From: Zero Powers (zero_powers@hotmail.com)
Date: Mon Apr 03 2000 - 20:06:25 MDT
>From: "Billy Brown" <bbrown@transcient.com>
>
>Zero Powers wrote:
> > Odds are, since nanotech will be even *more* dangerous than
> > nuclear weapons,
> > access to it will be guarded just as tightly as nuclear weapon access is
> > now. Have you tried to buy a nuclear weapon lately? Is the
> > reason that you
> > cannot because you live under the thumb of an authoritarian government?
>
>The examples are not parallel. Nuclear weapons aren't very useful for
>anything except blowing people up, so it is easy to keep the number of
>potential manufacturers small and restrict their activities.
So are you suggesting that, if nukes were handy for many other things
besides huge explosions, you'd be able to buy them at your local Radio
Shack?
>Nanotech, OTOH, is incredibly useful for just about everything imaginable.
>It would be extremely difficult to prevent its use from spreading to every
>major industry on the planet in short order, and once you reach that point
>there are far too many people with assemblers for a government to easily
>keep track of them all.
So do you think government is stupid enough to avoid regulation of nanotech
until *after* everybody already has a near-anything device?
>And, of course, this doesn't even count the fact
>that I don't need to own an assembler to reap the benefits of nanotech.
Sure, but without access to one of your very own, you would be limited to
making only what the owner of the device would allow you to make. So yes, I
guess one way to deal with the threat would be to only allow government to
own the devices and then require the rest of us to line up welfare style to
put in our construction requests. If that is more acceptable to you than
surveillance, I suppose I could live with that.
-Zero
"I like dreams of the future better than the history of the past"
--Thomas Jefferson
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