From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Wed Sep 01 1999 - 13:00:38 MDT
hal@finney.org wrote:
>
> There is a good fictional interpretation of this in Neal Stephenson's
> Diamond Age. There is a constant warfare between good and bad nanotech
> going on all around. The air is full of "soot", which is composed of
> the destroyed bodies of the broken nanotech. Apparently the good guys
> always win as nobody melts down in the book, as I recall.
If it ever gets up to that point with military goo, we'll have lost so
totally that - hell, I don't even have words for it. Try this: We'll
be really, really, dead.
Nanotech warfare in the air you're breathing is the equivalent of
shooting it out with invading enemy troops in the basement of your
house. It doesn't matter if you win the battle because you've obviously
lost the war.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/tmol-faq/meaningoflife.html
Running on BeOS Typing in Dvorak Programming with Patterns
Voting for Libertarians Heading for Singularity There Is A Better Way
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:04:59 MST