From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Mon Jun 24 2002 - 11:27:39 MDT
On Mon, 24 Jun 2002, Anders Sandberg wrote:
> No. Treating a symptom (lack of food and lack of food production)
> without dealing with the cause (lack of rule of law, lack of respect
> for human rights) with replicating technology can be extremely
> dangerous.
I disagree -- food is entirely based on replicating technology.
Its just that most of it doesn't do the conversion efficiently
and is very poorly adapted for human purposes. I'm thinking
along the since of solar ponds that directly produce blocks
of cheese (much more efficient than the "natural" process).
> If the leadership/thugs of such a region could use these
> technologies to strengthen their hold, say by making weapons, they
> would welcome them.
Well Sadaam has demonstrated that -- but the world in general
seems to have strongly rejected that approach (though they
are still having trouble putting that Pandora back in the box).
But the vectors are fairly different a photosynthetic bacteria
that produces cheese is probably pretty difficult to "weaponize".
You solve that problem by making sure that only responsible
people have access to the technologies.
> I have always thought there is a need for a "nasty" aid organisation
> that gives subversive, useful things directly to people, bypassing
> whatever government they have. The microloan movement is a good first
> approximation, but I would like to see something that would actually
> airdrop satphones or nano seeds over hostile governments. But whatever
> you give the people, the rulers will also have.
True. You want, to the greatest degree possible, for the things
to be difficult to adapt to evil purposes. The satphones and the
bacteria cited above would be good examples. Perhaps sat-PDAs
with built-in cameras so you send and receive your news unfiltered
so state control of the media doesn't buy you much.
If you can make the food production efficient enough, then I
don't think surrounding countries would have any difficulty
supporting an influx of refugees. So the only way "thugs"
would stay in power is by imprisoning their population.
Its kind of hard to stop a mass migration out of a
country. How would the Swedish government stop the
population from moving to Finland? I think you could
only get away with that in places like Japan and even
then there are lots of small craft in which to flee.
Robert
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