"Cordell, Arthur: #ECOM - COME" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> quoted:
>From: Sid Shniad
>Subject: New technologies threaten human extinction - Web entrepreneur
>(Vancouver Sun)
>Date: Monday, March 13, 2000 2:04PM
>WEB ENTREPRENEUR OFFERS GRIM VIEW OF HUMANITY+S EXTINCTION
>
> Sun Microsystem's top scientist writes in a
> provocative new article that technological advances
> could eventually threaten our existence.
>
> By Joel Garreau, Washington Post
[...]
> He points to nanotechnology +the emerging science that seeks
>to create any desired object on an atom-by-atom basis +and agrees
>that it has the potential to allow inexpensive production of smart
>machines so small they could fit inside a blood vessel. Genetic
>technology, meanwhile, is inexorably generating the power to
>create new forms of life that could reproduce.
I don't have any great argument against the genetic manipulation idea,
other than to note that it's been known and discussed for decades
(Frank Herbert's White Plague), and that we have probably had the
technology for someone to cause an irretreivable disaster for about
a decade and a half. The thing that baffles me about this article
is that with all the myriad ways we are preparing for a worldwide
catastrophe, mostly due to our limited concern for sustainability
and resource depletion being focussed on the input side of human
activity, seemingly oblivious to the far greater long term threat
posed by the effects of our toxic output, this guy chooses to play
Cassandra over an totally unproven and unrealized vapourware like
nanotechnology. To worry about the dangers of self-replicating
nanobots when no one has been able to even build a simple nanomachine
with no brain at all to accomplish the most trivial task, seems to
me to be folly of breathtaking grandeur.
By the time people have awoken to the implications on the food chain
of the reckless dumping of vast quantities of toxins into the oceans,
which are simultaneously being stripmined of every living organism
larger than a diatom (decreasing returns of driftnet fishing of larger
species have led the mammoth fleets of irresponsible fishing nations
to turn their attention now to krill), it will be far to late to
reverse the damage, and who knows how far the ripples will travel.
In the face of this, to concentrate on the potential hazards of an
arcane technology not yet out of the realm of the gonzo futurists
seems almost perverse in its irrelevance.
-Pete Vincent
