safe" replicators that do not grow exponentially using strategies such as the "broadcast architecture" (in computer science terms -- you never give a replicator a copy of its own source code). [See Merkle, R. C., "Self Replicating Systems and Molecular Manufacturing", JBIS 45:407-413 (1992)].
Nor is the idea that assembly lines produce better manufacturing systems than self-replicating systems new. [See Hall, J. S., "Architectural considerations for self-replicating manufacturing systems", Nanotechnology 10(3):323-330 (September, 1999).] It is obvious that the ability to self-replicate is extra overhead when compared with assembly systems optimized for specific assembly tasks.
Finally, it was shown several years ago that we have the technology to detect out-of-control self-replicating systems (nanorobots generate heat which can be detected by existing satellite systems). [For a discussion of various scenarios read: Freitas, R. A., "Some Limits to Global Ecophagy by Biovorous Nanoreplicators with Public Policy Recommendations" (May, 2000).]
Drexler alludes to the fact that we are already in the midst of a "green goo" ("We have trouble enough controlling viruses and fruit flies.") Most people are unaware of the fact that they have more copies of foreign genomes (in the form of self-replicating bacteria) on or in their body than they have copies of their own genome. Some of these bacteria actually produce vitamins that humans use. So "goo" scenarios should not be viewed as completely negative. It is worth noting that the same methods that can be used to stop the "green goo" (e.g. heat or radiation) can be used to stop the "gray goo" if we are prepared to detect and eliminate it. One sees examples of this today as government agents circulate through the crowd waiting to view President Regan's body in Washington with biological and chemical weapons detectors. It simply comes down to understanding the hazards and being prepared to deal with them.
It is also worth noting that the design of fully self-replicating nanorobots is *not* a simple or inexpensive task. (Look at how long it took Nature to get it started...) So it is highly improbable that such abilities could be developed by rogue groups before civilized nations developed robust detection and elimination methods.
For people who want to read more details, the IOP press release is here and points to the actual paper (registration probably required).
Also, I would respectfully request before you post any responses to this note that you "go do your homework" (that will put you one up on the reporters reporting on this and allow for an informed discussion).
We all know what happened when Wesley Crusher didn't watch his nanobots... he accidentally created a sentient colony lifeform :p
Eric Drexler now says nanomachines that self-replicate exponentially are unlikely ever to enter widespread use
No, that's not what he said; that statement is an oxymoron. If something self-replicates, its numbers necessarily grow exponentially until it hits resource constraints in the environment. There are no "nanomachines that self-replicate sub-exponentially".
What Drexler said that nanomachines that self-replicate are unlikely to ever enter widespread use, and therefore nanomachines will not replicate exponentially. Instead, they will be manufactured by desktop machines, according to him.
I would like to recommend the book Inherit the Earth by Brian Stableford if you want a good, imaginative story about the potential of nanotechnology and nano-medicine. Stableford gives some good insights into what the world would be like with a class of humans with Superman-like qualities. What would world society, politics, and economics be like if an elite class could afford to live for 1,000 years or more and ordinary people can live for hundreds of years?
I found this to be an engrossing and entertaining read.
Make no nanobots without the following hardwired instruction set:
(1) A nanobot may not harm a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm;
(2) A nanobot must obey the orders given to it by the human beings, except where such orders would conflict with (1); and
(3) A nanobot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with (1) or (2).
I've always prefered a coalition based parlementary system. While not perfect, it usually forces the center left or right to woo both the middle and the far end of the spectrum to rule, and allows for significantly more diversity of opinions. There is a whole branch of economics that looks at inefficiencies in different voting systems, it's pretty interesting.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
I for one welcome our new Nanorobotic overlords. I would like more grey goop in my grey goop please.
Parent is right; Richard P. Feynman is the true father of nanotechnology. His December 1959 lecture There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom is the foundational work of nanotech; it's short, to the point, and to this day still makes a fascinating and exciting read. Any discussion of nanotech should begin with Feynman's lecture, and I'm surprised it hasn't already been linked in this discussion.
Very insightful argument. I tend to agree with you, the non-voting public is the problem.
Sean D.
"Hmm. I am to metaphor cheese as metaphor cheese is to transitive verb crackers!"
Interesting anecdote about Bill Joy.
I wonder...by what criteria did he discriminate the 600 chosen movies from the 1400 (really good by concensus) movies that were not chosen for purchase?
I guess he just used the same kind of criteria as the rest of us (ohhh...shiny...I likey), in other words: personal preferences.
It's just that Bill Joy prefers to filter out the "consenus dreck"...wait...no. Bill Joy is "cherry picking" from the "really good" (by critical consensus) to build a library of films to watch. Seems reasonable.
As for risk aversion - notice that Bill did not say he would never watch (or buy) a movie that wasn't on the list of 2000 "good" movies. Only that he was using that list as a starting point and then further filtering it (based on presumably personal preferences) to get a list of 600 "good" movies to buy (all at once).
Must be nice to have Joy money to throw around on whims.
is an interesting take on this. Cheesyish with some pretty decent science. Nano uses symbiosis with bacteria to bootstrap the replication process.
So where is the list of 2000 really good movies? Anybody?
IMDB?
Nobody knows how to make molecular assemblers anyway, yet alone self-replicating nano-bots. Many scientists say Drexler's ideas would not work in any case.
... There are much more important technological threats to the environment to worry about in the real world.
Look at it this way - we have self-replicating nano-bots right now - they are called bacteria. Have they turned the world into gray goo in runaway exponential growth? Are we going to be able to make more efficient nano-bots than mother nature has done in the last 4 billion years?
Bill Joy's worries about nano-bots are like saying we should stop all research into magic because we could set off a chain reaction that would turn us all into frogs. Nano-bots are FANTASY
They don't have to be in "widespread" use if they reproduce exponentially, do they? Two tribbles is all it takes. And nobody has to "use" them to keep them around.
Personally I don't think this concern is plausible right now, and it doesn't seem like nanotechnology would redefine the basic laws of energy or evolution -- they're not going to reproduce somehow without the amounts of energy it'd take to reproduce.
But take a look at introduced species. Dandelions. Rabbits in Australia. Purple loosestrife. Godawful Eurasian House Sparrows in the US. Those species don't violate the rules of life either, and they can't be got rid of right now without massive effort on our part. It didn't take more than a few introduced pairs of sparrows, breeding in Central Park, to infest the entire continental US.
Natural history says even stuff that has trouble getting established at first can explode on you. That's what weeds are.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
typo sorry it was sposed to be grey goo
If you have nothing useful to say post as AC.
Human, n. Ubiquitous exponientally self-replicating organisms capable of transform an entire planet in grey-gloo. Dont blame the nanobots. We are the plague!
Last year the SARS virus scared the world. The reason it failed to wipe out mankind is that it killed it's host too quickly.
To destroy the world, the virus must not destroy it's immediate environment until it has got out of it.
The problem is not the ability to destroy, but the ability to create, reproduce and colonise a new and different environment each generation.
He wrote a whole sci-fi novel on this very same world covered in goo scenario.
We'll find something
new to do now.
Here is lots of
new blue goo now
New goo. Blue goo.
Gooey. Gooey.
Blue goo. New goo.
Gluey. Gluey.
If only he had read "Fox in Sox" before coming out and saying these things...
And the "Martian Sand Kings" episode is based on Sand Kings, a short story by George R. R. Martin, of A Song of Ice and Fire fame.
Bill Joy, while clearly a genius, is (like any good genius) a nutcase.
That explains vi
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
Our planet already has 'nano-scale' machines which self replicate. Bacteria have been breaking down complex molecules in order to exponentially self replicate for, well, about as long as life has existed on this planet. What has stopped a single celled organism turning everything into 'grey goo' already?
I expect it something to do with the amount of energy required to do the job. Although there's a lot of energy around, it's distribution is fairly sparse. Evolution has already made some pretty damn good systems for capturing, storing and using stored energy. Unless nanobots happen to be an order of magnitude more efficient than any possible thing evolution has ever produced, I doubt that it would be possible to achieve any high-impact 'grey goo' scenario.
Every scenario I've read here today sound an awful lot like standard evolutionary processes. Look at ants, or spiders or whatever. If you drop an ant in any environment where ants can't find food within their feeding limit, they die. Same thing with nanobots, bacteria, etc.
I mean, if it were so hard to kill a self-replicating organism, pesticides, fungucides and antibiotics wouldn't exist.
They use WMD daily in iraq and afghanistan and they used them extensively in the balkans. And they are using weather control modifications over the US, which could qualify as well.
Why are nanobots supposed to have been a risk to the planet while just plain old bots aren't? What's so special about something small that there's a risk of exponential runaway which isn't there for macroscopic factories. They still require raw materials and energy like any other type of production.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
The reason that no single bacterial species has overtaken the entire planet is because if it did, it would die out. Bacteria function within a complex ecological framework, the interconnectedness of which prevents them from living on their own. Each species of bacteria is specialized, maybe to live in bigger animals or maybe to convert sunlight to sugar. Due to this specialization, no one single species could take over the planet. Interdependence is built into evolution.
like, say for instance they had a lysine dependancy!
There's no need to get so worked up over vapor.
You've obviously never smelled my place after Mexican night.
I'm surprised CleverNickName hasn't chimed in, he being our resident expert on runaway nanites. :)
I am Sartre of the Borg. Existence is futile.
Again with the "we can't do it now so it can't be done" stuff.
The grey goo isn't waste, it's the nanomachines themselves. If they replicate exponentially without end, you get this flood of lil' bots consuming everything, and the grey goo eats the Earth. You can see how that'd be a problem.
Point well taken, I didn't see that.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
However, the totality of life in its present form is actually quite vulnerable to being taken over by a distinctly different and new form of life (in fact this already happened once, to a lesser degree, with photosynthesis). The reason is that, although the current totality of life appears incredibly diverse in one sense, at the most fundamental level there is an extraordinary unity. This unity is found in the method by which the principle components of all living organisms are assembled: the linkage of amino acids on the ribosome as directed by DNA sequence.
This unity makes us (and ALL other extant life) vulnerable to outcompetition by a new type of assembly system. But if such a system emerges, it will NOT resemble the industrial kinds of nanoassemblers proposed by Drexler et. al. Instead, this kind of system would have the flexibility and compositional variability of existing living chemical systems, which would enable it to evolve through mutation and mechanisms of selection.
Second, such a system would have machines capable of genetically-directed molecular assembly, but the components of such a system would not be limited to existing biological building blocks such as amino acids, nucleic acids, carbohydrates and lipids. Indeed, the advantages of a wider material repertoire have been pointed by Drexler.
Of course, a new kind of self-replicating system such as this would have to be initially created by pre-existing life (presumably us), but since it is evolvable, its subsequent nature could easily grow out of our control.
Now, to the final question of whether a new self-replicating system could outcompete ALL existing life. I assert that this is unlikely, but for a very different reason than that given by Drexler or others. The reason is NOT because it would be limited by energy utilization, or because that current life forms are already optimally evolved in the use of energy and materials.
Current living organisms do NOT come close to achieving the theoretical optimums of efficiency. This is only achieveable by the industrial kinds of nanomachines mentioned above, which are not a threat because of their brittle and specialized nature. In addition, the criteria for what is optimal depends on the conditions of the local environment, so that control of the nature of the local environment is a critical factor in determining who can best survive in that environment.
The real reason that the threat is limited is that any self-replicating system, no matter how optimized at the molecular level, would also need to compete for resources and control of the environment at the macroscopic scale. To compete at the macroscopic scale requires macroscopic sensor and effectors, and some kind of control system to integrate them. That is, any new form of life that hopes to take over will have to acquire something akin to a macroscopic nervous system.
While such a scenario is certainly possible, this is a whole new requirement that must be met, and I don't believe that it has been sufficiently addressed when considering the likelihood of the 'grey goo' scenario.
mhack
Building a better ribosome since 1997
This has gone way off topic, but if your parents set up a voting system where they said they would do whatever the family voted, but then they made sure that they outvoted you 2-to-1 on anything that you cared about, would you bother adhearing to (and therefore validating) your parents silly system?
Isn't the fear of exponentially speading nano-bots being the fact that we only need a few to get out?? How is limiting them to a 'minumum number' going to help that? Don't these guys watch movies?? :)
Don'y you hate it when kiddie scriptors get nano technology. AIDs isn't even the biggest problem.
You'll be walking down the street and banner adds will just start popping up in your brain. All beacuse you hooked up with some girl with out using a firewall...ermm... condom
The Neo-Bohemian Techno-Socialist
> Machines only do what you design them to.
I can't tell you how many times I've seen bugs make software do things it was not designed to do. Sure, a good programmer can avoid some such issues, but most programmers are not good these days.
> if the raw materials are not available in the right form, they cannot replicate.
Sure, but what if your machine uses cellulose as the raw material? You know some idiot will do that. And some evil mad scientist is certainly going to try.
> Self-replicating machines are prohibitively complex.
You must have missed this article
> an evil mad scientist would not have the funding
> or resources to develop a self-replicating machine.
I should remind you that evil mad scientists are not necessarily getting paid for their research. Never underestimate just how cheap research can get when you don't have to pay for the researcher's time. If someone estimated how much money it would take to develop the theory of relativity, I bet nobody could afford to do it either.
> The real problem with nano machines would be simple design flaws, not replication.
Would you consider an infinite loop in the replication routine a design flaw?
> But a decade of testing on any given design would happen before it was used in humans.
Unless it happens to be designed by a mad evil scientist who tells it to look for healthy cells and kill them. Remember, there is a lot of hate in the world. And to say that nobody but the government is capable of developing nanobots, is to say that all researchers are either hate-free or stupid. At this point I would like to mention the iraqi scientists who made WMDs in Iraq, and let you decide into which category they fall.
But they are not outlawing exponentially self-replicating nanomachines. They are saying that such machines are impossible to build, while fervently hoping that all the terrorists in the world would read it and say "gosh darn it! I guess I'll have to abandon my gray goo research now. Can't do the impossible..."
"Joy is a film buff, and he recently outfitted his basement with a spectacular home entertainment system. He also happens to be a bibliophile, so he bought three handbooks -- ''Halliwell's Film Guide,'' Pauline Kael's ''5001 Nights at the Movies'' and the ''Time Out Film Guide'' -- to compare reviews. ''I was going through the books and found out there are only about 2,000 movies in history in which there's critical consensus that they're really good,'' he told me. ''So I bought 600 of them.'' No bad movies, fewer possible bad outcomes."
The "critical consensus" consists of reviews from those three books all agreeing thast the movie is worth seeing. I think the weak point of this method is that you have to trust the opinions of film dorks. What if you get three guys who all happen to think Lars von Trier is a directorial genius?
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
We can't even get VOIP over WLAN to work, and you all are worried about nano-bots turning the world into grey-goo???????? Have you seen the latest advances in nanotech? Tubes and tweezers???? jeez, we've got a LOOONG way until grey-goo. Go ahead, look at the predictions for the future from 100 or even 50 years ago. VERY inaccurate.
Discussing this topic is like discussing the negatives of having flying cars filling the sky with gridlock, EXCEPT ITS EVEN MORE FAR FETCHED PEOPLE!!!
Obsession with nanotech is like obsession with Star Trek and Japan. snap out of it.
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
There's a point I think a lot of people are missing. Despite having failed to keep the aforementioned feces in the aforementioned equine on the matter of computer-spread malware, society has failed to collapse because of same malware. In part this is because the damage malware can do is finite, and in part because we developed defense against all these things.
We deal with problems as they arise. It's almost impossible to do otherwise. Thinking about them and postulating that they could exist is about the best we could do. Making laws about them is almost certainly the worst thing we can do.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Why not try Metacritc, instead of buying dead tree things, what are they called again? Buying books for changing subjects is insane, imho. Who the hell owns a current encyclopedia in this day and age for instance?
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
The Foresight institute has spent alot of time with this one. They have proposed some safety guidelines and Robert A. Freitas Jr. wrote a paper on the physics which limit the threat. "Some Limits to Global Ecophagy by Biovorous Nanoreplicators, with Public Policy Recommendations"
[-- Trust the Monkey --]
Has anyone considered the possibility that it has happened before and that it happened somewhere nearby and a couple of the bots fell on Earth? Alien Genesis?
Up the Mountain, Down the misty glen, We daren't go a-hunting, for fear of little [green] men.
(Obviously, they don't care because his system still leaves them the 1% or whatever percent advantage on every bet, so they'll be fine)
When he tried to talk me into playing the system, I explained that I don't gamble for the odds and winning. I can't, since I know the odds are against me. There's no joy in it that way. However, if I sit, visit with people, make sure I get the maximum number of free drinks and other comps, and keep my burn rate down below a bearable level, I can have fun. Trying to gamble based on a system would take enough concentration that it'd lose me every one of those advantages, so I don't hack gambling. In fact, what I really appear to myself to be hacking is the chance to practice my social skills. Some of us nerds do need practice there, after all.
A few days later, he brought the subject up again. Two additional sources had taught him about system that depended on a limited level of multiple-deck card counting. Now, this is a system that works. It gets you past the 1% house advantage, and if you're good at it you'll probably get banned from casinos that catch you at it.
At that point, I realized this guy was hacking blackjack. He was simply applying hacker principles to gain maximum advantage in a situation. It wasn't about any deeper obsession or nutjob personality quirk... it's just something every hacker does. In fact, every hacker I've ever met does this. One saves a few cents a day by bringing his own soda to work rather than use the vending machine. He'd make a year's worth of those savings up by working another 10 minutes. Go figure. Another spends untold hours cracking DirectTV smartcards, but then scrupulously guards the info so DirecTV isn't harmed beyond his own single larceny. Again, his hourly rate makes this time worth about 10x the cost of just buying the services. It's the challenge, not the money. Another optimizes driving routes until he's got the fastest routes home at any time of day... oh, wait... that's me.
So what that Bill Joy optimized his video buying. It isn't necessarily obsessive. He probably JUST GOT THE IDEA and followed thru out of curiosity.
Saying Bill's a nutcase for this and that it somehow invalidates his opinion on the risks of nanotech is as wrong as somehow coming to a conclusion about Richard Stallman's politics based on the fact that he has some ragged personal hygiene issues. They're so unrelated that you're a nutcase for even thinking they're proof of anything.
Lessee, put nanobot on slide with raw materials and energy source. Nanobot took 287.41 hours to replicate. (Observation: Little buggers take FOREVER to cover any distance.) Both nanobots then turned to nearest supply of raw materials and energy to replicate - each other. Both nanobots deactivated 2 seconds later, experiment over.
Conclusion: Next time I give'em frikkin' LASERS!
(I knew that degre from Abberant University would come in handy someday!) };->
The U.S. really needs an English to Wisdom dictionary.
they are so stripped down they can't move themselves, and they can infect only a few species for the same reason. Further, since they can't move themselves, they have a built in tendancy to evolve toward being sub-lethal (if they kill of their hosts too quickly, they stick themselves in their own firewall).
The gray goo scenario involved self mobile nanomachines that could consume any and all organic matter so rapidly that there could be no defense.
This is exactly why man-made machines are not likely to be more efficient than natural microbes and viruses: thermodynics and the energy denisity of materials.
Now humans might someday invent a nanomachine that is as efficient as a paramecium at the same weight, but it wouldn't be able to do so and carry around armor or weapons any better than the paramecium has, and so would make just as tasty a meal for a rotifer as a paramecium.
IOW, the paranoid are easily scared because they don't know as much about biology and physics as they think they do (and this certainly includes computer genies who get their name in print by expounding on things they lack the training to understand).
You people aren't being suitably pessimistic. Where's the profit motive in building something that can replicate itself and solve an entire problem just from a few grams? Pharmaceuticals, et. al., want to be able to sell you the same stuff over and over again. This stuff will be artificially crippled if need be.
Sif they cancelled that show - the bad guys were AI grey goo too!
Homonyms are fun!
You're driving your car, but they're riding their bikes there.
Isn't there already self repicating micoscropic machines?? yes there are and they are called bacteria. I have little fear that anything we make could possibly out compete in the wild the real rulers of our planet.
stendec@gmail.com
The amazing thing about this garlic mustard is that it grows in shade under dense stands of evergreen trees where nothing else grows. This plant must have some genetic advantage regarding photosynthesis under low light conditions.
Beside being a distant relative of broccoli, garlic mustard is a close relative to rape seed, of which Canola is a specially-bred variety, and rape seed is one of the oil seeds people talk about with regard to biodiesel solving the oil crisis.
Here I am, pulling garlic mustard until my hands are stiff and sore, and resistance to the garlic mustard is probably futile because it is going to take over everything anyway, but because of its unique genetics, we are probably going to be cultivating garlic mustard as an oil-seed crop when the fossil fuels run out.
For all the talk of Grey Goo, I believe I have identified to Green Goo of our post-oil age society, and it is garlic mustard.
On Last Comic Standing last night, the old guy had a joke that went something like this:
"We had five children. We were a little concerned about this because we heard that every fifth child born is Chinese. This didn't stop my son though. He and his wife have ten children... two Chinese."
He didn't get picked to go on to Vegas, but this probably has more to do with the fact that he wouldn't be a particularly interesting member of the LCS household, rather than not being funny. Anyhow the point is that the public DOES in fact have an idea of how to lie with statistics, even if they don't always recognize when it is happening.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Not to be unfair to your well-taken larger point, but your premise is only true in theory.
Exceptions to the military following the orders of politicians come in various ways, from self-protection to obstinance. Let's take just one. Sometimes orders are nebulous or ambivalent. Sometimes military engagements are ill-defined. And sometimes deniability goes all the way to the top. Case in point: Tiger Force in Vietnam.
As the Toledo Blade's Pulitzer-winning investigative series established last year, Tiger Force was a law unto itself. Ostensibly performing recon, the truth was much more complex and sinister. In fact, the squad was just raping and murdering whomever they pleased, as surviving members told the Blade's reporters. Nobody specifically ordered them to do what they did. Nor--and this is the key point--did anyone tell them not to do it. (Note for the conspiracy-minded: the Blade is far from being a leftwing publication. It's a family-owned daily newspaper--one of the last--serving steak-and-potatoes Ohio. It doesn't get much more staid than this in journalism.)
Fast-forward to this year's atrocities in Abu Ghraib. The soldiers say they were told to commit torture. Their commanders deny it. The politicians deny it. The truth is probably somewhere in between. We only need look at the souvenir photos of US soldiers committing evil to know it didn't take a politician anywhere to tell them to enjoy it.
We cannot excuse military malfeasance and free-lancing. The answer is oversight, constant and vigilant, and punishment for abuses. And we must be very cautious about what technologies that barely-governable institution is allowed to play with.
As far as our grand social systems are concerned, the people are indistinguishable from grey goo.
Those institutions we have created during the short history of civilisation -- government, finance, law, industry, commerce, media, academic, religious, military, sport, etc., etc. -- are as far removed from the cares of billions of individual humans as each human is from the billions of individual cells of her body.
As basically caring human beings, this is the hardest truth to swallow -- that we have all but lost the capacity to act, not even collectively, to substantially change the dynamics of those systems, systems which are inherently indifferent to our individual and our collective well being.
One area in which intentionality has been shown to be more efficient than nature had been previously is in the development of production systems, where we don't have the overheads of full reproduction and its requirement for endless mutable copies of an encoding of the design.
So while it would most likely be possible over a long history of evolving design to produce a reproducing molecular (nano) system an order of magnitude more efficient than bacteria, pushing micro efficiency too far would most likely fail to produce components with sufficient adaptability to do anything we or our systemic masters might consider useful.
It appears that two decades on Drexler is finally conceding the likelihood of the scenario that some of us saw as soon as the overwhelming optimism of Engines of Creation started to lose its immediacy -- that the development of automated production processes for not just nano components but also nano component factories is likely to be much easier than the development of reproducing nanobots. That should remove any lingering incentive to tackle the hard problem of nanobot reproduction, even if possible exponential production was still imagined to have potential advantages over proven polynomial production.
Some of these arguments might get turned on their head if we can ever bootstrap a robotic economy off planet, but that is another topic.
On this planet, resource constraints have so far always found ways to keep some kind of check on exponential reproduction. Whether that will continue to apply to certain ethereal products of "the system" is an open question.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
I don't think that you could make a true "grey goo" that would literally convert everything on earth to itself - that's ludicrous, as you would have to have a machine capable of co-opting any type of molecule (even huge ones) to itself, and this just isn't plausible.
However, i do think that there is a potential for the weaponization of a sort of "lesser grey goo" - something that worked on steel and oxygen, say, or on flesh or any number of other things.
That all said, "It's inefficent" is not a fundamentally good way to say something won't happen. Hostile nations, curious professors, engineering tinkerers - these people will design such things out of curiosity, to solve a problem, or to use as a weapon. While everyone might have thier own nano-factory in thier house, some people will no doubt use it to produce things like this.
"Nothing excites jaded grandmasters like a Theoretical Novelty" - Dominic Lawson
'grey goo' - I mean really. It's obvious you got nothing worthwhile to do all day long.
Now watch as a mod with even less to do knocks this one way down.
You people are pathetic. Really pathetic.
Me, I'm outta here. I gotta go take a shit.
Doesn't it only take just ONE exponentially reproducing nanite to kill everything?
There already is a dangerous self-replicating technology which could theoretically turn the world into something like grey goo. It has destroyed several cities. It is widespread, gets out of control frequently by accident, and has been weaponized. It is self-replicating at the molecular level and can consume many different types of materials. It is very probable that this technology is more energy-efficient and robust than any new nanotechnology will be - it probably defines the outer bounds of destructive capacity for replicating nano-thingies.
It is usually called by its trade name, "fire".
This will give rise to a new technological morality - "black hat" and "white hat" programmers.
Dan
Information wants to be free.
Information wants to be valued.
So, if I have 3 computer games I'm a hardcore gamer?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Oh, I don't think it invalidates his opinion. I just think it let's you know where he's coming from. Remember, Bill Joy brought up the movie selection method himself as an example of properly applied risk management. I think all hackers are a little bit nuts. The soda story reminds me of one of my father's coworkers, an engineer. He had a hot water circulating pump in his house. In order to not pay for keeping the water in the pipes hot at night while he was sleeping, he had a timer put in. This wasn't good enough though. What if he was out of town? Or got up at noon one day? The water didn't need to be circulated unless he was actually in the house to use it! So he had an electrician wire up the pump to a wall switch next to his sink. He turns it on in the morning and off at night. The bizarre part is, he probably paid about $500 in parts and labor to have that switch installed in order to save what likely amounts to no more than 20 or 30 cents a month worth of natural gas. This is the "far side" of the hacker nature, where it just starts looking like run-of-the-mill crazy. I'm not saying Bill Joy's movie selection scheme is quite that bad, but it sure looks to me like it's in the same neighborhood.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
0.25 percent of donors contribute 80% of the campaign funds used by political candidates. They expect something back for that contribution. How is the common person going to match that kind of political influence? It's no wonder peole don't vote, they can't compete with the corporations or the elites that control the political process.
Or, in this case, why should we care that Bill Joy has ethical concerns with respect to micromachines. He's neither an ethicist nor a computer expert (off-mike: Oh... he is? Java?... founded Sun?... oh...) Never Mind!
(I miss Gilda Radner)
Bill Joy, a computer expert, is worried about nanobots. I am also a computer expert. I worry less, since murphy's law is on my side here: if we tried to make a device of any size capable of self replication and an ability to eat anything and self-propel, the world economy would go bankrupt without success. Instead, we'll start simple. We'll devise nanobots that live in a soup of ethylene glycol, dissolved hydrocarbon chains, and trace elements. Or something like that. The engineers will say "The problem is insurmountable written as you have it, but if we can shift to a controlled medium that eliminates a few areas that are toughest to design around (source of energy, method of floating in 3-d while working, communication capability), we can do it. We suggest [X]." And X will be coincidentally restrictive enough to make any unintentional outbreak a manageable one. And the devices will likely have a thousand mechanisms of failure, from UV to heat to cold to solvents to filtration.
I refuse to discredit Mr. Joy, but I really do sleep easily. We have yet to make a nanobot capable of even making a tenth of her own composition. The last I checked, we're making spinners/motors, mirror-oriented optical switches, limited logic circuits, macerating gears, and other absurdly-simple devices. And replication at any scale is so uncharted a realm of systems design that we've got a while before we start panicking about them being so efficient at replicating that enough will exist to end up turning us all into grey goo. I figure I'll get a hovercar, a wrist videophone and the ability to grow my own replacement kidney before this happens.