Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!iuvax!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!nanotech From: peb@tma1.eng.sun.com (Paul Baclaski) Newsgroups: sci.nanotech Subject: Re: Nanotech thoughts Message-ID: Date: 16 Nov 89 22:51:50 GMT Sender: nanotech@athos.rutgers.edu Lines: 66 Approved: nanotech@aramis.rutgers.edu In article , mgoodfel@mgoodfel.oracle.com (Michael Goodfellow) writes: > > Someday, we will all be eaten by Grey Goo. > The Grey Goo/Blue Goo senario looks very much line the Nuclear War/SDI senario today. Mutual Assured Destruction is what keeps us from having a nuclear war. The cost of building more nuclear weapons is lower than the cost of building an impregnable sheild (like the fantasy SDI system proposed by Reagan (originally Edward Teller, I suppose)). Likewise, the cost of a Blue Goo defense would be much higher than the cost of building a Grey Goo. Biological example: the Human Immune System is very complex and the AIDS virus is very simple. I think the idea of copying/backing up your consciousness is probably going to be expensive, but perhaps not as expensive as an impregnable Blue Goo. However, the technology for backing up a human is certainly going to come much later than military Grey Goo. M.A.D relies on a rationality assumption, which is a good assumption when it comes to large countries. However, it would not be reliable assumption if Grey Goo could be concocted by a singular person. Also, there is the danger of a Dr. Strangelove senario (but I will ignore this at this time--too many variables for making predictions). (The cost of building a nuclear weapons lab is very high and has certainly limited the spread of these weapons. The requirements are: fuel, knowledge and equipment. Thus, building nuclear weapons is the domain of governments, not individuals.) I think that designing nanomachines is not going to be in the realm of the kitchen table--it will be very expensive, and only large corporations will have the factilities to implement significant designs. Home nanotech kits should be limited to non-reproducing, non-evolving, fixed designs with changable firmware and well characterized manipulation capabilities. The question then becomes: what is the actual cost of building an assembler lab? You need a programmable assembler, raw materials, design support equipment and very specialized knowledge. This is very similar to building a nuclear weapons lab. A programmable assembler is going to be very expensive, even if it is cheap for it to reproduce (this is because the opportunity cost of losing the assembler to the competition is very high)--so security will be extremely tight. However, no security is perfect and some assemblers will be stolen. The people stealing an assembler will still need raw materials, design support equipment (which does not self reproduce) and specialized knowledge. Perhaps the cost is on the order of $10,000,000 minimum, when all things are considered, but the black market usually pays more for anything, so the cost would be higher. This is probably less than the cost of building a nuclear weapons lab, but is still higher than most individuals can afford. Given these limitations, populations of humans on Earth should be safe--Grey Goo is not inevitable. However, these assumptions do not lead to the conclusion that any particular individual is safe from nefarious activity of corporations or governments (no change from current state of the world), so there should be considerable need for a consciousness backup system. Paul E. Baclaski Sun Microsystems peb@sun.com