21–30 of 43 posts
like an microorganism or device designed to impregnate every women on the planet
or maybe people will start modifying their offspring to worship them
my personal favorite are tiny robots that interfere with the unjust use of force worldwide, causing the collapse of most governments
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's wrong with that assumption? There are some efficient mechanisms that evolution hasn't invented because they could not be reached by a series of gradual refinements. The wheel has long been said to be one of them, but I guess now we know that that's not strictly true. But nature's wheels are all very small and are bound to remain small because of their purpose, even though many organisms could benefit from larg…
Nuclear bomb isn't so complicated that evolution couldn't figure it out, for example, but it didn't and won't anytime soon. That's kinda true, but there was a natural nuclear reactor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor Also, the Sun seems to work pretty well. If course, neither of these evolved though biological mechanisms, though, but they did arise in a natural environment. I find it diffi…
The nuclear bomb was a needlessly confusing example--I could have just mentioned explosives in general. Evolution is all about weapons, and explosives make for damn good ones, and it's not hard to imagine a realistic organism that uses them, unlike a nuke-wielding organism. Only I'm not sure that no organism uses explosives. I was already wrong once today about what nature can't do!
No one may find this interesting, but in virtual worlds, this is a very big problem. For example, in Second Life, if a bug report/ticket contains the terms "Grey Goo" (or) "Gray Goo" it is immediately taken care of. To the point where, if you are a worker who can handle it, you will be given a phone call and you must drive to your office immediately- it doesn't matter what else you are doing. Grey Goo can destroy a s…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nuclear bomb isn't so complicated that evolution couldn't figure it out, for example, but it didn't and won't anytime soon. That's kinda true, but there was a natural nuclear reactor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor Also, the Sun seems to work pretty well. If course, neither of these evolved though biological mechanisms, though, but they did arise in a natural environment. I find it diffi…
Fascinating link. The nuclear bomb was a needlessly confusing example--I could have just mentioned explosives in general. Evolution is all about weapons, and explosives make for damn good ones, and it's not hard to imagine a realistic organism that uses them, unlike a nuke-wielding organism. Only I'm not sure that no organism uses explosives. I was already wrong once today about what nature can't do!
Self-replicating-nanobot Earth-death final-state. Things like this always make me think of Sam's Archive's "Geocide" page. Which, by the way, points out that this does not in fact bring about the destruction of the Earth: http://qntm.org/destroy
There's another site called "Exit Mundi" that has a lot of doomsday scenarios. In particular, the grey goo problem: http://www.exitmundi.nl/graygoo.htm
No one may find this interesting, but in virtual worlds, this is a very big problem. For example, in Second Life, if a bug report/ticket contains the terms "Grey Goo" (or) "Gray Goo" it is immediately taken care of. To the point where, if you are a worker who can handle it, you will be given a phone call and you must drive to your office immediately- it doesn't matter what else you are doing. Grey Goo can destroy a s…
Presumably they have automatic safeguards against it, and these emergencies occur when somebody outsmarts them. I wonder if this can be generalized to an interesting theory--how do you prevent all-consuming self-replicating behavior in a system with minimal intervention otherwise? Is this question even meaningful?
There are all kinds of disastrous applications of technology waiting for us. like an microorganism or device designed to impregnate every women on the planet or maybe people will start modifying their offspring to worship them my personal favorite are tiny robots that interfere with the unjust use of force worldwide, causing the collapse of most governments
There are all kinds of disastrous applications of technology waiting for us. like an microorganism or device designed to impregnate every women on the planet or maybe people will start modifying their offspring to worship them my personal favorite are tiny robots that interfere with the unjust use of force worldwide, causing the collapse of most governments
The last one will never happen, since it's the government that defines "just".
Drexler thinks it's nonsense: http://nanotechweb.org/cws/article/indepth/19648
>In particular, it turns out that developing manufacturing systems that use tiny, self-replicating machines would be needlessly inefficient and complicated. The simpler, more efficient, and more obviously safe approach is to make nanoscale tools and put them together in factories big enough to make what you want.
(note that he explicitly acknowledges the safety risk) and
>The popular version of the grey-goo idea seems to be that nanotechnology is dangerous because it means building tiny self-replicating robots that could accidentally run away, multiply and eat the world. But there’s no need to build anything remotely resembling a runaway replicator, which would be a pointless and difficult engineering task. I worry instead about simpler, more dangerous things that powerful groups might build deliberately - products like cheap, abundant, high-performance weapons with a billion processors in the guidance systems.
This does nothing to diminish the risk of replicators if they are, in fact, created. And there are all sort of possible problems where replicators would be essential. For example, we may want to release replicators into the environment to clean up certain kinds of pollution which can't be easily brought to a central facility.