From: Billy Brown (bbrown@transcient.com)
Date: Mon Apr 03 2000 - 17:15:42 MDT
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.
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. 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.
Billy Brown
bbrown@transcient.com
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