mmm@cup.portal.com (09/09/89)
Suppose all the cryonicists had their own country. With nanotechnology they would be rich as Saudis and immortal as the gods on Mount Olympus. Assuming they didn't feel a need to reproduce, their population would be stable. (They could reproduce at the suicide rate.) Now think about the outside world. Here would be the teeming mass of humanity. You can't force them to take birth control pills, except by the barrel of a gun. Some of them are starving. If you use nanotechnology to give them free food, they reproduce some more and run out of something else such as water, living space, or maybe even air. Now what are you (the nanotechnologist) going to do? You need some of the resources they use. If you try to help them out, you just increase their numbers. They are running out of resources, and cast a hungry eye at you. It seems obvious to me the cryonic nation will see the living population as a danger which they won't be able to tolerate. You can't sterilize these people because they don't want to be sterilized. You can't freeze them because they don't want to be frozen. You can't ship them into space colonies because they don't want to go. Left to its own devices, the living population will grow until it strains the ability of the planet to support it. The living population IS gray goo, gray goo of the worst and dirtiest sort. And what do we do with gray goo? The cryonicists already know the answer to this question. [I don't see what this has to do with cryonicists. To the extent the analysis is valid, it is valid for anybody. The difference between the "good guys" and the "goo guys" has nothing to do with cryonics or even nanotechnology; it is simply the willingness to limit one's own reproduction. --JoSH]
Daniel.Mocsny@uc.edu (daniel mocsny) (09/12/89)
In article <Sep.8.20.20.50.1989.17738@athos.rutgers.edu>, mmm@cup.portal.com writes: > Suppose all the cryonicists had their own country. With nanotechnology > they would be rich as Saudis and immortal as the gods on Mount Olympus. > > Now think about the outside world. Here would be the teeming mass of > humanity. You can't force them to take birth control pills, except by the > barrel of a gun. Obviously a man unfamiliar with advertising technology. Working completely by trial and error, without a mechanistic understanding of the human brain, our advertising establishment is already able to convince most of the public in the industrial world to purchase all sorts of frivolous dreck they would never have realized a need for if left to themselves. Furthermore, the advertising industry is able to command brand loyalty that would have most religious and political leaders seething with envy. Convincing people to limit their numbers is simply an advertising problem, albeit a challenging one. Nanotechnologists who have realized immortality should be able to marshal the necessary information power. They might not have to stoop to persuasion, either. If they're giving free food to the starving, then certainly they should have the ability to add agents to the food that can alter reproductive capacity. (Birth control pills are rather primitive, you know. How about a super-nanotech IUD that waits in a Fallopian tube and intercepts the ovum every other month?) Or worse, they may know enough about the brain and its mechanisms of wants to re-engineer them directly. Knowing how to fiddle with desires leads to a philosophical abyss, however. For example, if you can change your desires, then on what basis do you change them? Your pre-existing desires? Stanislaw Lem has toyed with these ideas in his fiction. He said, essentially, that if you can be anyone and have any convictions, then you are no one and you have no convictions. Dan Mocsny dmocsny@uceng.uc.edu [Quite an anthropocentric, albeit very common, point of view. What does it matter in the long run whether you "are someone"? Those convictions (memes) which are successful will spread, and after a while the laws of evolution will determine the shape of people's convictions. This is nothing new with nanotechnology, although the process may be accelerated a bit. --JoSH]
andrew@frip.wv.tek.com (Andrew Klossner) (09/13/89)
[]
"It seems obvious to me the cryonic nation will see the living
population as a danger which they won't be able to tolerate.
You can't sterilize these people because they don't want to be
sterilized ..."
A group that controlled nanotechnology could sterilize anyone they
chose by releasing appropriately targetted nano-devices into the
environment. Such a group might well decide that involuntary (and,
possibly, unwitting) sterilization would be the least of all evils.
-=- Andrew Klossner (uunet!tektronix!frip.WV.TEK!andrew) [UUCP]
(andrew%frip.wv.tek.com@relay.cs.net) [ARPA]
[There is a run-of-the-mill science fiction story by the author of
Colossus: the Forbin Project (I've forgotten names) about a biowar
where the major weapon is a sterility plague. I imagine that such
an agent would be relatively easy for bio-techniques, and not rely
on out-and-out nanotechnology. (I.e. it could probably be done
now for the cost of a Manhattan-type project.)
--JoSH]alan@oz.nm.paradyne.com (Alan Lovejoy) (09/13/89)
In article <Sep.8.20.20.50.1989.17738@athos.rutgers.edu> mmm@cup.portal.com writes: >Suppose all the cryonicists had their own country. With nanotechnology >they would be rich as Saudis and immortal as the gods on Mount Olympus. >Assuming they didn't feel a need to reproduce, their population would be >stable. (They could reproduce at the suicide rate.) >Now think about the outside world. Here would be the teeming mass of >humanity. You can't force them to take birth control pills, except by the >barrel of a gun. Some of them are starving. If you use nanotechnology >to give them free food, they reproduce some more and run out of >something else such as water, living space, or maybe even air. Why assume that only cryonicists want to live extremely long lives? Not all immortalists are cryonicists, and not all cryonicists are immortalists. And for that matter, not all nanotechnologists are either immortalists or cryonicists. Why assume that immortalists and/or cryonicists and/or nanotechnologists will be more willing than average to limit their reproduction? Why assume that non-immortalists and/or non-cryonicists and/or non-nanotechnologists will be less willing than everyone else to limit their reproduction in the face of acute overcrowding? Perhaps the blue-eyed people of the world will form their own "nation" in response to the threat of being crowded out by the brown-eyed devils (or did that happen already? :-))? If the 200 or so cryonicists of the world pose such a threat as some recent postings have suggested, then there just isn't any hope for mankind. There are numerous groups that are far more sinister than the cryonicists whose membership exceeds that of all cryonics organizations combined by orders of magnitude. I never really realized how radical an idea immortalism was until I took concrete steps to express my immortalism by signing up for cryonic suspension. You'd think I'd proclaimed that the Earth orbits the sun! Of course, Gallileo wasn't the first person to discover that his ideas were more controversial than he thought, and he certainly wasn't the last either. He imagined, like I did, that it was merely a question of fact. Not so. Most people don't even seem to care what the scientific basis for immortalism or cryonics may be. That's not the issue that gets people so upset, not at all! The theology of death is pervasive in all human societies, and heresy is NOT taken lightly. ____"Congress shall have the power to prohibit speech offensive to Congress"____ Alan Lovejoy; alan@pdn; 813-530-2211; AT&T Paradyne: 8550 Ulmerton, Largo, FL. Disclaimer: I do not speak for AT&T Paradyne. They do not speak for me. Motto: If nanomachines will be able to reconstruct you, YOU AREN'T DEAD YET.
Daniel.Mocsny@uc.edu (daniel mocsny) (09/13/89)
In article <Sep.11.18.22.46.1989.6084@athos.rutgers.edu>, Daniel.Mocsny@uc.edu (daniel mocsny) writes: > Knowing how to fiddle with desires leads to a philosophical abyss, > however. For example, if you can change your desires, then on what > basis do you change them? Your pre-existing desires? Stanislaw Lem has > toyed with these ideas in his fiction. He said, essentially, that if > you can be anyone and have any convictions, then you are no one and > you have no convictions. > > [Quite an anthropocentric, albeit very common, point of view. > What does it matter in the long run whether you "are someone"? It may not matter, but I haven't another way to think about "myself" just yet. > Those convictions (memes) which are successful will spread, and > after a while the laws of evolution will determine the shape > of people's convictions. This is nothing new with nanotechnology, > although the process may be accelerated a bit. > --JoSH] The "abyss" I refer to may have a bottom, but I still hesitate at its edge. I will adopt JoSH's evolutionary premise. Let us assume that convictions represent successful evolutionary strategies (at least local optima). (In fact, I have a somewhat difficult time with this assumption, given the seeming irrationality and bad consequences of so many convictions, but for the discussion we'll allow it.) Then changing environmental conditions should lead in time to new populations of convictions. OK, here's one problem I'll toss out. I submit that nanotechnology may well be just a little more than "nothing new." The key concept here is "rate of change." Whether or not our convictions are the result of evolutionary pressures, they change over time scales on the order of human generations, or possibly much slower. Since bad convictions may be immensely destructive, this guards (albeit imperfectly) against "time bombs," i.e., convictions with destructive power that have a certain latency period. Now nanotechnology promises to let us not only speed up the rate of change of convictions, but also to open up vast new options for what we will think, believe, and desire. This will happen on a time scale probably much shorter than any in previous evolutionary change. Simply put, we're heading for uncharted territory, and *fast*. Our knowledge of complex systems might suggest that great instability will be possible, if not likely. I don't say this to argue against nanotechnology or scientific advance in general. On the contrary, I think we have no choice but to surge forward. However, when we talk about pulling the rug out from under something so fundamental and previously beyond our reach as what we *want*, well, I'm just not sure how to think about that. Indeed, how can I? What if person X wants to become person Y, and having done so, decides that person X was really best after all. This is person Y's opinion now, but after changing back to person X, Y looks just as attractive as before, because person X believes so and that is that. The progression need not be cyclic, it could merely be infinite in any direction. The point is that we may desire to be something else, but upon becoming that we may then desire something just now entirely unthinkable, if not appalling. I suppose that is what has been going on all along, though we don't live long enough to see our descendents carrying on the string. It is still something interesting to think about, and it removes some of the meaning from the notion of "wanting" to do something. What will motivate us to change our wants? Meta-wants? Where does it end, if all wants are pliable? Then we really are non-entities. That's OK, I'm not altogether in love with the notion of "self," but it has been quite a convincing illusion thus far, and I shall need some time to mourn its loss. Dan Mocsny dmocsny@uceng.uc.edu