Re: Nano Morality


Rory McLean wrote:

In article <123ta5ib446lt36@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Anton Vredegoor
<URL:mailto:anton.vredegoor@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

[snip]

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?

My experience is that I have more energy and get more done, both
in work and outside work, while in a full-time job, than between
jobs!

We would have to get into deep information theoretic arguments about
whether redundant information (working inside the system) or seeing
things from the outside (jobless, without money) is more valuable, lets
not do that ;-)

[snip

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.

While I have referred to the CRN, I've been rather lax on reading
up on their articles, working more from posts here on the newsgroup
sci.nanotech and their general statement of principles. I am not
familiar with the article you have mentioned, but I will go find
it and read it.

Alas, I forgot to add, looks a lot like to *me*. In fact I guess you
could study that site forever without being able to determine which
article I was referring to, so I'll just give it here:

http://crnano.org/systems.htm

Anyway, I recommend the article, as its food for thought :-)

In most people's perception it would be not much like your article, but
in my view it is like it, because it shares the same basic assumptions
that nanotech can be controlled by use of force (governmental or as in
your article by some built-in safety mechanism independent from
government), and that it should be, because things would get out of
control if there was no large scale effort to control nano developments.

At the time I read that article for the first time I was just
enlightened by it because it clarified my own position as an open source
programmer, but even then I had some doubts as to whether it would be
possible to incorporate the extremely slow moving governmental systems
and the somewhat more open and flexible commercial systems into the kind
of exponential developments that open source and future nanotech
technology would have.

So in my view yours and CRNs article are only alike in the limited
aspect of trying to catch sparrows by training turtles to hunt them.

I have to say that trying to build safety mechanisms inside the nanotech
devices itself as you suggest, is the better option, but still, this
seems to fail in essentially the same way as it is impossible to solve
NP-hard mathematical problems by throwing more hardware (or brute force
programming) at it.

So your solution would last longer, maybe a few seconds longer :-)
before we basically have the same situation with the race between the
turtle and the hare.

Thanks, and thanks for your compliments!

You're welcome, and even though my criticisms seem rather fundamental I
respect your ideas very much, partly because I'm just speaking from my
intuition myself without there being proof one way or the other and I
need some reference frame. Anyway I feel that these issues have to be
addressed rather sooner than later.

It's just that I think that trying to control things by forbidding
developments will make things worse (because one would lose any grip on
the situation immediately), and enticing people to join a positive
development is basically the only remaining option left.

[snip]

Yes, a rigid set of rules will cause problems. But, I think this
is analogous to driving - a flexible set of driving rules, which
aims to ensure people do minimal damage to each other, lets lots
of people use the roads effectively to travel, rather than no
rules which would mean that the roads would be dangerous and
unusable with far, far, less vehicles than use them today.

But this assumes that roads are already in place, instead of having a
wild west like situation with pioneers and vast ranges of unchartered
territory.

[snip]

With nanotech we need the same basic infrastructure of rules
about what we will accept from the network in terms of 'good'
assembler instructions, about what an assembler will build, or
disassemble or modify, without confirmation from the net. And
that it will (safely) destroy itself rather than let those rules
be subverted.

That seems to be the way biological organisms have solved the problem of
cell reproduction: Just build a self-destruct sequence inside the
individual cells, to control body shape (for example the tissue between
the fingers is removed to make a hand in humans) and to remove defunct
cells.

The strange thing is that immortal cells (cancer cells) are often lethal
for the organism as a whole.

But why should something that works in a "competition for physical
resources" situation (building large, intelligent, cooperative cell
clusters) also work with other systems where the speed of development of
new systems is orders of magnitudes higher? With evolution of nano
devices driven by human intelligence or even by artificially enhanced
human intelligence?

[snip]

Yes, we may add new places for people to be in, but you can be
pretty sure we will put in a transport infrastructure so that
people can move around these to places of interest with great
speed. Arguably the Internet would have disintegrated into
various sub-nets by now, as predicted, due to people not being
able to find what they want, without Google, a very cunning
brute-force search tool.

Nanotech opens up the possibility of being able to do things, and
in some respects exist, on a much smaller scale than we have done
previously - people who build cities out of match-sticks or write
sizable chunks of the Bible on a pin-head will be nothing
compared to nanotech!

No, I am not saying we will shrink people down, re-implementing
them on a much smaller scale using nanotech, more that you tend
to 'live' where your perceptions are, and if a good amount of
your time can usefully be spent in a virtual world down to, and
on, the nanoscale...

The whole psychology of being in a crowded environment affects
people in ways still not properly understood. It would be good,
I think, if nanotech gives us ways to handle this more
effectively.

This is an important point I think, but remember that if nano tech would
"expand our world", either by opening up space, the oceans and the sky
and the room under the thin layer of surface we are now occupying, or by
digitizing us, or by decoupling our sensory input from our bodies
(redistributing our consciousnesses over the Internet), that the world
would become so big that a nomadic lifestyle could take over again.

[snip]

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.

This is interesting, but I strongly suspect that most of the time
people will ignore the space and focus on what they consider the
interesting bits. More like a long car journey, you just recall
the points of interest (and terror!), not the countryside. And,
if the journey is too long, you instead take a plane.

But my point is that there would be so much things more interesting than
meeting with humans that *we* would be the countryside and the new
(illegally acquired ?) music, videos, and games would be so attractive
that people forget to socialize. This cannot be overcome by force, but
only by enticing them to come back to the hive.

Yes, nanotech may well transform how we experience the world, but
I don't see how we might accurately predict how, at this point,
though thinking about the possibilities is interesting, and quite
possibly useful. A reason I continue to be a science fiction
fan!

If only the writers could keep up with technology. I was a fan once but
got disappointed with the mismatch between the technology in (older) SF
and modern scientific developments that were often even more strange
than the things writers would think of. I wonder when I will have to
give up on fantasy :-)

[snip]

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?

It is a fun image, but I think it's unlikely to go that way.

But imagine circling in an orbit around Jupiter, that would already be a
bit lonely even if thousands of people would share your orbit?

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.

I think we will always have and need scouts to explore the
intellectual and physical boundaries of where we live. I don't
think that ignorance solves any problems, particularly in the
longer term.

Sure, but in the past those scouts always had to accept less comfortable
living quarters and missed out on important scientific discoveries even
if they came back with stories about distant territories. If we start
limiting nano developments, we could create the situation where those
staying back at home would be the ones who feel "left behind".

Nanotech provides us with new boundaries, in new directions, to
explore.


Just my two cents.

Again, thanks!

Thanks too, for your comments.

Anton

.

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