Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!oz.nm.paradyne.com!alan From: alan@oz.nm.paradyne.COM (Alan Lovejoy) Newsgroups: sci.nanotech Subject: Re: Is active shield design intractable? Keywords: active shields, cultural evolution Message-ID: <8906150841.AA06249@athos.rutgers.edu> Date: 13 Jun 89 15:12:23 GMT References: <8905310354.AA19565@athos.rutgers.edu<.<8906010521.AA05561@athos.rutgers.edu> <8906130723.AA21670@athos.rutgers.edu> Sender: nanotech@aramis.rutgers.edu Organization: AT&T Paradyne, Largo, Florida Lines: 97 Approved: nanotech@aramis.rutgers.edu In article <8906130723.AA21670@athos.rutgers.edu< offutt@CAEN.ENGIN.UMICH.EDU (daniel m offutt) writes: <The human body can be destroyed by the disruption of just *one* <life-critical process. There are numerous simple elements, chemicals, <viruses, and bacteria that can kill. Killers can be simple. But an <active shield (such as the human immune system) is necessarily much, <much more complex. So designing killers should be easy compared to <designing a broad defensive system. And yet still we survive. Your arguments that we cannot survive are just about as impressive as the "proof" that bees cannot fly or that rockets cannot reach orbit. Is there a problem? Yes! Is the situation hopeless? No! <If the immune system must be complex in order to cope with uncertainty <of mode of assault, then artificial active shields will also have to <be complex in order to cope with similar uncertainty. The human <immune system is the product of hundreds of millions of years of <evolution, including a like amount of time of rigorous testing against <the most noxious assaults Nature has been able to devise against it. <The immune system reflects, in some never-to-be-fully-understood way, <a long history of mostly unknown assaults by viruses and bacteria. <Clearly there are not millions of years available to evolve active <shields capable of defending against gray goo. Your argument is based on three overly-pessimistic assumptions: 1) Equal effort will be expended towards developing gragu and active shields. 2) Nanotechnology which is sufficiently advanced to create gragu will appear before AI which is sufficiently advanced to speed up technoscientific advancement by 6 orders of magnitude (or better). 3) The first team to make the AI/nanotechnology breakthrough will either be inimical, or else stupid enough to freely distribute their knowledge. The first assumption is probably not true, because most people oppose the goals of gragu. Gragu will not be an accident. Inimical people will have to create it. Only the highly insane will consider releasing an indiscriminately-destructive goo on the world. Most people who put any effort into gragu will intend to survive their creation. And most of those will only intend to release the goo for purposes of retaliation to being attacked by someone else's gragu. Mutual assured destruction all over again. Military gragu will be designed to be selective and controllable by its owners. The "control codes" will be the target of the most intense espionage campaign the world has ever seen. And everyone will seek to subvert everyone else's goo. Can you be SURE that your goo has not been subverted by the other side? Remember, your neighbors have nanoagents, just like you do. Will anything ever be truly secret and/or secure again? The problem isn't gragu--it's inimical intelligences. Perhaps the best way to prevent gragu is to prevent the sicknesses, abuses and depravities that engender insanity and evil. Nanotechnology and AI may provide us with the capability--and the imperative--to heal the world. Can we learn enough about what makes people willing to commit mass murder to prevent it from happeing? We'd better! The second assumption is probably false because a gragu agent would have to be much more sophisticated than a virus or bacterium--and we aren't even close to being able to design such a thing [a gragu agent] without advanced AI to help us. The human brain, and hence the human mind, is a machine. It operates in accordance with natural law just like everthing else. It was designed and built by a process of evolution over billions of years. Note that most of the design time was taken up to create the most primitive aspects of the human brain--the really advanced capabilities appeared with relative rapidity. Consider what that means in light of the current state of the art in AI. The brain is not magic. If it can evolve, it can be purposely designed. There can be no credible refutation of this logic. The rate of progress in machine-intelligence technology is such that artificial human intelligence will almost certainly appear before 2050. Idiot savant machines that are very good molecular engineers will probably be available by 2020--or sooner. It is the capabilities of these AI machines that will determine the success--or failure--of active shields. The third assumption is probably false because most scientific researchers are not inimical--nor are they stupid (if they are, they're in the wrong profession). <Mr. Drexler and others seem to think that cultural evolution on a time <scale of decades or centuries is at least as powerful (in the sense of <ability to discover solutions to problems -- such as artificial active <shield design) as biological evolution is on a time scale of hundreds <of millions of years. I believe this assumption is dead wrong. It <needs to be considered very much more carefully by nanotechnologists. The idea that cultural evolution proceeding at the rate it does today can produce effective and reliable active shields quickly enough to counter gragu is almost certainly wrong. That is NOT Drexler's argument. Drexler argues that AI--and other advancements--will drastically accelerate the rate of progress by many orders of magnitude. The first team to use nanotechology to create a "super computer" will probably be able to achieve and maintain an unassailable technological superiority over everyone else, if they so choose. Alan Lovejoy; alan@pdn; 813-530-2211; AT&T Paradyne: 8550 Ulmerton, Largo, FL. Disclaimer: I do not speak for AT&T Paradyne. They do not speak for me. ______________________________Down with Li Peng!________________________________ Motto: If nanomachines will be able to reconstruct you, YOU AREN'T DEAD YET.