From: Billy Brown (bbrown@conemsco.com)
Date: Fri Jan 22 1999 - 08:54:05 MST
Dan Clemmensen wrote:
> Your fundamental point is completely correct and we are in violent
> agreement: I feel that nanotech without SI is essentially impossible..
> please see:
> http://bobo.shirenet.com/~dgc/singularity/singularity.htm
> which I wrote in 1996..
>
> I thought that you had made an assumption of nanotech without SI..
> If you agree that nanotech->SI, then why discuss attack and defense?
Well, depends on what you mean by nanotech. I could see humans building an
assembler, and using it to make diamondoid parts. With a large investment
of engineering effort I could see using nanotech for drug manufacture,
making novel materials, building computer chips and micromachines, and a lot
of other useful stuff. If you posit some advances in automated engineering
and non-sentient AI, I could even see some of the more advanced stuff being
possible.
The big difference is that without SI, each individual thing you want to
make is going to take a lot of human effort to design. A diamondoid shovel
is no big deal, but a robot that builds nukes would take a
multibillion-dollar research project. That's one of the more likely
scenarios I see - a gradual transition from modern engineering limitations
to genie machines, with design costs for advanced products falling from
billions of dollars to nothing.
I would expect intelligence enhancement, uploading, sentient AI and cheap
space travel to all be developed during this transition period. I also
expect to see a lot of military nanotech - but it will be nanotech with a
price tag, which makes it look more like an arms race than a sudden
cataclysm.
Now, an obvious question is how long the transition will take. I can see
arguments for anything from a few decades to a few minutes - it all depends
on how hard AI and IE turn out to be, which isn't something we can predict
in advance.
Billy Brown, MCSE+I
bbrown@conemsco.com
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