The facts of nonotechnology are very scarce at the present time. Even informed discussions on the subject rely heavily on speculations about what may or may not be possible. Presented below are some assumptions that often crop up in these discussions, along with my $.02 about each one.
1. We will one day be able to produce self-replicating nanites capable of destroying life on earth; possibly all life. This is unknown at the present time. But it's better to assume the worst than to get surprised by it. So, let's assume this for the time being.
2. We will be able to control the propogation of these nanites by some technological means. Also unknown. But, I'm willing to buy this for now. I think that, given enough time and talent, we're clever enough to pull this off.
3. The nanites, themselves, might circumvent our controls by a process of mutation and natural selection. This seems likely to me. Everything that reproduces also evolves. The ability to reproduce without limit would afford the affected mutants a huge survival advantage. I think that such species would be highly favored.
4. At least some people will be able to circumvent these controls deliberately. Sounds right.
5. It will be possible to control access to the technologies needed to produce deadly, self-replicating nanites. This is completely unknown, and probably the most worrisome aspect of the present inquiry. Nuclear proliferation is relatively easy to control due to the difficulty of producing fissionable material of sufficient quality to make a weapon. Biological weapons are easier to produce, but harder to deploy effectively. Chemical weapons lie somewhere between nuclear and biological weapons in terms of ease of manufacture and deployment.
If the technical challenges of producing nano-weapons are very great, then it will be feasible to limit access to the technology. But it is extremely dangerous to think that they would be. Indeed, the phrase, "cheap and ubiquitous," is often used in connection with nanotechnology, and universal access is touted by its proponents as a key advantage of the technology.
If someone like Kip Kinkel has the ability to produce this type of weapon, then we really do have something to worry about. Looking at Drexler's own scenarios, this is not at all inconceivable.
***
In his novel, "3001: Final Odyssey", Arthur Clarke introduces the idea of a nanotechnological device used for virtual reality and knowledge acquisition. The device also detects mental illness. In the book, every person, upon coming of age, has this device applied. If the person is found to be psychologically fit (i.e., unlikely to act out in dangerous, destructive ways), then s/he gets access to all known knowledge. Otherwise, presumably (though Clarke never states this explicitly), the person would be treated.
Although the privacy issues raised by such a regimen are pretty disturbing, I think that I would favor this type of prophylactic. Having considered this at some length, I have concluded that the privacy problems would be easier to solve than the nano-weapons proliferation problem.
Just for the record, I am a great proponent of nanotech. I want the benefits. That's why I think that we should take the risks seriously.
I just subscribed to their list. It would take a great deal of planning (and the consent of the GF:) for me to be able to do this for 120 days. But, I would love to do it.
Some buddies of mine and I once set up a service bureau in Colombia to do map vectorization for companies in the US. Maybe I could contribute in a similar fashion here if my little penguin vetoes a full on trip.
I've thought about this for my slashsite. The problem would be changing the colors of all the little rounded corner graphics, and of the ones that tile within table cells to form borders and boundaries. My site has a number of graphics that have colored gradients on them, too; presenting an even greater challenge.
It could be done, of course. But it would be a bit of work with a good graphics library.
Re:Patience pays (or, "Consider the Alternative")
on
Censorship In China
·
· Score: 1
"people think they can change a country of 1.2 billion people that fast, they obvious didn't kept anything from their high school history."
Actually, I think the problem is that they did keep very much of what they learned. Check out:
Sadly, most Americans live in what Marshall McLuhan called "The Current Fantasy", and have no idea how much worse things were in China before Mao (feudalism, mass starvation, foot binding, &c). I doubt very much that there would be democracy in China today had the KMT prevailed against Mao. But most products of the American system of education don't have enough context to be able to reason about it.
Patience pays (or, "Consider the Alternative")
on
Censorship In China
·
· Score: 2
China may still be an extremely restrictive, and certainly an undemocratic regime. But, it's a lot less restrictive and closer to democracy now than it was twenty years ago. Eventually, China will become a prosperous democracy with a free market economy. But these changes will not, and, frankly, cannot, happen over night.
The Chinese leadership is looking at the G7 countries and saying to themselves, "Gee, someday we want to be like them." At the same time, they're looking at the frightening example of the former Soviet countries where productivity has dropped by half in the past decade. The Soviet experience presents a cautionary tale that the Chinese cannot afford to ignore. We do not yet have a model for tranforming a failed communist economy into a successful free market economy. But, we have learned from the Soviet experience that shock treatment doesn't work.
The Chinese have already established a number of highly successful special economic zones where free trade reigns. They've also evinced an if-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it disposition in Hong Kong since taking over.
Eventually, all of China will become a huge special economic zone. But, remember that the world's largest group of poor, uneducated people lives in China. They'll need to keep basic services like education, food production and medical care (to name a few) running for a few more decades in order to get there. When a critical mass of Chinese are well off and well educated, then they will insist on democracy and an end to corruption, as has recently happened in Taiwan. This will likely occur around the time we have a $1,000 computer about as powerful as a human brain (about twenty five years from now). Sounds like an interesting future.
I actually like Enhydra and xmlc better than jsp. YMMV.
Good point about XML/XSL performance. I just meant that I'd let humans manage the content using XML. This is easier than building a bunch of data entry screens. I would then suck the XML up into a RDBMS for dynamic page generation. IMO, this is the main thing that XML is good for.
Well, I'd do this using java's internationalization support and something like Enhydra. I'd use XML to store the content if it needs to be human readable (e.g., if the people who manage content aren't programmers).
Java internationalization is a really cool solution. It takes a day or two to master the fine points. But it'll pay off in the long run.
I got this from a Psych 1 class about 15 years ago. Not sure who did this resrearch. I'm sure it would turn up in Psych Abstracts. But it might not be on the Web since it's so old.
I think that the major stake-holders in large firms are quivering in their boots at the realization that being big is less and less a guarantor of corporate success. Two major trends are at play in this.
Firstly, advances in technology are lowering barriers to entry across an increasing number of industries. The explosion of the independent film industry over the past few years is just one good example. I can think of many other examples of this phenomenon. Think of a few of the products that we would not have at all were it not for (relatively) cheap SGI worstations and stereolithography machines (rollerblades, &c).
Secondly, virtual companies that license brands, and outsource everything from design to fulfillment will soon be less risky to invest in, as well as more efficient and easier to manage than large, monolithic organisations. In the not too distant future, most companies will be service bureaus. Each will do one thing, and do it well. One of the last missing pieces is a set of clean, standardized interfaces that allow companies to couple and decouple more or less dynamically, treating one another like closely knit business units of the same firm. XML will soon fill this gap. Any firm that 'implements the interface' will satisfice for a given business need.
All of this contributes to the diminishing importance of economies of scale. It won't be long before a group of really smart grad students starts, say, a car company that that does to General Motors what Microsoft did to IBM. Executives at Time-Warner and the like realise this, which is why they're circling the wagons, merging with everyting in sight. I term this behaviour 'Panic Buying'. Like its frightful cousin, Panic Selling, it doesn't pencil out in the long run.
Actually, this is a commonly held fallacy. There is no correlation between intelligence and mental illness.
There is a correlation between intelligence, and the level of eccentricity _others_ will tolerate in a person (generally, people will tolerate greater eccentricity in more intelligent people). But that's not the same thing.
Fine by me. UN*X with the Mac interface and lots of cool apps available? I'll gladly pay for it if it's stable (especially if I can get a Power4 Mac, he he), and I haven't bought a Mac since 1984.
Yikes! No, I wasn't there. Thanks for the clarification. Now I am aware of such a proposal, and I cannot take it seriously for the reasons stated above. (Although, I must concede that Bill Joy is a rational person:)
This is an excellent starting point for the kind of discussion I think we should be having.
"This is why we must develop nano- and bio-technology: as human population grows..."
I emphatically agree. The question is not whether these technologies should be developed, but how they should be deployed, and how and whether their use can be regulated.
In general, we need to develop a set of strategies that optimise for both maximum benefit and minimal hazard. How do we ensure that medical researchers have full access to the latest nano-gear, while making equally sure that members of the lunatic fringe have zero access? What criteria must a person meet in order to be granted/denied access? How, and how often, will these properties be measured? How will access be controlled? What new institutions will be needed? Who will control them, and what dangers will they present?
For historical reasons, I think that we can rule out the possibility that these technologies will not be developed. For humanitarian reasons, I think that we should prepare ourselves to defend their development vigorously. In order to do so, we will have to have answers to the above questions, as well as, undoubtedly, many others.
I am troubled, and, actually, rather surprised, to discover that so many/.'ers do not share at least part of Bill Joy's concerns regarding the prospective dangers of self-replicating nano-scale machines. Members of the geek class ought to recognise the full gravity of the perils we face as our species makes its next great ascent of the learning curve. Otherwise, who will warn the rest? Im primis: self-replicating nano-scale devices already inhabit our world in countless forms. Nature abounds with them. It seems incredible to me that we will not learn how to make them ourselves. We may ernestly debate how much longer it will take us to produce something really dangerous. But the time remaining is measured in decades, not centuries. Does anyone here dispute this? Secondly, I am unaware of any serious proposal, from Mr. Joy or anyone else, that would put a halt to nanotechnology research. Such a proposal would be unserious by definition, since no rational person would take it seriously. The benefits of nanotechnology are both so great, and so obvious that nothing short of a full blown dark age is likely to retard progress in this area. What Bill is saying, what Ray is saying, what I am saying, and what everyone reading this ought to be saying is that we should start thinking about these issues now; not twenty or thirty years from now. I have no doubt that our universe is littered with dead planets once inhabited by sentient creatures who let this technology get the better of them. Let's think fast, and not get eaten by nanites. "That's not an error. It's an undocumented feature."
Slashdot Mirror
1. We will one day be able to produce self-replicating nanites capable of destroying life on earth; possibly all life.
This is unknown at the present time. But it's better to assume the worst than to get surprised by it. So, let's assume this for the time being.
2. We will be able to control the propogation of these nanites by some technological means.
Also unknown. But, I'm willing to buy this for now. I think that, given enough time and talent, we're clever enough to pull this off.
3. The nanites, themselves, might circumvent our controls by a process of mutation and natural selection.
This seems likely to me. Everything that reproduces also evolves. The ability to reproduce without limit would afford the affected mutants a huge survival advantage. I think that such species would be highly favored.
4. At least some people will be able to circumvent these controls deliberately.
Sounds right.
5. It will be possible to control access to the technologies needed to produce deadly, self-replicating nanites.
This is completely unknown, and probably the most worrisome aspect of the present inquiry. Nuclear proliferation is relatively easy to control due to the difficulty of producing fissionable material of sufficient quality to make a weapon. Biological weapons are easier to produce, but harder to deploy effectively. Chemical weapons lie somewhere between nuclear and biological weapons in terms of ease of manufacture and deployment.
If the technical challenges of producing nano-weapons are very great, then it will be feasible to limit access to the technology. But it is extremely dangerous to think that they would be. Indeed, the phrase, "cheap and ubiquitous," is often used in connection with nanotechnology, and universal access is touted by its proponents as a key advantage of the technology.
If someone like Kip Kinkel has the ability to produce this type of weapon, then we really do have something to worry about. Looking at Drexler's own scenarios, this is not at all inconceivable.
***
In his novel, "3001: Final Odyssey", Arthur Clarke introduces the idea of a nanotechnological device used for virtual reality and knowledge acquisition. The device also detects mental illness. In the book, every person, upon coming of age, has this device applied. If the person is found to be psychologically fit (i.e., unlikely to act out in dangerous, destructive ways), then s/he gets access to all known knowledge. Otherwise, presumably (though Clarke never states this explicitly), the person would be treated.
Although the privacy issues raised by such a regimen are pretty disturbing, I think that I would favor this type of prophylactic. Having considered this at some length, I have concluded that the privacy problems would be easier to solve than the nano-weapons proliferation problem.
Just for the record, I am a great proponent of nanotech. I want the benefits. That's why I think that we should take the risks seriously.
--
The map on this page is pretty telling.
Some buddies of mine and I once set up a service bureau in Colombia to do map vectorization for companies in the US. Maybe I could contribute in a similar fashion here if my little penguin vetoes a full on trip.
Sounds like the sites you visited would not be considered as candidates for GeekCorps' current programs. Please read above.
I could see using one of these things to speed up data-intensive dynamic web serving if the database were big enough. Anyone tried this?
It could be done, of course. But it would be a bit of work with a good graphics library.
Actually, I think the problem is that they did keep very much of what they learned. Check out:
Lies My Teacher Told Me : Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
Not to mention:
A People's History of the United States : 1492-Present
Sadly, most Americans live in what Marshall McLuhan called "The Current Fantasy", and have no idea how much worse things were in China before Mao (feudalism, mass starvation, foot binding, &c). I doubt very much that there would be democracy in China today had the KMT prevailed against Mao. But most products of the American system of education don't have enough context to be able to reason about it.
Pity, really.
Sounds like we're going to need a lot more robots
The Chinese leadership is looking at the G7 countries and saying to themselves, "Gee, someday we want to be like them." At the same time, they're looking at the frightening example of the former Soviet countries where productivity has dropped by half in the past decade. The Soviet experience presents a cautionary tale that the Chinese cannot afford to ignore. We do not yet have a model for tranforming a failed communist economy into a successful free market economy. But, we have learned from the Soviet experience that shock treatment doesn't work.
The Chinese have already established a number of highly successful special economic zones where free trade reigns. They've also evinced an if-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it disposition in Hong Kong since taking over.
Eventually, all of China will become a huge special economic zone. But, remember that the world's largest group of poor, uneducated people lives in China. They'll need to keep basic services like education, food production and medical care (to name a few) running for a few more decades in order to get there. When a critical mass of Chinese are well off and well educated, then they will insist on democracy and an end to corruption, as has recently happened in Taiwan. This will likely occur around the time we have a $1,000 computer about as powerful as a human brain (about twenty five years from now). Sounds like an interesting future.
Yeah, but in this case, the ad agency owns all of the content. Only the ownership of the HTML is in dispute.
<tr>
<td><td>
</tr>
</TABLE>
© 2000, cDarwin. All rights reserved.
And don't even think about using this to produce a derivative work!
I actually had a laptop with me, and I got a temporary account with a local ISP. But the phone lines were so noisy that it really wasn't worth it.
Happy trails!
Good point about XML/XSL performance. I just meant that I'd let humans manage the content using XML. This is easier than building a bunch of data entry screens. I would then suck the XML up into a RDBMS for dynamic page generation. IMO, this is the main thing that XML is good for.
Java internationalization is a really cool solution. It takes a day or two to master the fine points. But it'll pay off in the long run.
Hope this helps!
I got this from a Psych 1 class about 15 years ago. Not sure who did this resrearch. I'm sure it would turn up in Psych Abstracts. But it might not be on the Web since it's so old.
Cheers
Firstly, advances in technology are lowering barriers to entry across an increasing number of industries. The explosion of the independent film industry over the past few years is just one good example. I can think of many other examples of this phenomenon. Think of a few of the products that we would not have at all were it not for (relatively) cheap SGI worstations and stereolithography machines (rollerblades, &c).
Secondly, virtual companies that license brands, and outsource everything from design to fulfillment will soon be less risky to invest in, as well as more efficient and easier to manage than large, monolithic organisations. In the not too distant future, most companies will be service bureaus. Each will do one thing, and do it well. One of the last missing pieces is a set of clean, standardized interfaces that allow companies to couple and decouple more or less dynamically, treating one another like closely knit business units of the same firm. XML will soon fill this gap. Any firm that 'implements the interface' will satisfice for a given business need.
All of this contributes to the diminishing importance of economies of scale. It won't be long before a group of really smart grad students starts, say, a car company that that does to General Motors what Microsoft did to IBM. Executives at Time-Warner and the like realise this, which is why they're circling the wagons, merging with everyting in sight. I term this behaviour 'Panic Buying'. Like its frightful cousin, Panic Selling, it doesn't pencil out in the long run.
There is a correlation between intelligence, and the level of eccentricity _others_ will tolerate in a person (generally, people will tolerate greater eccentricity in more intelligent people). But that's not the same thing.
Mental illness is physical illness. Widespread deial of this simple fact greatly exacerbates the problem.
Go with God, if that's your choice. I'll go with science.
Ah, numeracy is going all to hell. . . <sigh>
Kudos to Apple!
Again, thanks.
I second the motion, and would be extremely pleased to contribute some time to the effort!
This is an excellent starting point for the kind of discussion I think we should be having.
"This is why we must develop nano- and bio-technology: as human population grows..."
I emphatically agree. The question is not whether these technologies should be developed, but how they should be deployed, and how and whether their use can be regulated.
In general, we need to develop a set of strategies that optimise for both maximum benefit and minimal hazard. How do we ensure that medical researchers have full access to the latest nano-gear, while making equally sure that members of the lunatic fringe have zero access? What criteria must a person meet in order to be granted/denied access? How, and how often, will these properties be measured? How will access be controlled? What new institutions will be needed? Who will control them, and what dangers will they present?
For historical reasons, I think that we can rule out the possibility that these technologies will not be developed. For humanitarian reasons, I think that we should prepare ourselves to defend their development vigorously. In order to do so, we will have to have answers to the above questions, as well as, undoubtedly, many others.
--"Darwin Saves!"
Exactly. I think that was the point :)
I am troubled, and, actually, rather surprised, to discover that so many /.'ers do not share at least part of Bill Joy's concerns regarding the prospective dangers of self-replicating nano-scale machines. Members of the geek class ought to recognise the full gravity of the perils we face as our species makes its next great ascent of the learning curve. Otherwise, who will warn the rest? Im primis: self-replicating nano-scale devices already inhabit our world in countless forms. Nature abounds with them. It seems incredible to me that we will not learn how to make them ourselves. We may ernestly debate how much longer it will take us to produce something really dangerous. But the time remaining is measured in decades, not centuries. Does anyone here dispute this? Secondly, I am unaware of any serious proposal, from Mr. Joy or anyone else, that would put a halt to nanotechnology research. Such a proposal would be unserious by definition, since no rational person would take it seriously. The benefits of nanotechnology are both so great, and so obvious that nothing short of a full blown dark age is likely to retard progress in this area. What Bill is saying, what Ray is saying, what I am saying, and what everyone reading this ought to be saying is that we should start thinking about these issues now; not twenty or thirty years from now. I have no doubt that our universe is littered with dead planets once inhabited by sentient creatures who let this technology get the better of them. Let's think fast, and not get eaten by nanites. "That's not an error. It's an undocumented feature."