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

From: Jim Logajan (JamesL_at_lugoj.com)
Date: 07/16/04 

Date: 16 Jul 2004 06:25:26 GMT

Matthias Sohr <marodeur2020@compuserve.de> wrote:
[ Big snip ]
>> The best way to insure that nanotechnology ends up in the hands
>> of bad people before good people have a chance to prepare defenses is
>> by promoting policies that centralize any aspect of nanotechnology
>> development.
>
> And who would be in charge?
[ Bigger snip ]

Matthias, perhaps it was the way I worded my sentence. Perhaps it is
because I too often write run-on sentences. Whatever the cause, I think if
you re-read may sentence you'll see that I was attempting to advocate
precisely what you advocate:

> An open source (i.e. bottom up) approach would be the logical opposite
> to a 'control freak' (top down) approach, and the MS Windows vs Linux
> example might show which approach is more likely to succeed in the
> long run:
>
> Of all people that work on computer operating systems, the vast
> majority works on open source that made the various flavours of Linux
> so comparably safe and reliable, and the minority of them work at
> Microsoft whose closed source approach made Windows comparably unsafe
> and unreliable. Bottom-up safety might be more vulnerable in the very
> beginning and it always provides the possibility for a few bad guys
> outsmarting the many good guys because both have access to the code,
> but in the long run I think its the way to go. I believe so because Im
> convinced that vastly more man-years will go into doing good than into
> doing harm. And exactly that will be vital, because subtly defending
> *everything* is so much harder to achieve than viciously and
> successfully attacking *something*.

All well said: a policy that puts no constraints on nanotech research -
make sure as many eyes and minds are working on it as possible. It is,
IMHO, more philosophically sound in any case since it places the decision
(and responsibility) on the trade-off of liberty versus safety where it
belongs: at the individual level, not taken by force and handed to some
proxy.