Re: Nano Morality


I look at the progress of nanotech, and I could see crude
diamondoid assemblers within five years, almost certainly within
ten. True assemblers not much further off. This is not to say
that we would have the control software to make them work
properly, though! But, even a crude, hacked-together, assembler
could do an awful lot of damage.

You remind me of the 1980s when people said speech recon would be 10
years away.

I wonder if you can name me a firm or research company that says it
will produce diamonds from carbon in say 10 years.

As for throwing up our hands and giving up on the problem, I am saying
that is what we do today. We build a machine and say that technology
is niether moral or not moral,

I think we need to admit to the reality that our social institutions
are losing power to technology, that our culture is being more and more
dominated by the patterns and structures that machines make possible,
that we as a society have lost all control of the pace of technology,
and we have no idea at all how technology will impact us or change us.

I work for the firm that produced a breakthrough software in SMS
messaging. Its a very old crusty dull company and as grey as grey goo,
boring beyond boring. But they built the software that open up an
entire new kind of culture for kids today. I am doing research on my
masters on how mobile technology is creating a new kind of living
different from earlier generations for kids, and the impact has been an
utter revolution. Right now the mobile phone has changed the value
levels, the morality (I suspect not for the best) and the interactions
of kids in ways that the dull companies that invented this stuff didn't
even think about.

Well its just going to get faster and faster and faster, so we better
start thinking about it. The idea the technology and morality can
somehow be forever seperated is a one way road to extinction, as our
culture becomes more and more dominated by machines so complex that
really no-one understand 1% of it, we need to think about how machines
can be made so that as they have more and more "control" we can expect
them to be responsible, loyal, and good.

As for our influence, *** look at the world today. You expect Bush to
lead a team to insure machines are used properly? How about Microsoft?
You think any leader can be trusted to even know right from wrong. I
place my hope in ethical modelling, not necessarily strong AI,
machines.

As for quantum, I am sure at a nano level you could make quantum limits
preventing the assemblers from doing certain things. In theory it
seems pretty clear and humans are more clever than ethical.


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