From: Billy Brown (bbrown@transcient.com)
Date: Fri Mar 31 2000 - 14:05:08 MST
Zero Powers wrote:
> How about this scenario. Nanoassemblers are developed and the decision is
> made to let the public benefit from them. But in order to be issued a
> nanobox of your very own, you must first agree to have your every
> interaction with any other human, computer or nanodevice recorded and
> publicly stored.
>
> So you have your choice, to be surveilled or not. Curious: Which would
> *you* choose?
This is another scenario that is only possible if you already have an
authoritarian government - and in this case it has to control the whole
world, not just one part of it.
In a free society there is no entity that has the power to compel me to sign
any particular agreement in order to gain access to nanotech. I can buy
from Zyvex, or Nanotech Industries, or the Japanese, or anyone else who has
technology to sell. The odds of there being a monopoly (or even a small
pool of vendors) for very long are just about nil.
If you try to get a democratic government to pass a measure like this,
you'll just get squashed. 99% of the voters will want nanotech, and 99% of
them will oppose mandatory surveillance, so they'll pass one and not the
other. Besides which, the agreement can't be enforced unless you create a
police state to do the dirty work - otherwise some people will just sign the
agreement and ignore it, others will create a black market in illegal
anything boxes, and no one with criminal intent will ever surveil
themselves.
Bottom line: people do not want strangers watching them in the privacy of
their own homes. The only way to get universal surveillance is to resort to
force, and once you do that you've given everyone a very good reason to
resist. In the end, universal surveillance can only happen if there is a
police state making it happen, in which case the state will decide who gets
watched and who gets to do the watching.
Billy Brown
bbrown@transcient.com
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