Re: Nanotech arms race worries: all smoke and no fire?

From: John S. Novak, III (jsn_at_panix.com)
Date: 07/11/04 

Date: 11 Jul 2004 19:37:59 GMT

In article <ccg08b01ggc@enews4.newsguy.com>, Jim Logajan wrote:
 
>> Are you serious?
>> Or are you being ironic?
 
> And the principal origin of the nuclear arms race was economic: if by some
> historical accident the Russian February Revolution had resulted in a
> democratic Russian government, a polarized set of competing economic
> systems would not have resulted decades later. Tensions existed long before
> nuclear weapons came on the scene. (And of course the Russian revolutions
> took place precisely BECAUSE of inequitable economic conditions.)
 
> Likewise, terrorism is founded on economic inequites as well a clash of
> cultures - and the latter would be reduced if the economies of the cultures
> involved were less interdependent. If there is any technological solution
> to economic scarcity, reduction of inequities and economic interdependence,
> then nanotechnology seems to be that solution.

Suffice to say I think your analysis is naive: The principle origin
of the economic disparities during the Cold War resulted from a
politics promoting individual choice (and thus a market economy) in
the West and a politics destroying individual choice (and thus
creating a command economy) in the East.

The principle origin of the economic problems of much of Islam are a
combination of kleptocratic dictatorships and quasi-dictatorships
combined with a particularly narrow and inflexible view of a religion
teaching total submission to religious authority. (And I don't know
what you're talking about in terms of economic interdependence--
the alternative to economic interdependence is isolationism which has
never been good for a region's economic or social outlook.)

Economics plays a role, certainly, but there are forces which shape
economics, as well, and it's difficult to posit that those forces will
disappear with the wave of the nanotechnology wand any more than they
disappeared with the wave of the electronics wand, the steam engine
wand, the water wheel wand, or the iron wand.
 
> I'm pretty sure Chris is using "stable" in a colloquial sense - and so am
> I. There are, after all, gobs of real-world physics and engineering
> problems that can never be solved, except approximately. And that assumes
> one can even model the problems exactly - which one generally can't. No one
> can even predict the weather 2 weeks from now - good luck finding a half
> way reliable model for arms races!
 
I'm pretty sure that he's using it colloquially, too, which is
precisely the problem. I don't know what an unstable arms race is, or
how it differs from a stable one. I know many people who would claim
that there is no such thing as a stable arms race to begin with.

I most especially don't know if you and Chris even mean the same thing
by the term.

>> That's probably because we haven't defined instability as it pertains
>> to an arms race. I don't see a definition or a mathematical treatment
>> given on crnano.org, either. Perhaps I missed it, but my impression
>> is that it's a scare-adjective.
 
> Here's a web site loaded with equations that purport to determine the
> instability of an arms race:
> http://www.dean.usma.edu/departments/math/pubs/mmm99/DDS1.HTM
 
> I started disagreeing with it by the second sentence. ;-) A contrary
> opinion to some of the assumptions in the model can be found in:

> http://www.twq.com/01autumn/tertrais.pdf
 
At least you *can* sensibly agree or disagree, since they define their
terms. 

-- 
John S. Novak, III              jsn@cegt201.bradley.edu
The Humblest Man on the Net

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