From: Billy Brown (bbrown@transcient.com)
Date: Wed Mar 15 2000 - 12:35:49 MST
Anders Sandberg wrote:
> The problem with military nanotechnology isn't that it is military but
> that nanotech defenses might be withheld or suppressed in order to
> promote national security. That military forces are going to apply
> nanotech is a virtual certainty. The technologically leading nations
> are (not by coincidence) democratic nations with a strong interest in
> protecting themselves first and second the ability to exert
> force.
I think that if you dissect the relationship between specific nanotech
threats and their countermeasures a bit more carefully, this begins to look
unlikely.
Against the threat of artificial pathogens, including gray goo, the
appropriate defense is nanotech immune systems. I would expect this
technology to grow out of medical research, as we move from treating natural
diseases to guarding against artificial ones and finally to regulating
populations of nanobots. That implies that the general population (and
their pets and possessions) will tend to develop significant resistance to
simple nanobot attacks over time.
Against more detectable threats, like armies of minted robots, I'd expect
the military to be an effective defense. An early warning system capable of
detecting large-scale manufacturing should be feasible, which means a sudden
overwhelming surprise attack would be difficult to pull off. A system of
small rapid response forces backed by larger units in central locations
should provide an effective general defense.
> Hence a lot of work is going to be done on nanodefenses, but
> allowing them to spread into the hands of the public or to other
> nations might be counterproductive - it would make potential enemies
> less vulnerable to their own weapons, and possibly give them the
> chance to work on cracking the defenses. This creates a situation
> where the military possess defenses intended to be deployed in case of
> an attack, but the public may be less well protected especially
> against low-level attacks.
What you want the civilians to have is defenses against nanobots, small
infiltrations of micro-scale robots, and other such stealth attacks. A
system that defends you against these threats isn't going to be any good at
all against a full-scale invasion.
As I've said before, the military will continue to use macro-scale weapons
even in a nanotech age. A group that uses an intelligently chosen weapon
mix scaled all the way from nanobots to warships can easily defeat a force
with an equal mass of nanobots. This is actually just another special case
of the forces that make economic specialization so effective - there is an
infinite number of potential 'ecological niches' for weapon systems, and the
more of the possibilities you explore the more effective your forces can be.
> This is actually something we can start working on right now, by
> suggesting good policies on how to deal with nanowarfare and starting
> a debate on making direct nanoweapons as politically unusable as
> bioweapons. If we start it rather than the luddites, then we can maybe
> keep it from becoming "ban all nanotech because it will kill us all"
> or "nanotech them all and let God v2.0 sort them out".
I think you are defining 'nanoweapon' to narrowly here. Simple
pathogen-like nanobots have been the major focus of attention, but they
aren't an especially good weapon for anyone but terrorists. The military
would tend to develop a smooth continuum of devices at every scale from the
macro to the nano, which makes it much harder to create this kind of
distinction.
OTOH, you might be able to discourage early efforts at making synthetic
super-microbes, and that is high on my list of things to avoid. We have no
idea how hard it will be to make nanobots that are immune to natural
biological defenses, or whether they will be easier to make than artificial
defenses capable of stopping them. However, I think it is clear that we
don't want to find out the answers the hard way.
Billy Brown
bbrown@transcient.com
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