USA Today No need to fear: Nanotechnology is near
"What might these things do? They will probably be sent into human bodies to find cancer, then make and deliver cancer-fighting drugs on the spot. They might be the atomic-scale chips and memory of next-generation computers thousands of times more powerful than those that run on silicon technology. They could be molded into the material of tires — millions of tiny pressure gauges and pumps capable of knowing the air pressure inside and keeping the tire inflated. ''It's hard to think of an industry that isn't likely to be disrupted by nanotechnology,'' says David Bishop of Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs, based here.

Nanotech also might destroy the world."

post-gazette.com Future technology sure to be fantastic, but will it improve life?
"Within the next 50 years, technologists will be able to build tiny robots small enough to navigate the body's circulatory system. Billions of these robots could infiltrate the brain, taking up positions that allow them to interact with individual brain cells.

The result, says artificial intelligence expert Ray Kurzweil, will be "total immersion virtual reality," a system in which an individual can be mentally transported to another world, or another body, where he can experience imaginary adventures with every sense.

Fantastic, yes. But will this and other types of computer-aided technology make life and society better in the next 50 years?"

redux [10.13.00]
NetFuture THE TROUBLE WITH UBIQUITOUS TECHNOLOGY PUSHERS (PART 3)
"If we do not pay attention to the difference between the computational abstraction and the human reality in the simple cases, nothing will require our attention to those differences in the "higher" cases.

Further, the more you automate, the more you tend to reduce the affected contexts to the terms of your automation, so that the next "higher" activity looks more and more like an automatic one that should be handed over to a machine. When, finally, the supervisor is supervising only machines, there's no reason for the supervisor himself not to become a machine.

So the idea that automation relieves us from grunt work in order to concentrate on higher things looks rather like the opposite of the truth. Automation tends continually to reduce the higher work to mechanical and computational terms. At least, it does this when we lose sight of the full reality of the work, reconceiving it as if its entire significance lay in the few decontextualized structural features we can analogize in a machine. (In a machine-driven world, we are always pressured toward this reconceptualization.) But if, on the other hand, we do not lose sight of the full reality of the work, then the "lower-level" stuff may look just as much worth doing ourselves as the "higher" -- in which case we have to ask, "What, really, is the rationale for automating it?""

redux [08.28.00]
MIT Technology Review Not by Reason Alone
"In a recent Wired magazine article, Bill Joy argued that the consequences of research on robotics, genetic engineering and nanotechnology may lead to “knowledge-enabled mass destruction...hugely amplified by the power of self-replication.” His medicine: “relinquishment...by limiting our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge.” I don’t buy it.

What troubles me with this argument is the arrogant notion that human logic can anticipate the effects of intended or unintended acts, and the more arrogant notion that human reasoning can determine the course of the universe."

"I suggest we broaden our perspective to the fullness of our humanity, which besides reason includes feelings and beliefs. Sometimes, as we drive the car of scientific and technological progress, we’ll veer because our reason says so. At other times we’ll follow our feelings, or we’ll be guided by faith. Most of the time, we’ll steer with all three of these human forces guiding us in concert, as they have guided human actions for thousands of years. As we do so, we should stay vigilant, ready to stop, when danger is imminent, using our full humanity to make that determination. If we do so, our turning point will be very different from where it may seem today, based on early rational assessments...that have failed us so often. Let us have faith in ourselves, our fellow human beings and our universe. And let’s keep in mind that our car is not the only moving thing out there."

redux [06.01.00]
Reason Joy, to the World
"... Joy is worried, really worried–20,000 words and five months of writing worried–that 21st-century technologies threaten to make human beings extinct. The threats are intelligent robots, nanotechnology (the ability to build things on the atomic level), and genetic engineering. All of them, he acknowledges, offer wonderful advantages, but they are, in his view, simply too dangerous to develop. We should stop investigating these ideas, he argues, before they become uncontrollable realities."

"Bill Joy is a lot smarter than I’ll ever be. But he is also incredibly foolish, in the parochial, reality-dodging way that geniuses sometimes are. And he is willing to sacrifice an awful lot of other people’s lives and liberty to his fantasies of power and control.

If—then statements are a staple of computer programming. Here’s one to consider: "If we could agree, as were headed, and why, then we would make our future much less dangerous–then we might understand what we can and should relinquish." (Emphasis added.) How, exactly, does a species of more than six billion intelligent individuals, with their own plans and purposes, agree on anything? Joy imagines the world as a small, technological elite and assumes away the problems of politics. He and his friends will just get together and agree on what to do."

redux [03.12.00]
Wired Magazine Why the future doesn't need us.
"Biological species almost never survive encounters with superior competitors. Ten million years ago, South and North America were separated by a sunken Panama isthmus. South America, like Australia today, was populated by marsupial mammals, including pouched equivalents of rats, deers, and tigers. When the isthmus connecting North and South America rose, it took only a few thousand years for the northern placental species, with slightly more effective metabolisms and reproductive and nervous systems, to displace and eliminate almost all the southern marsupials.

In a completely free marketplace, superior robots would surely affect humans as North American placentals affected South American marsupials (and as humans have affected countless species). Robotic industries would compete vigorously among themselves for matter, energy, and space, incidentally driving their price beyond human reach. Unable to afford the necessities of life, biological humans would be squeezed out of existence. "