From: Charlie Stross (charlie@antipope.org)
Date: Thu Mar 09 2000 - 05:44:36 MST
On Wed, Mar 08, 2000 at 07:16:31PM +0100, Anders Sandberg wrote:
> There is also another problem here, and that is that "moral evolution"
> (whatever that is; I agree that we have seen a trend the last
> centuries towards more human-friendly and "nice" moralities, but that
> is no proof of an obgoing evolution towards something "good" and might
> just be my own particular prejudices talking) might not be
> enough.
Moral evolution isn't inevitable, anyway: it's a mis-application of
evolutionary theory. Evolution isn't directed -- there's no goal and
no progress, just an endless run of new permutations that are then
filtered out if they aren't viable in their current context.
(I'd like to think that some sort of teleological progress is something
that our memes can aspire to, even if our genes are stuck in a Darwinian
mire, but that's another matter.)
> Probably the only viable solution is to make sure the system can
> survive huge disasters, that makes these disasters something that can
> be handled at least partially. Space colonisation is a good first
> step, but currently too expensive to do as a security precaution. With
> enough nano it is cheaper and viable, but then we have a window of
> opportunity between the development of space-applicable nano and the
> sufficient spread of dangerous technology to make catastrophic
> destruction likely whose width is hard to estimate.
We have survived such a window before -- one that opened (to the
public gaze) on August 6th, 1945.
While the destructive potential of nano is arguably greater than that
of nuclear war, given the slowdown in military procurement since the
end of the Cold War I _expect_ the nano industry to be dominated in
its early phases by civilian technology development. My hope is that
the polycentric world order of today means that we're entering a period
like that between 1870 and 1914 when, apart from the battleship race (the
ICBMs of the day -- big, expensive, and of militarily dubious utility),
the armies of Europe made little technological progress.
(Barbed wire, machine guns, and war gas were _all_ available off-the-shelf
in 1871, during the Franco-Prussian war -- they became commoner over the
next 45 years, but generals in 1914 still believed in cavalry attacks
as fervently as they had in 1814, and real progress towards new engines
of destruction had to wait until an actual major conflict broke out and
the then-extant tools proved inadequate.)
If we are lucky, our military will be happy with their smart bombs,
F-22's, and stealth bombers until around 2030 or so -- and the nano
security problem will be a police/social one rather than one involving
weapons of mass destruction. If we're _very_ lucky, the existing
political order will disintegrate under the weight of its own internal
inconsistencies before there are widespread military applications of
nanotechnology.
(You will note that I consider a bureaucracy staffed by diligent,
patriotic, loyal, experts to be potentially far more hazardous than
a lone maniac. That's because I consider the task of designing and
deploying a nanotech weapon to be one that most maniacs don't have
the time, energy, money, or intelligence to address -- whereas any
study of the history of the cold war, with reference to fun toys
like Project Pluto or the NB-36, or Russian counterparts like the
YaKHR-7[*], will recognize that the lunacy of a bureaucracy knows no
bounds.)
-- Charlie
[*] A fission-powered ICBM. No, I'm not kidding. They got as far as
specifying the barium-salt-rich, lead-lined reservoirs in Siberia to
crash-land the main engines in -- when flight-testing the thing --
before someone pointed out that the idea was to nuke the enemy, not
Mother Russia.
It was marginally more sane than Project Pluto, though.
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