[extropy-chat] Depressing thought of the day

[Eugen Leitl]

On Wed, Nov 05, 2003 at 04:49:26PM -0800, Robert J. Bradbury wrote:

> You are joining problems that have very different
> outcomes.  SPAM is annoying and problematic but it
> generally doesn't kill people.  Grey Goo could
> kill people and therefore evokes a significantly
> greater response.

There's zero awareness in the general public right now of what nanotechnology
is, and what a successful military self-replicator could do. If you ask
random people (notice that your friends and acquaintances are not that)
you'll agree that's an accurate description.

When will there be a widespread awareness? Probably, after the first large
incident. Well, we'd better survive that first incident. What is the impact
of a first large incident in terms of policy? Extreme degree of surveillance,
down to the microscale. 
 
> You need to present an argument that (a) people
> would not see grey goo coming -- something that
> the papers re: ecophagy by R-Freitas would seem

Who has read that paper? Apart from people on this list, I mean.

> to contraindicate; and (b) we do not have the
> capability to eliminate grey goo (something that
> to my knowledge base has never been presented).

b) is backwards. You have to prove that we have the capability for that. I
used to present lots of arguments why you can't contain military self-rep
without dire side effects to biology. No one has ever refuted them, so I'm
assuming we can't contain it, as long as there's an ecosystem around. For dry
nanosystems grey goo is about as annoying as mites are to biology. Not an
issue most of the time, nasty in some cases, terminally so in negligible
number of cases.

As long as we're stuck with biology, this doesn't help us a lot, of course.
But, a successful design is nontrivial, and we don't have that many rampant
evil geniuses around. 
 
> You have thrown down the gauntlet.  Back it up.

Eliezer doesn't have the burden of proof here, methinks.

-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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