"Benford-Biotech" - читать интересную книгу автора (Benford Gregory)

invading band of unsuspecting nanobots, fresh off the farm.

In fact, their first generation will probably have to live in odd chemical
soups, energy rich (like, say, hydrogen peroxide or even ozone) and free of
Natural predators. Any escaping from their chemical cloister will probably get
eaten -- though they might get spat right back out, too, as indigestible.

The "gray goo" problem of nanotech, in which ugly messes consume beautiful flora
and fauna, need not occur, precisely because the goo will be gray. It need not
have built into it the rugged, hearty defenses which are the down payment for
anything which seeks to use sunlight, water and air to propagate itself. Gray
goo will get eaten by green goo -maybe by a slime mold, which has four billion
years of survival skills and appetite built in.

So nanotech will not be able to exponentially push its numbers, unless we
deliberately design it that way, taking great trouble to do so. Accidental
runaway is quite unlikely. Malicious nanobots made to bring havoc, though,
through special talents -- say, replacing all the carbon in your body with
nitrogen -- could be a catastrophe.

When machines begin to design themselves, we approach the problems of
Natural-style evolution. Even so, design is not like genetic diffusion. In
principle, it is much faster. Think of how fast cars developed in the last
century, versus trees.

That problem lies far beyond the simple advent of nanotech. It will come, but
only after decades of intense development one or two levels above, in the hotbed
of biotech.

What uses we make of machines at the atomic level will depend utterly on the
unforeseeable tools we'll have at the molecular level. That is why thinking
about nanotech is undoubtedly fun, but perhaps largely futile. Certainly such
notions must be constrained by knowing how very much biology can do, and will
do, long before we reach that last frontier of the very, very small.