Month: November 2000

from the what-happened-to-the-God-part? dept.
Lew Phelps brings to our attention a Wired story on Bill Joy's talk at the Pop!Tech2000 conference: "Joy said that while such technologies [robotics, nanotechnology and genetics] offer much, including freeing many from poverty and 'grinding physical labor,' there are also inherent dangers. Although some have misinterpreted his arguments as calling for a ban on some types of research, Joy said he is simply calling for a return to common sense. 'Reason taught us how to develop these tools and if we donít use our reason to manage them, we do so at our own peril,' Joy said during his one-hour address." CP: From the conference program, it appears the focus of Bill's talk was spirituality, God, religion, and the soul, although these weren't mentioned in the Wired coverage: odd.

from the Rod-please-cut-back-on-the-sf dept.
MIT roboticist Rodney Brooks writes at Edge.org : "Strong nanotechnology, the version that is most popular in science fiction, has molecular machines which can manipulate matter, disassemble arbitary raw materials atom by atom, and build copies of themselves. We do not know whether the physics of our universe allows such machines to exist, or whether self reproducing machines need to use the molecular mechanisms of biology and must be on the order of billions of atoms in size…We have no evidence that non-biological nanotechnology machines will even in principle be able to manage energy supplies, manipulate single atoms in arbitrary ways, break down raw materials, both decode and copy a description of themselves, implement the computational resources necessary to control their behavior, and avoid being ripped asunder by the presence of other nearby matter. We have no clue when we will be able to answer whether such machines can exist, even in principle. Worrying about whether nanotechnology machines might "get away" from us and eat the fabric of our world, or evolve to do so, seems to me to be on a par with worrying about how the world will fare with the screwups in temporal consistency that will occur once we have figured out how to build time travel machines. Another topic popular in science fiction."

from the it-can't-be-done-today-so-it-can't-be-done-ever dept.
Garrison Hamrick points out a Knight Ridder wire service story. Excerpts: "Meanwhile, Dr. Smalley, and many other academic scientists, say that basic research being done today doesn't reflect the original Engines of Creation vision. "I call it the silly side of nanotechnology," Dr. Smalley says. Dr. Vicki Colvin, another Rice researcher, adds that "to a chemist, the idea of a molecular assembler is anathema"…Harvard University chemist George Whitesides [argues] "We certainly cannot build a self-replicating robot at any size," he says. "The idea of building one on a nanometer scale does not make sense"…Dr. Evelyn Hu, an engineer at the University of California, Santa Barbara [opines] "I think what Drexler was talking about, what Richard Feynman was talking about," she says, "is a vision that is still ahead of us with all its positive, beneficial aspects and all its scary aspects." CP: It appears from the article that those attempting to critique the assembler concept are attacking a straw man, i.e. a proposal that no one is making. Note also that the engineer quoted has a sense of time; the others use the present tense only — typical.