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

Project and the Trinity test - that the last step in proving a technology is large
and hard. The breakthrough to wild self-replication in robotics, genetic
engineering, or nanotechnology could come suddenly, reprising the surprise we
felt when we learned of the cloning of a mammal.

And yet I believe we do have a strong and solid basis for hope. Our attempts to
deal with weapons of mass destruction in the last century provide a shining
example of relinquishment for us to consider: the unilateral US abandonment,
without preconditions, of the development of biological weapons. This
relinquishment stemmed from the realization that while it would take an
enormous effort to create these terrible weapons, they could from then on easily
be duplicated and fall into the hands of rogue nations or terrorist groups.

The clear conclusion was that we would create additional threats to ourselves by
pursuing these weapons, and that we would be more secure if we did not pursue
them. We have embodied our relinquishment of biological and chemical weapons
in the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) and the 1993 Chemical
Weapons Convention (CWC).12

As for the continuing sizable threat from nuclear weapons, which we have lived
with now for more than 50 years, the US Senate's recent rejection of the
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty makes it clear relinquishing nuclear weapons will
not be politically easy. But we have a unique opportunity, with the end of the
Cold War, to avert a multipolar arms race. Building on the BWC and CWC
relinquishments, successful abolition of nuclear weapons could help us build
toward a habit of relinquishing dangerous technologies. (Actually, by getting rid of
all but 100 nuclear weapons worldwide - roughly the total destructive power of
World War II and a considerably easier task - we could eliminate this extinction
threat. 13)

Verifying relinquishment will be a difficult problem, but not an unsolvable one. We
are fortunate to have already done a lot of relevant work in the context of the
BWC and other treaties. Our major task will be to apply this to technologies that
are naturally much more commercial than military. The substantial need here is
for transparency, as difficulty of verification is directly proportional to the difficulty
of distinguishing relinquished from legitimate activities.

I frankly believe that the situation in 1945 was simpler than the one we now face:
The nuclear technologies were reasonably separable into commercial and military
uses, and monitoring was aided by the nature of atomic tests and the ease with
which radioactivity could be measured. Research on military applications could be
performed at national laboratories such as Los Alamos, with the results kept
secret as long as possible.

The GNR technologies do not divide clearly into commercial and military uses;
given their potential in the market, it's hard to imagine pursuing them only in
national laboratories. With their widespread commercial pursuit, enforcing
relinquishment will require a verification regime similar to that for biological
weapons, but on an unprecedented scale. This, inevitably, will raise tensions
between our individual privacy and desire for proprietary information, and the