Path: utzoo!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!wuarchive!bcm!dimacs.rutgers.edu!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!nanotech From: bill@braille.uwo.ca (W.B. Carss) Newsgroups: sci.nanotech Subject: Re: Is this stuff for real? Keywords: reality nanotech questions Message-ID: Date: 3 Mar 91 03:52:42 GMT Sender: nanotech@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: The Computer Braille Facility, UWO, London Lines: 104 Approved: nanotech@aramis.rutgers.edu [The arguments in this message are, fortunately for the future of life on Earth, flawed. See below. -j] >[This is essentially what is referred to as the gray goo problem, from {...lines deleted} > > Fears of accidental gray goo scenarios are less comparable to > rabbits in Australia, than to a story where feral automobiles > run wild, mutating into herds of grass-eating vans hunted by > carniverous pickup trucks. I would worry instead about what > people do with them on purpose; I was in Australia recently and > I saw a hell of a lot more sheep than rabbits. > To suggest that we can build machines that work perfectly EVERY time forever is (IMHO) just about as silly as the paragraph I have reproduced. All I said, essentially, was that considering our record so far, i.e. the things we think we KNOW, I would be willing to bet that there will be a lot more POTENTIALLY serious screw-ups than successes. In your GRAY GOO summation you neglected to discuss our i.e. human capacity for error, our often frequent assumption or at least attitude that we know everything and the frequent occasions when we find out that we don't. We are a long long way from being anywhere near "programming" these nanobots, nor even doing much more than day-dreaming about them. For you to suggest that sometime between now and when ever we are actually able to build or design them we as human beings will exhibit a lot less arogance and a lot more sense is just about as silly as your trite dismissal of a potential problem that you didn't seriously address or even consider. The problem isn't nanotechnology, it is US. Our inefficiencies and stupidity which has been shown time and time again. Let me take this a step further ... We design nanobots that are either self-replicating or are built by other nanobots. Assuming that ever replication from which ever source is not perfect, some of the machines will be flawed. To check for flawed machines we design sel-test abilities it to the replicators. Assuming that the flaws don't develop in the self-test portion of these machines everything works fine. If, however, the flaws develop in the self-test portion of the machine, you will either have a machine which is scrapping good nanobots and/or passing flawed nanobots. What will these flawed nanobots create? We have no real way of knowing. What type of end-product would be built by flawed nanobots? Again, we have no real way of knowing. Could we test the testers with testers with testers ... We would end up with so many testers nothing constructive could be built because all of the available resources would be consumed by testing the test ... So now I state the ultimate question, and I mean this very seriously, CAN SOMEONE SHOW ME WITH SERIOUS SCIENTIFIC REFERENCES I.E. SOME RESULT FROM EXPERIMENTATION OR SOME OTHER TESTABLE MEANS WHY THIS CRITICISM IS FLAWED? I truly believe that it requires a more serious answer than the ever popular gray goo catch-all which you have used. I challenge you, in a friendly way to show me that I am wrong rather than attempting to sweep my criticisms under the proverbial rug. -- Bill Carss bill@braille.uwo.ca [The major flaw in the above argument is that it doesn't take any account of the difference between a machine and an animal. Bill has taken a major (and completely unsupportable) leap of faith: since we are quite likely to make mistakes (true) our machines will suddenly become supermachines able to take over the world in spite of all we can do to resist them. A machine built for some useful purpose will tend to be as efficient as we can make it for that purpose. This means that it will tend to be highly specialized, run on special fuels or power sources, require inputs preprocessed for their special purpose, etc. Consider a car. It runs on gasoline. For a car to turn feral, it would have to convert to some naturally occuring fuel, say wood. You could *design* a car to live off the land; it would come with saws and chippers for harvesting trees, some low-efficiency but highly robust motor able to burn anything in some broad range; it would trade speed for off-road capability, etc, etc. Spend a little time actually trying to design a self-fueling, self-repairing car. Now come back and tell me how you are accidentally going to build this amazing vehicle, without intending to, by making a MISTAKE in the process of building an ordinary regular car that runs on gasoline, and is fixed at service stations with parts manufactured by factories. If you don't understand why I'm talking about feral cars you've missed some important point and need to go back and try to explain why you think gray goo could happen in the first place. Early nanotech thinkers realized that nanomachines could be much more efficient than natural organisms and it is easy to jump to the conclusion that they could thus outperform them in an evolutionary struggle and take over the biosphere. That's wrong. It's based on completely ignoring what it is that makes natural organisms less efficient than machines. The answer turns out to be flexibility, adaptability, self-repairability, evolvability. The lesson to be learned from this is that using nanotechnology for some given task might be much safer than the alternative if that alternative was to use BIOtechnology. Modifying actual organisms does *not* have the safeguards of specialization, inflexibility, brittleness of design, and so forth that a mechanistic approach to nanotechnology has. With biotechnology you're talking rabbits instead of cars. --JoSH]