Re: Nano Morality


Rory McLean wrote:

Just as an example of a 'human-scale' system, here is an article
on controlling the use of assemblers that I wrote last year:

http://www.romsys.demon.co.uk/nanotech/safeassemb.htm

I'm not claiming that it is water-tight, but it might give us
something to talk about that is humanly achievable. The hard bit
is the political will to attempt it!

First of all, thanks for both of you posting here and for your article
and my apologies for not being able to read all of it thoroughly before
replying, but I've just accepted a job and have to get used to the idea
of making money and at the same time falling behind with keeping up to date.

Yes read what I wrote here "working is equivalent to getting less
informed". How is that going to be accepted inside current normative
systems which high working ethos?

Further more I would like to say that your article looks a lot like some
CRN article I read some time ago and that I was impressed by.

Meanwhile I have become convinced that it just won't work that way. Any
kind of rule enforcement slows down the creative process and will enable
other processes developing from different angles to take over
unexpectedly, like a fourteen year old school kid writing a virus and
totally taking over all computers connected to the Internet.

In facing such complexities should we then just resign ourselves to the
fact that nothing can be done about it, and worse than that, that
anything we might do about it will put us out of business because our
rules will slow us down?

Not completely. First of all we have to see that completely against all
current ideologies our world is becoming bigger and bigger and as a
consequence it becomes less and less populated, even though the current
paradigm is that the earth is becoming crowded with people and that
resources will become scarce. Not so. The future will become so complex
with Internet and other communication devices and by generated virtual
worlds that it will become a rare event to meet another human.

So we will be switching from a limited resources kind of system with
crowded cities to something more akin to nomadic tribes hiking in
endless virtual plains, like now are for example physically present in
the taiga on certain places on earth.

How do these people cope with the endless space and with meeting other
people? It's clear that meeting some other people there is reason for a
celebration and there is so much joy in that, that crime is not often
present. In fact they share every last bit they have and take the
opportunity to trade and exchange stories.

So switching to a mindset of endless possibilities and the scattering of
our small brain capacities over larger and larger subject areas is what
is necessary, and at the same time it is in direct contradiction with
what the current philosophies of overpopulation, heating up the earths
atmosphere, lack of energy resources, are trying to make us believe.

Instead we will be scattered around vast endless areas of space and
intellectual worlds, lonely, and asking ourselves why we ever decided to
leave the safe harbor. Was it really so crowded that we each had to go
our own way?

So the remedy is not to enforce rules but to offer possibilities for
joining and to try to induce a mindset into our people to accept those
few that have wandered far and have seen a lot with joy and gratefulness
for the stories they will tell us. Only a few of all that will scatter
in all directions will return to our primitive circumstances in order to
educate us barbaric people that stayed behind.

Just my two cents.

Anton

.

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