"bill_joy_-_why_does_the_future_not_need_us" - читать интересную книгу автора (Joy Bill)

"engines of destruction." Indeed, in my rereading of this cautionary material
today, I am struck by how naive some of Drexler's safeguard proposals seem, and
how much greater I judge the dangers to be now than even he seemed to then.
(Having anticipated and described many technical and political problems with
nanotechnology, Drexler started the Foresight Institute in the late 1980s "to help
prepare society for anticipated advanced technologies" - most important,
nanotechnology.)

The enabling breakthrough to assemblers seems quite likely within the next 20
years. Molecular electronics - the new subfield of nanotechnology where individual
molecules are circuit elements - should mature quickly and become enormously
lucrative within this decade, causing a large incremental investment in all
nanotechnologies.

Unfortunately, as with nuclear technology, it is far easier to create destructive
uses for nanotechnology than constructive ones. Nanotechnology has clear
military and terrorist uses, and you need not be suicidal to release a massively
destructive nanotechnological device - such devices can be built to be selectively
destructive, affecting, for example, only a certain geographical area or a group of
people who are genetically distinct.

An immediate consequence of the Faustian bargain in obtaining the great power
of nanotechnology is that we run a grave risk - the risk that we might destroy the
biosphere on which all life depends.

As Drexler explained:

"Plants" with "leaves" no more efficient than today's solar cells could out-compete real plants, crowding the
biosphere with an inedible foliage. Tough omnivorous "bacteria" could out-compete real bacteria: They could
spread like blowing pollen, replicate swiftly, and reduce the biosphere to dust in a matter of days. Dangerous
replicators could easily be too tough, small, and rapidly spreading to stop - at least if we make no preparation.
We have trouble enough controlling viruses and fruit flies.

Among the cognoscenti of nanotechnology, this threat has become known as the "gray goo problem." Though
masses of uncontrolled replicators need not be gray or gooey, the term "gray goo" emphasizes that replicators
able to obliterate life might be less inspiring than a single species of crabgrass. They might be superior in an
evolutionary sense, but this need not make them valuable.

The gray goo threat makes one thing perfectly clear: We cannot afford certain kinds of accidents with replicating
assemblers.

Gray goo would surely be a depressing ending to our human adventure on Earth,
far worse than mere fire or ice, and one that could stem from a simple laboratory
accident.6 Oops.


It is most of all the power of destructive self-replication in genetics,
nanotechnology, and robotics (GNR) that should give us pause. Self-replication is
the modus operandi of genetic engineering, which uses the machinery of the cell
to replicate its designs, and the prime danger underlying gray goo in