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Dyson On Grey Goo, Bioterrorism, and Censorship 236

Posted by timothy from the not-your-ordinary-next-door-neighbor dept.
Phronesis writes "In "The Future Needs Us," Freeman Dyson reviews Michael Crichton's Prey. After disposing of the bad science (The Reynolds number of nanobots 'the size of red blood cells' would limit their top speed to 2 mm/sec, which would make it hard for them to swarm or chase people; Solar power would provide no more than 20 nanowatts, which would not be sufficient for the activities the book describes; etc.) he turns to the more general theme of fearmongering about nanotechnology and biotechnology, comparing Prey to Nevil Shute's On the Beach ('Prey is not as good as On the Beach, but it is bringing us an equally important message')." Read on for a few more notes from the story, which makes an interesting followup to reader cybrpnk2's positive review of Prey .

"Dyson notes Joy's oddly prescient comment in April 2000 that

I think it is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation-states, on to a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals.
but objects to Joy's recommendation that we should 'relinquish pursuit of that knowledge...so dangerous that we judge it better that [it] never be available.' After a discussion of the actual history of biological warfare and bioterrorism, Dyson quotes Milton's Areopagitica in defense of intellectual and scientific freedom, concluding that 'Perhaps, after all, as we struggle to deal with the enduring problems of reconciling individual freedom with public safety, the wisdom of a great poet who died more than three hundred years ago may still be helpful.'"
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Dyson On Grey Goo, Bioterrorism, and Censorship

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  • Freeman Dyson is great! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by los furtive ( 232491 ) <ChrisLamothe&gmail,com> on Thursday January 30, 2003 @01:26PM (#5190215) Homepage
    I've read a few of his books over the years, and would put him up there with Richard Dawkings. Great read, even for the non-scientific.

    • Insult! (Score:3, Insightful)

      by exp(pi*sqrt(163)) ( 613870 )
      Freeman Dyson is a very smart guy with a lot of good, difficult and original work under his belt as well as the ability to write for the general public. Dawkins is just a tactless popularizer of other people's theories.

      • Re:Insult! (Score:3, Interesting)

        by los furtive ( 232491 )
        Dawkins is just a tactless popularizer of other people's theories.

        I tend agree with you on that point, but I also have to admit that if it wasn't for him I wouldn't even know about other people's theories. And let us not forget his articulation on the concept of the meme, a worthy epiphany in its own right.

    • People really seem to be missing the point of this review, apparently because (surprise surpise) few seem to have really read it. Dyson is not making some kind of blanket condemnation of Prey, or On The Beach... in fact, the article clearly affirms the value of these types of works as vehicles for cautionary messages DESPITE their (disputed, at least in the case of Prey) technical shortcomings. The rest of the article is a reasoned consideration, which includes generous helpings of opposing opinion, of what the appropriate response to the dangers of technological development are.


      I don't agree with everything in this article. But it is a very reasonable approach to considering a very broad topic in a very limited piece. Unfortunately, it isn't a sufficiently reactionary assertion of black-and-white dogmatism to appeal to this crowd.


      While people pick their sides and play tug of war over the "issues," while politicians see every issue as leverage to maintain their positions of power, trading slogans for solutions and consistently getting too little done, while wealth interests continue to gaze intently at the quarterly earnings at the expense of any rational consideration of the future, we can assume that we will continue to impact the evolution of life on earth the old-fashioned way: blindly, dumbly, mutely.

      • That's a great post, but I fail to see what it has to do with the thread it is on. What does this have to do with Freeman Dyson writing good books, or Dawkings popularising other people's works for his own benefit?
    • I've read a few of his books over the years, and would put him up there with Richard Dawkings.

      Did you perhaps mean Richard Feynmann, or Stephen Hawking? :) Dyson is an older contemporary of both of them. I've never heard of anyone named Richard Dawkings.... (Although it's possible I wouldn't have, I rather doubt it -- I'm a physics hanger-on.)

  • Security thourgh obscurity? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SilkBD ( 533537 ) on Thursday January 30, 2003 @01:29PM (#5190226) Homepage
    we should 'relinquish pursuit of that knowledge...so dangerous that we judge it better that [it] never be available.'

    The problem with this is that knowledge (or even simply ideas) once taken out cannot be jammed back into the can. Nor should it. Security through obscurity is never really secure... if you know what I mean...

    • Agreed, but this quote comes to mind, albeit in a different context:

      "Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever."
      - Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) :-)
    • The problem with this is that knowledge (or even simply ideas) once taken out cannot be jammed back into the can.

      That's the point: Therefore, we need to establish prohibitions on such research preemptively. In the article, Dyson discusses the 10-month worldwide moratorium on recombinant DNA research that was enacted in the seventies. After two international conferences, different types of recombinant DNA research were grouped into different classes, including a class of "too dangerous and hence forbidden."

      All in all, it seems like this has been a good thing. Or perhaps you would prefer that we had antibiotic-resistant radiation-hardened botulism toxin-producing strains of E. coli culturing in the labs of our nation's bioweapons researchers?

      -renard

      • I think the grandparent's point was that a moratorium on a technology isn't going to stop the sort of people who would use said technology for evil from researching it. For example, we could agree all we wanted to that we aren't going to try to find security holes in IIS, but that's not going to stop Mr. l33th4x0rs|>13 from finding those holes.

        Hence the security through obscurity reference - while it may take bad people longer to figure it out without our help (it's obscure, and they won't have a lot of help), we're going to be totally unprepared for it when they do. We won't even have an inkling of an idea of how the exploit/virus/nanobug/magic death box/whatever works, and we'll be fucked as far as finding a fix quickly goes. If we had researched it, we might have found a fix already, or at least we'd have an idea of where to start.
      • As much as I agree with the last sentence of your statement, the problem is that the US does have the largest chemical and biological weapons labs in the world. Saying "this research is too dangerous and should not be pursued" might sound nobel, but has no bearing in the real world, where the research will be done anyway, maybe by people with less than honourable intentions. Case in point: the experiments of doctor Mengele (nazi scientist)...the experiments where horrible, absolutely disgusting as to what they did to people...but the knowledge that came from them is great, and we wouldn't be as far in the biosciences without them...now, we coulde have gotten that knowledge another way, but does that mean we should just forget the data Mengele already got?

        Anyway, the point is this: we will not be safe untill we as humans get to the point where even the most dangerous knowledge is safe in every mans hand...what I'm saying is that unless people are perfect, knowledge will always be dangerous. But that knowledge is still crucial to the furtherment of humanity and the conservation of the earth. Knowing that fertiliser and orange juice can be made inot an explosive is dangerous knowledge...but drinking the juice is good ofr the body, and fertiliser is good for plants...and if someone devises a way of using the aforementioned explosian to make an environmentally and mechanically safe combustion motor, you'll be glad we had the knowledge that thsoe ingredients could be combined to an explosive.
    • The point made by Bill Joy and others is not that scientific knowledge is bad, but that specific technological research should be directed towards things that are likely to be beneficial rather than harmful. For example, genetic engineering is best used to increase crop yields or cure inherited diseases, not to make seeds infertile or to make the HIV virus spread as easily as the common cold.

  • Gray Goo vs. real nanotech (Score:3, Interesting)

    by hlovy ( 613473 ) on Thursday January 30, 2003 @01:30PM (#5190236) Homepage
    Yeah, "Prey" might scare the beejeebees out of people, but maybe get a few interested in real nanotechnology. For that, they can take a look at Small Times, which has covered the environmental issue extensively both in this article [smalltimes.com] and in its upcoming dead-tree-edition cover story [smalltimes.com].

  • Unabomber Manifesto relates to nanotech (Score:4, Interesting)

    by joelparker ( 586428 ) <joel@school.net> on Thursday January 30, 2003 @01:33PM (#5190245) Homepage

    Dyson & Bill Joy both relate to the Unabomber Manifesto,
    which has some stunning sections on technology:

    Industrial-Technological Society Cannot Be Reformed

    Restriction Of Freedom Is unavoidable In Industrial Society

    The 'Bad' Parts Of Technology Cannot Be Seperated From The 'Good' Parts

    Technology Is A More Powerful Social Force Than The Aspiration Freedom

    The complete manifesto is here [panix.com]

    BEFORE YOU REPLY, please read a bit.
    He has some ideas that are VERY similar
    to ideas that get posted here on slashdot.

    One excerpt here...

    While technological progress AS A WHOLE continually narrows our sphere of freedom, each new technical advance CONSIDERED BY ITSELF appears to be desirable. Electricity, indoor plumbing, rapid long-distance communications . . . how could one argue against any of these things, or against any other of the innumerable technical advances that have made modern society? It would have been absurd to resist the introduction of the telephone, for example. It offered many advantages and no disadvantages. Yet as we explained in paragraphs 59-76, all these technical advances taken together have created world in which the average man's fate is no longer in his own hands or in the hands of his neighbors and friends, but in those of politicians, corporation executives and remote, anonymous technicians and bureaucrats whom he as an individual has no power to influence.

    • So our fate is not in our hands because we have plumbing, electricity and the telephone? He had to kill three people to give us this vast wisdom? Maybe he could have used this magical long-distance communication, like you are, and just posted this online. Actually, he didn't want to [lycos.com], because there is too much 'noise' online so he had to threaten to kill people to get 'respectable news sources' like the NYT to print this tripe instead.

      Try reading (in one of those new fangled book thingies) some history about life before and during the industrial revolution. The 'average man's fate' was much less in his own hands than it is now. How can you choose your own fate when life expectancy is like like 30 years? Ever heard of slavery, serfdom, kingdoms, or indentured servitude? How would life be now without technology.. no antibiotics or other medical procedures besides leeches, no printing presses, no advanced learning available for 95% of the population, transportation by animal with no roads, no microwave, no space travel.. you get the idea. Sure technology can be intrusive and even dangerous, but there's no way I would want to go back to the way the things were.

      One other minor point, Ted Kaczynski made a good show of living with no water or electricity, but where did his food, typewriter, paper, bomb equipment, address lookup, mail delivery or even clothes come from?
      • Funny...those technological advances you quote (all of the advances you mention) only apply to the rich 10-20% of the world which live in 'western' societies...one could even argue that the west's standard of living has made lving anywhere else much worse, due to polution and exploitation.

        No matter what you think of the unabombers methods (I for one find them appaling, but that's me), you should read the manifesto. It is written unarguably by a smart person and contains quite a bit of truth. Failing that, it contains a lot of material that actually makes you think; pertaining to the quoted bit, being tied to one point (by plumbing, which means you need to have a 'home base' :) and telecomunications etc) means you can be located and taxed. One could argue that that gives a governement power over you, and gives them a powerbase because they can take it away.
        Personally I'd say that that is a direct consequence of the contract you make with society (google for it, it's a widespread idea, that 'contract with society'), but the unabomber manifesto is still a thought provoking bit of work.
        And you know what? Maybe Ted whatsisname is right: if he hadn't done what he did, I wouldn't of read it...in that respect, he got what he wanted. That makes him smart enough to know how to get what he wanted; not compasionate, but smart. And reading what smart people say can lead to something all powerfull people fear: thinking.

    • Re:Unabomber Manifesto relates to nanotech (Score:5, Informative)

      by William Tanksley ( 1752 ) on Thursday January 30, 2003 @03:24PM (#5190797)
      A considerably better exploration of this topic, by a considerably better person, is found in C.S. Lewis' "The Abolition of Man".

      In short, technology is not to blame in any way. People are to blame.

      -Billy
      • This is just another twist on the old "guns don't kill people, people kill people" argument. Both are self-evidently true, but also evade the point that our technologies amplify both the good and the bad we can do. If I have the urge to kill someone, I am far likelier to succeed with a gun than with a knife, and also more likely with a knife than with my fist.

        Put another way, who we are is inseparable from our technology. Technology is our adaptive response to the problem of survival. It is what makes our species unique on Earth. Talking about humans without reference to their technology is like talking about sharks without reference to their teeth.
        • This is just another twist on the old "guns don't kill people, people kill people" argument.

          I can see why you say that (considering my post), but it's not really pertinent. The Unabomber says that technology makes our lives more complex; Lewis says that the dominion of Man over Nature (a phrase more used in his time than in ours) is actually, in the final analysis, the dominion of one man over every man. Both are considering technology; the Unabomber treats it as an abstract entity in its own right, while Lewis considers its qualities when seen as a means and an end.

          It's as if someone wrote an essay claiming that guns were destroying our lives, and someone else wrote a book examining how the pursuit of guns was motivated, and speculating on the results of such motivation and actions. The analogy is perilously close, except that the Unabomber went on to murder a large number of people, something that most anti-gun people wouldn't consider (to say the least :-).

          The guns-don't-kill-people analogy doesn't even come close here; Lewis isn't claiming that technology is harmless; instead he's looking past the technology to the motivations of the people using and developing it.

          Put another way, who we are is inseparable from our technology. Technology is our adaptive response to the problem of survival. It is what makes our species unique on Earth. Talking about humans without reference to their technology is like talking about sharks without reference to their teeth.

          Humans have MANY sources of adaptive response to problems of survival. Lewis doesn't talk about humans without resource to their technology; actually, he considers it as part of the issue, a larger issue, of how and why humans use technology and science in general.

          The Unabomber, on the other hand? Feh.

          -Billy

    • Too many ALL CAPS... I smell a conspiracy brewing (Score:5, Funny)

      by Wee ( 17189 ) on Thursday January 30, 2003 @03:47PM (#5191004)
      The Unabomber's manifesto violates a very important law: The chances that a written work was authored by a crackpot increase with the percentage of completely capitalized words in the work.

      I don't know if anyone else had come up with a similar law before I thought of it a number of years ago (thanks mostly to the brilliant work [amazon.com] of none other than Ivan Stang [subgenius.com]), so I'll put a flag in it right now and call it Wee's Law of Tinfoil Hats.

      -B

    • all these technical advances taken together have created world in which the average man's fate is no longer in his own hands or in the hands of his neighbors and friends

      But the technical advances to blame are agriculture and irrigation, not telephones and indoor plumbing. Does the word "serf" ring any bells? The average man's fate hasn't been in his own hands since hunter-gatherer times.

  • Impossible? I think not (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 30, 2003 @01:39PM (#5190281)
    Micheal Crichton in this book, describes HOW these nanites are moving. Yes, they have fibres to move and by themselves could only go 2 mm/sec (not enough to chase people) but he goes on to say how through these emergant behaviours that they were working as groups. They were developing propulsion that was designed around multiple units working at once. Increasing the totally speed of the swarm. There was a lot of very detailed explanation on exactly how these units moved, how when wind came up they had to fall to the surface to escape the velocities.

    With the exemption of the ending which I wont spoil here it was a very plausible book.

    You have to understand that with solar power in nanite groups, you're not just generating electricity, but also heat which causes convection etc and nanites could control this force among others naturally present in the environment.

    Its exactly this kind of emergent behaviour that crichton was talking about and this guy has seemed to miss the point.

    $.02
    • Its exactly this kind of emergent behaviour that crichton was talking about and this guy has seemed to miss the point.
      Ummm, "this guy" is FREEMAN DYSON, one of the smartest human beings alive. (Ever hear of a Dyson sphere?) I'll wager he knows more about the physics of nanotech than Michael Chriton, you, and the entire readership of /. combined.


      • I realy don't know how else to put this.
        But FUCK YES!
        Accusing Dyson of not having a imagination is like saying water can't be wet.

        Freeman Dyson is one of the smartest people alive. Don't allways agree with him, (in this case I do).
        Only other person with that range of insight is Roger Penrose. I don't always agree with Roger either.
        Hmm come to think of it Penrose pisses me off somtimes but he allways makes me think. :>


      • Ever hear of a Dyson sphere?

        and Dyson interaction picture of quantum mechanics, and Dyson vacuum-energy capacitor ... The Dyson sphere is just among
        the _simplest_ bright ideas he had ...

        I'll wager he knows more about the physics of nanotech than Michael Chriton, you, and the entire readership of /. combined.

        About physics in general, very probably true, but I wouldn't wager
        there aren't a few actual nanotech researchers who browse /.
        ocasionally.
    • Not having read the book I can't comment on the possibility of what he describes. Aboe in the comments however are several posts claiming that it's just fiction and it doesn't matter if it's possible. That's only a half truth. It is marketed as "science fiction" which requires plausibility, though if what you describe is correct, the potential for it to still qualify as science fiction is still there. I'm not a fan of Crichton, some of his stuff is ok, but you dropped the magic words for me, "emergent behavior" I may have to pick this one up now.

  • Grey Goo arguments in other fields? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 30, 2003 @01:47PM (#5190318)
    One of the most intereting conversations I've ever had was with a fellow who was pursuing a career in particle accelerator work.

    According to him there used to be similar "Grey Goo" arguments surrounding some earlier particle accelerator work. There was some worry that an experiment, by chance, might create a form of matter that was more stable at lower energies, causing a chain reaction that would convert normal matter into this more "stable" matter, plus energy.

    I really don't know enough about the field to flesh this out better. However, rather than being frightening, the conversation really captured how exciting fields on the edge can be.

    • Re:Grey Goo arguments in other fields? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Yep, it's called "strangelets". There was some concern that Brookhaven would produce them, IIRC. The whole Earth would collapse into strange matter. What fun. Fortunately, it's not so easy to do.

      In the 40's there was concern for a while that a nuclear blast could ignite the atmosphere. Calculations showed that to be false as well, of course.

      And, if you ever hear about the potential of producing black holes at the Large Hadron Collider, keep in mind 2 things:
      (1) it's very unlikely
      (2) they would evaporate quickly without hurting anyone - we know this because if a collider could make them, then cosmic rays are making them all the time just above the Earth and we're still here.
    • Similar concept in Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle - that there's a configuration of water ice that's stable at room temperature ("ice-9") - which when dropped in the ocean causes the entire thing to "freeze".
    • The one I heard was that certain particle collisions might create a tiny black hole. We wouldn't have the technology to contain it so it would immediately fall through the Earth's crust and after a few oscilations, come to rest at its center of mass. All atoms that came near it would be eaten, and it would grow in mass and power until it ate up all of the Earth.

      Don't circulate this story too much, lest it catch the ear of some lameass, desperate "disaster movie" screenwriter who converts it into movie that convinces our moronic leaders to cut funding for fundamental physics.

  • What do nanobots eat? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 30, 2003 @01:52PM (#5190344)
    I always had trouble with the grey goo concept, on which Crichton bases this book, on the grounds that I have a hard time figuring out what the damned things do for food.

    The dominant energy source around us is organic matter. You can't get much energy out of eating inorganic matter (rock) because, aside from carbon (coal, graphite, diamond), it's mostly well-oxidized and sitting in a free-energy minimum. That's why we don't burn rocks other than coal in the fireplace. This means that the nanobots would be competing with natural life forms for organic matter and I doubt they would do well in the competition.

    The machinery by which living things extract energy from organic matter is quite sophisticated and I don't see any prospect for engineered nanotechnology out-competing basic bacteria on this front.

    Similarly, if most of the energetically favorable raw material around is organic, if the nanobots are to reproduce, they will likely be built of organic compounds, so they are again competing with bacteria that have a 4 billion year head start in optimizing themselves for the environment. If they are built of inorganic compounds or make much use of elements that are not generally found in living matter, then they will need to use much of their metabolic output to fighting entropy as they purify (reduce sand to silicon, for instance) and synthesize the necessary building blocks.

    Until the question of where a nanobot gets its food and how it reproduces are plausibly explained (we don't need reduction to practice, but some plausible background is necessary), I will not take scenarios involving huge swarms of malevolent grey goo seriously, even in fiction.
    • if most of the energetically favorable raw material around is organic, if the nanobots are to reproduce, they will likely be built of organic compounds, so they are again competing with bacteria that have a 4 billion year head start in optimizing themselves for the environment.
      Evolution does not necessarily make things the best that they can be. It's a greedy algorithm and can fall into local optimums quite easily. Engineers with a goal can do things that Mother Nature would never bother to try.

      Furthermore, why can't Man stand on the shoulders of this giant? Scientists are watching bacteria, and always very interested in their tricks. If they see something useful and copy it, they won't get a C&D letter from the bacterium's lawyer.

  • Strangelove (Score:5, Funny)

    by stendec ( 582696 ) on Thursday January 30, 2003 @01:55PM (#5190362)
    Hello? Ah... listen, can't hear too well. Do you suppose you could turn the music down just a little? Oh-ho, that's much better. Yes... heh... yeah. Fine, I can hear you now Dimitri. Clear and plain and coming through fine. I'm coming through fine, too, eh? Good, then... well, then, as you say, we're both coming through fine. Good. Well it's good that you're fine, and... and I'm fine. I agree with you, it's great to be fine.

    A-ha-ha-ha-ha.

    Now then, Dmitri. You know how we've always talked about the possibility... of something going wrong with the dust. The dust, Dmitri. The nano dust! Well, now, what happened, is... ah, one of our scientists, he had a sort of... well, he went a little funny in the head. You know, just a little... funny. And, ah, he went and did a silly thing. Well, I'll tell you what he did. He ordered his dust... to attack your country. Ah, well let me finish Dmitri - let me finish Dmitri... Well listen, how do you think I feel about it?! Can you imagine how I feel about it, Dmitri? Why do you think I'm calling you? Just to say hello?

    Of course I like to speak to you! Of course I like to say hello! Not now, but anytime, Dmitri. I'm just calling up to tell you something terrible has happened. It's a friendly call, of course it's a friendly call. Listen, if it wasn't friendly... you probably wouldn't have even gotten it.

    They will not reach their targets for at least another hour. I am... I am positive, Dmitri. Listen, I've been all over this with your ambassador, it is not a trick.

    Well, I'll tell you. We'd like to give your HVAC staff a complete run-down on the targets, the flight characteristics, and the defensive systems of the dust. Yes! I mean, i-i-i-if we're unable to denature the dust, then... I'd say that, ah... well, we're just gonna have to help you destroy it, Dmitri. All right, well listen now. Who should we call? Who should we call, Dmitri? The, wha-whe, the People... you, sorry, you faded away there. The People's Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning Headquarters. Where is that, Dmitri? In Omsk, right? Yes? Oh, you'll call them first, will you? Uh-huh. Listen, do you happen to have the phone number on you, Dmitri? Whe-ah, what? I see, just ask for Omsk Information.

    Ah-ah-eh-um-hmmmmm.

    I'm sorry, too, Dmitri. I'm very sorry. Alright, you're sorrier than I am! But I am as sorry as well. I am as sorry as you are, Dmitri. Don't say that you're more sorry than I am, because I'm capable of being just as sorry as you are. So we're both sorry, alright?

    Alright.

  • I saw a copy at the local bookstore, read the first few pages, and then sat down for four hours and read it from cover to cover. As a novel, it is an excellent read and the creeping horror as the father of the family (told in first person) realises something is 'not quite right' is very well delivered. Mr Crichton writes a compelling story that's hard to put down.

    However, it does suck on a few points:

    1) It's written like a movie script. There's one part where the characters rush into a supply shed past a large case of dynamite, then scenes later where the sprinkler system is mentioned again, and again. Gosh, those props are not going to be used later in the book, are they?

    2) The last third is just plain silly. I don't care if other /. ers think I'm one of the anal types, but especially (this is not really a spoiler) the whole scene inside the cave made me frown and go "What the heck?!?" It also looks as if he was given a deadline and he had to bash out the remaining holes in the story in a very rushed epilogue.

    3) Crichton has done the whole "Scientists not understanding the powers they meddle with" thing before. Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, Timeline... on the other hand, this has made him a very rich man. More power to him. And I'll probably give the movie a look when (not if) it comes out.

    Go read it for the human elements, and don't look at the nanotechnology too closely.

    Dr Fish
  • Forget all the tech arguments(it's *fiction*, folks) this guy has some serious issues - he seems incapable of writing realistic female characters. Jurassic Park - the little girl was constantly whining and crying - at least Spielberg gave her some intelligence("Hey - this is Unix! I know this! :) ). Andromeda Strain- I only recall some nurses. Now, in Prey, the hero's wife goes to the dark side and conjures up some Clones(see: Attack of).
    Mebbe Mr. Critchton should go for a little sensitivity training?
    Dyson rocks, though.

    DT

    • It's quite simple, really. Critchton is a MAN and as such there is no way he can conjure up a truly realistic woman. Equally so, a woman cannot possibly conjure up a truly realistic man. They are very mentally/emotionally different creatures incapable of fully understanding/experiencing the other's "reality".


      That said, Crichton is a bit more hamfisted in his generation of pseudo-women than many (Clancy doesn't create even realistic men, only pseudo-superheros and supervillians).

    • ... look at Heinlein. The man was incapable of writing a female character who wasn't either a total slut, or a super-capable total slut. Yet he seemed rather prudish in real life - I dimly remember reading part of his (posthumously) published letters where he's bemoaning the sexual deviance of "young people" who engage in "soixante-neuf and all sort of other perversions". This from the man who wrote "Friday" and "Stranger in a Strange Land"...

  • Pretty Typical of Crichton's Work (Score:5, Insightful)

    by anzha ( 138288 ) on Thursday January 30, 2003 @02:38PM (#5190602) Homepage Journal

    Crichton seems to be a reasonable writer. I say this in the sense that his style is readable and engaging. The topics are rarely boring. The characters seem to be plausible.

    The problem is that he gets details in science often wildly wrong. Almost all the geneticists I spoke to flinch at _Jurassic Park_. The supercomputer people I work with smirk about his treatment of our field. The situation is not unlike how the military people and defense contractor engineers read Clancy: it's a good read, but don't expect anything like reality from it. (re my own experiences having worked @ one of the laser test ranges in NM and comparing it to _Cardinal of the Kremlin_ or the reactions from engineers to people that cite Clancy on sci.military.naval or rec.aviation.military).

    The good question is...is this a service he's doing for us, the scientists and engineers? Or is it a massive disservice? The weighing that needs to be done is whether or not the service of bringing up the fact that people need to pay attention to new technologies and their implications vs the really bad extrapolations and wrong impressions the guy gives people about what we are able to do or even how the stuff works at all...

    People will react with "This is only fiction..." but then most people don't often read about the real science and get caught up, do they? They find it dull and, thus, get their impressions from these works...

  • How can the future "need" us or not? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by SiliconEntity ( 448450 ) on Thursday January 30, 2003 @02:40PM (#5190611)
    I've never really understood the title of Joy's essay, "Why the future doesn't need us", and likewise for Dyson's rejoinder. Joy mostly wrote about how we could wipe ourselves out through technology. Of course this has been a concern for decades. But nobody before expressed it as whether or not the future "needed" us. It was rather a question of whether we would be around!

    Why did Joy adopt this curious phraseology? What does it mean for the future to need us? How can the future have needs at all? It's like saying that Left needs us, or Up doesn't need us. I've never understood it.
    • It's a warning. Many people assume that in the future human life and human domination of this planet is a certainty. It's not. There is no guarantee that we will stay at the top of the food chain in the future.

      We could cause our own extinction. We might cause a new form of life to arise that could outlive us. We would essentially be the "primordial ooze" where real intelligence springs from. The future life and world at that time wouldn't need us anymore.

    • I've always looked at it like this.

      I think he is trying to make an association with technological progress. As we develop more and more technology to do the tasks that formerly required a human being it is reasonable to say we don't "need" a human to do the job.

      Technogical advancement to the point of obsolesence is different than human beings blowing each other up in a war because in the case of war we don't have a future. It's over for humanity. In the other case everything about our society continues (except of course for us). Hence, the future doesn't need us.

      I don't know if this is what he intended to communicate and I haven't written it as well as I'd like to have, but I hope you get the point I'm trying to make.

  • Who cares about nanobots? (Score:4, Funny)

    by NoMoreNicksLeft ( 516230 ) <john.oyler@noSpAm.comcast.net> on Thursday January 30, 2003 @02:56PM (#5190634) Journal
    Like any other sane person, it is the yoctobots that I fear. Devices so small they can masquerade as a hydrogen atom to escape notice. They would float around on superstring loops, adjusting quantum spins on our very molecules!

    What happens, when a swarm of these things invades your brain, and suddenly changes some unobserved quantum value to another unobserved quantum value? Your entire SOUL could change, and there is nothing you could do about it!!! Even if neurological science progesses to a fantastic level, upon examination, no one could conclude that your mind had been tampered with...

    This is why I propose a worldwide ban, without exception, on yoctotechnology experimentation. We can't act soon enough!

  • Dyson well known for his sphere.. (Score:3, Informative)

    by xTK-421x ( 531992 ) on Thursday January 30, 2003 @02:57PM (#5190638) Homepage
    Freeman Dyson postulated the idea of a Dyson Sphere [d.kth.se], which is basically a planet that was built as a shell surrounding a sun, using all the energy it radiates.

    Also mentioned in the TNG episode Relics [startrek.com].

    • Olaf Stapledon Sphere (Score:5, Informative)

      by StefanJ ( 88986 ) on Thursday January 30, 2003 @03:57PM (#5191095) Homepage Journal
      From Dyson's autobiography, Disturbing the Universe:

      "Some science fiction writers have wrongly given me the credit for inventing the idea of an artificial biosphere. In fact, I took the idea from Olaf Stapledon, one of their own colleagues:

      'Not only was every solar system now surrounded by a gauze of light traps, which focused the escaping solar energy for intelligent use, so that the whole galaxy was dimmed, but many stars that were not suited to be suns were disintegrated, and rifled of their prodigious stores of subatomic energy.'

      "This passage I found in a tattered copy of Stapledon's Star Maker which I picked up in Paddington Station in London in 1945."

  • "Dyson notes Joy's

    Ok, what about that comment is "oddly prescient"? Does the submitter not understand what "prescient" means; does he not understand the comment; or (the most generous interpretation I can find) is he merely noting that Joy foresaw--not anything that has passed in reality--but further science-fiction doom-saying?

  • Read these instead if you like NanoSF (Score:3, Informative)

    by unfortunateson ( 527551 ) on Thursday January 30, 2003 @03:26PM (#5190808) Journal
    Blood Music, by Greg Bear: One of the original grey goo stories. The short story version is somewhat different from the novel, both fascinating. Queen of Angels and Slant deal with nano/bio modifications to people.

    Deception Well by Linda Nagata (also The Bohr Maker, and Vast, the prequel and sequel -- though DW reads fine on its own). Nano-infected planet holds keys to all kinds of mysterious stuff, including how this not-quite human person is able to live among the humans.

    Limit of Vision by Linda Nagata. OK, I reallyreally like her stuff. This one is closer to present-time, and doesn't quite hit the grey goo phase... but avoids it narrowly. Not her best, but still very entertaining.

    Truly, NanoSF is a bit passe. Blood Music dates from '86 (according to Amazon). Current cutting-edge SF tends more towards bioengineering, plagues, eco-crashes (Dust), or truly wonky time travel (Chronoliths).
    • A few more...
      ,br> All Tomorrow's Parties-William Gibson
      Nanotech is important, but this isn't a doom-and-gloom novel. And, as Gibson typically is, everything's really chaotic until the last 5 pages or so.

      The Diamond Age-Neal Stephenson
      Nanotech-saturated. Yet once again, not a grey goo novel.

      Frankly, Crichton strikes me as a luddite who needs to stop writing alarmism. He uses bad pseudoscience and then uses this limited scientific understanding to start crying chicken little whenever some new idea comes out and changes the scientific paradigm. All it does is freak out the general public and turn scientists into pariahs.

  • We already have the tool to stop the grey goo (Score:5, Funny)

    by rworne ( 538610 ) on Thursday January 30, 2003 @03:26PM (#5190812) Homepage
    From the article:
    One kind of nanomachine is the assembler, which is a tiny factory that can manufacture other machines, including replicas of itself. Drexler understood from the beginning that a replicating assembler would be a tool of immense power for good or for evil. Fortunately or unfortunately, nanotechnology has moved more slowly than Drexler expected. Nothing remotely resembling an assembler has yet emerged. The most useful products of nanotechnology so far are computer chips. They have no capacity for replicating either themselves or anything else.

    We have the means to stop this onslaught, a lovely piece of legislation called the DMCA and an army of lawyers to back it up.

    Any badass nanite that tries to replicate itself will be doing so without paying the appropriate copyright fees to the original creator and will summarily get slapped with a nice lawsuit and some jailtime to cool it's heels (erm... cillia? flagella?).

    Just in case that does not work, we have Senator Disney who will make sure that these abominations have DRM technology built into them from the get-go, so self-replicating nanites will come pre-spayed and neutered for our protection.

    We need not even go that far. The very fact that such a beast is being created is a violation itself, since it's its own circumvention device.

    • HOLY SHIT, STOP THE PRESSES (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 30, 2003 @03:49PM (#5191018)
      The very fact that such a beast is being created is a violation itself, since it's its own circumvention device.

      Not only did the slashdot poster use both "its" and "it's" correctly, but (s)he did so adjacently!

      I do believe that this is a slashdot first, folks. Any other poster would have confused possessive pronouns with contractions. The only possible explanation is that rworne is not a real slashdot poster, but rather a sentient nanite himself!
    • Small, dumb, virus-like robots that build themselves out of matter can be easily dealt with. Just destroy them with energy weapons. Fire your flame thrower or laser at them, and eventually you will wipe them out. They can't use matter from your weapon against you.

      Alternatively, you can smash the little buggers with some form of matter that they are unable to use. I am not worried.
  • Quoting 2 passages from the article:

    Relinquish pursuit of that knowledge and development of those technologies so dangerous that we judge it better that they never be available.

    As we now know, the Soviet Union violated the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972 on an extensive scale... until its collapse in 1991.

    If the "we" in the first passage were "we, the world" then we could decide which technologies are too dangerous to pursue. Unfortunately the real world is made up of a collection of we's and they's, acting independently and at their own levels of wisdom. Any we that decides not to pursue a technology has no guarantee that they will do likewise. The fate of the world will rest, as usual, on the wisdom of whoever ends up dominating it.

  • One thing really pissed me off (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Dr. Spork ( 142693 ) on Thursday January 30, 2003 @11:04PM (#5193961)
    "As we now know, the Soviet Union violated the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972 on an extensive scale, continuing to develop new weapons and to accumulate stockpiles until its collapse in 1991."

    While Mr. Dyson is quite right in this observation, it seem almost absurd that he didn't see it fit to mention that post-Nixon USA also resumed research and large-scale production of biological weapons. For example, all evidence indicates that the "weapons-grade" anthrax sent through US mail was a strain developed by US weapons labs. What that anthrax scare revealed is just how many US military labs are working on the further weaponization of anthrax and other, more deadly biological agents.

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