From: Mark Grant (mark@unicorn.com)
Date: Thu Sep 04 1997 - 12:38:05 MDT
On Wed, 3 Sep 1997, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
> Besides, it's not going to be one psychotic, it's going to be entire psychotic
> governments, or even the entire Chinese government which, though sane, might
> realize it couldn't dominate a population with access to nanotechnology. Give
> the Chinese government nanotechnology and they will launch an all-out effort
> to create a preemptive strike.
But that makes its job much, much harder. A fanatic can build a goo which
reproduces without limit and eats anything, while a government must create
a goo which destroys everything except them. This means that the
government must already have created an effective antidote to the goo and
all we have to do is reproduce it; many, many people will die, but we can
clearly stop the goo. This is why the random psychotic scenario is the one
to be most feared, and not the nanowar.
> Giving nanotech to one person is taking a big chance.
> Giving nanotech to all governments is simple suicide.
So the obvious solution is to eliminate the governments...
Mark
|-----------------------------------------------------------------------|
|Mark Grant M.A., U.L.C. EMAIL: mark@unicorn.com |
|WWW: http://www.unicorn.com/ MAILBOT: bot@unicorn.com |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------------|
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 14:44:49 MST