Re: Bill Joy on the CBS evening news

From: S.J. Van Sickle (sjvan@csd.uwm.edu)
Date: Sat Jan 06 2001 - 08:59:03 MST


On Sat, 6 Jan 2001 Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de wrote:

> If you think 10 independant simultaneously released strains of
> different-family viruses with long symptomless latency then delayed
> kill will have no ill effect, then I'd rather not encounter what
> you call "ill effect". (It'd probably clean ionize me).

You betcha...this scares me a *hell* of a lot more than gray goo nanotech.
Biology by its very nature operates in the wild. Designing molecular
nanotechnology that can forage for raw materials and replicate in the wild
is a much harder problem than most people realize...and there is very
litte incentive to develope it unless you want to kill a lot of people.
And I can think of easier ways to do *that*.

Yes, MNT can be *extremely* dangerous. But I don't think the danger is in
someone using Wal-Mart (tm) Goo-For-You to wipe out the biosphere. Much,
much easier ways to do it.

steve



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