From: Billy Brown (bbrown@conemsco.com)
Date: Tue Apr 20 1999 - 08:19:29 MDT
O'Regan, Emlyn wrote:
> What can you do about this kind of thing? No regulations, or set of
> conventions, or anything like that is going to stop such an advance (if
> it is possible, which I am betting it will be). We could legislate and
> regulate until we're blue in the face, and end up being wiped out (in
> any number of ways) by a program which starts "This Krazy Brane created
> by the Phunky Phreaky Hacker Whackers club, yeah, we are the best"..
IMO, you are looking for solutions in the wrong place. Social control has
never succeeded at controlling a new technology for long, and there is no
reason to think that things will be any different in the future. A better
weapon for controlling technology is generally other technologies.
If you think that a particular nasty technology could be contained by the
proper defenses, the logical thing to do is to promote the development of
those defensive technologies. If you can get your defensive nanosystems
online in time, that nasty gray goo doesn't look quite as scary.
OTOH, if you don't think that there is any practical defense against a
threat, and you think that the threat is likely to be real, your only real
choice is to look for some other technology that would make the whole issue
irrelevant. So, if you think gray goo is invincible, you try to promote
space colonization or fast SI, or some other development that changes the
parameters of the problem.
Billy Brown, MCSE+I
bbrown@conemsco.com
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