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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.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
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.
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
...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.
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
you can't power a robot with dirt
Ever hear of bacteria?
KFG
Simple, open your eyes and look....
The universe is at least some 14,500,000,000,000 years old, during that time it has undergone remarkable changes, stuff that happened soon after the big bang that can never be replicated in a lab, stuff that goes on within stars and black holes, which might someday be replicated in a lap, and from the very moment the clock came into existence and started ticking the less than 200 chemical elements possible (forget star trek bullshit elements that if created would have a half life of nanoseconds) rwacting with the half a dozen or so possible forces and the handful of basic laws of physics / thermodynamics (even if we cannot create gravity in a lab observation is sufficient to asseert that it is a "Force" and it exists) have been CONSTANTLY trying all possible combinations in all possible enviornments and all possible ambient energy levels....
no experiment is too expensive, too stupid, too slow or too exotic for the universe to undertake it as many times as it can, and then unlike the lab it build other experiments based upon the varying results of previous experiments, iterated untold times.....
the grey goo scenario IS NOT POSSIBLE because it has not happened, and it did not happen because it could only ever happen in a small closed enviornment where an outside force could input VAST (of the order of E=mc2) amounts of energy, whicg CANNOT happen in the free universe, it is called Entropy.
anyone who who seriously thought a-bomb tests would ignite the atmosphere was applying as much logial brain power as those people who thought humans would suffocate at the dizzying speeds of 30mph on the early steam trains.
the ONLY science experiment that could possibly destroy the planet earth is the creating of a stable (eg massing many megatons) singularity or black hole and then accidentally "dropping" it when the cleaners unplug the magnetic fields to plug the vacuum cleaner in.... and even that would take geological ages because the little bastard could only "eat" an atom or so at a time due to its miniscule "diameter"
The only thing that I guarantee WILL NOT happen is human beings actually growing up from the quaking n their knees in fear cave dwelling hairless monkeys that are afraid of anything and everything that they cannot understand.
get a life, FFS.
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
The real problem with a grey goo scenario is that the nanobots would have to compete on a level playing field with organic life, which has had billions of years to get better at it then them.
Except the nanobots would have no natural predators (assuming they aren't organic).
People's desire to believe they are right is much stronger than their desire to be right.
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.
On the upside, I wonder if we could turn a swarm of these guys loose on Mars and let them terraform it (assuming we could make them release useful gases into the atmosphere instead of turning it into gray goo)?
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
... 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.
Great point. Also, consider that nature itself has, through millions of years of random experimentation, come as close as one can hope to self-replicating nano-machines: just look at any virus, bacterium, etc. I find it extremely unlikely that we will be able to do much better in terms of ability to replicate by harvesting external matter-- an ability closely related to deadliness to all sorts of life forms.
:)
One of the issues people tend to overlook when making this argument is that nature has searched only a part of the available solution space - the part that basically must start as an autocatalytic set. What this means is that there are plenty of designs, for instance those that can make copies of themselves, but by external construction (how a nanobot would likely reproduce) that is not autocatalytic - it's extremely unlikely that such a design would naturally occur. Those designs are able to incorporate elements like elemental metal crystals which are not very compatable with proteins etc. The shear number of raw materials on earth, such as silicon, that cannot be used effectively by organic life is tremendous, and may lead to interesting possibilites for technology.
Nature's gone through many permutations but has barely scratched the surface in terms of the space of possible molecular machines. Don't estimate the power of intention to home in on the most useful/dangerous part of the space.
Cheers,
Justin
Disclaimer: I studied physics not biology so... someone correct me if I'm wrong
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.
Well, first off, that's the 'fat fingers' nanotech problem. The tool on a nanobot would have to be made out of atoms, making it tough to manipulate things on a sub-atomic level. Secondly, you're missing the point. 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.
What the fuck do you think happens on election day? You walk into a booth and check either Bush or Kerry and then walk out? There are other races, other candidates. You can have an effect on all of them.
No independent candidate has ever even come close to winning the election for president. Independents in the Senate are outnumbered 99 to 1. Independents in the House are outnumbered 434 to 1(source).Voting for an independent candidate, or worse, writing one in, has no more effect than not voting.
You're lazy and apathetic and just looking to excuse it.
Ad hominem. If you can't attack the argument, attack the man.
Bill Clinton was first elected by less than half of the voters. George Bush was also likely elected by less than half of the voters. Perot and Nader changed the outcome of elections. What was the result of this?
The result was we got Presidents that more than half the voters thought were not the best men for the job.
People's desire to believe they are right is much stronger than their desire to be right.
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?
> America is a representative democracy.
Ostensibly. Now, we vote for corporations by purchasing products, and the corporations select the "representatives" by buying and selling them. All of this is meant to suggest that the government representatives really represent the interests of major corporate shareholders - i.e. an elite, rich, and powerful few, not the "the people."
A much better description would be polyarchy - governance by many rulers / ruling class.
We can build machines that fly faster and higher than any bird, that can travel over land and water faster than any animal, that can see and hear better than any living thing, that can survive higher and lower temperatures than any living thing, etc.
Yes, I think it could happen. Bacterial have a limited diet, so they don't grow out of control. We very likely will be able to make nano-bots that can feed on anything and have far less limited growth scenarios than any naturally occuring bacteria. As long as it doesn't violate the physical laws of the universe, someone will eventually figure out a way to do it.