As part of my participation on the CRN Task Force, I’ve been thinking in a bit more detail about how nanofactories might be regulated in the future. I recently posted the following in some forums. Join the disussion if you like. This was prompted by the questions, “What guidelines for humanity’s use of nanotechnology should there be? How should they be enforced? I see nanotech changing the sociology of the world as much or more than it will change the economy of the world.”
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Nanotechnology should only exist for public use in the form of personal nanofactories (PNs), self-contained desktop units that manufacture products associated with a license.
PNs will only fabricate product designs signed by a safety authority. Products will have a maximum and minimum allowable size, chemical composition, and power consumption, based on their documented functions. Other limitations to product designs should be applied based on the recommendations of an expert committee.
Because of physical scaling laws that permit extreme productivity at the nano-scale, the first company to create nanofactories will be able to manufacture their product rapidly. Once the productivity and flexibility gains inherent to desktop nanomanufacturing become obvious, there will be instantaneous and sustained worldwide demand.
The business model
Nanofactories should be sold for a reasonable price, perhaps similar to the debut price of state of the art computers (~$3,000), with a pricing half-life of three months. The technology itself theoretically allows a pricing half-life of a day or so, but a lengthy rollout will be used to generate enthusiasm and work out the bugs. The system will be $200 in a year and $10 in two years. Or maybe there will be a natural price floor. Note that this pricing model artificially slows the rate of adoption by a factor of about 100. This allows feedback to flow on normal human timescales, allowing discussion and analysis of potential problems before they happen. The pricing model may not happen in reality, but it’s a solid possibility.
The company should take their product international at a balanced pace – slow enough to work out the bugs, fast enough to ensure that they stay on top of the competition. Nanofactories are a sufficiently revolutionary technology that the first mover should be able to gain global dominance through competitive pricing and intelligent acquisitions. A unified company in charge of nanofactories will also simplify policy issues and guarantee the enforcement of universal security and safety standards.
The real price of the nanofactory will be in the products. Third-party developers will use an API provided by the nanofactory company to design and license products. Licensed products are sold to customers through an interface on the nanofactory. Pricing tiers for multiple product copies will be set by product developers. The nanofactory company will grab a small percentage of the profit, but most will go to the developers.
The API will be a CAD system that allows designers to specify high-level characteristics of an object or system without knowing its details on the molecular level. Drop-n-drag interfaces will allow anyone to design simple products. Developers need to be given flexibility such that they can let their minds run free, without feeling the limitations of a proprietary platform. This will be achieved by the design of nano-blocks by the nanofactory company – verified modular components that simulate surfaces or materials, store and transmit electricity, light, or force, communications cables and processors, displays and interfaces, and much much more.
The data underlying the operation of nanofactories will not be open-source or reprogrammable. It will, however, be reviewed and continually redesigned by the brightest engineers and security experts in the industry. Made impervious to natural disasters, internal scanning, and reverse-engineering, nanofactories will always keep records of who is using them, their respective energy budgets, local and global laws, and library of manufacturable products. These desktop machines will have hundreds of terabytes of hard drive space for storing fabrication instructions and product designs. Their tamper-proof nature will allow nanofactories to serve as ideal “black boxes” to examine after disasters, both natural and artificial. Conversely, nanofactories should be programmed to fry their internal workings when they recognize they are being breached. An opaque “airlock” should prevent the product output port from serving as a window to scanning the nanofactory’s internals from the outside.
Law
A primary concern for the development of civilian and commercial nanofactories is the buildup of NanoTrash – cheaply mass-manufactured products made of mostly diamond and empty space. Avoiding NanoTrash while preserving our freedom to design and create will be a great challenge of the early nanotech era. For starters, each nanofactory user should have a personal matter and energy budget determined by a safety authority. These limits should be variable based on product class and user profession. For example, someone that works at a hospital should have a larger energy budget when it comes to manufacturing medical products. In the same way that it’s illegal for just anyone to randomly practice medicine, not just anyone should be permitted to manufacture large quantities of painkillers, syringes, or scalpels.
Many professions operate under licenses today. Physiotherapists, acupuncturists, emergency medical technicians, paramedics, doctors, nurses, teachers, lawyers, and professional engineers all require some form of licensure to work their jobs. These licenses represent that the licensee demonstrates basic knowledge of their profession and its associated responsibilities. Because of the tremendous range of products nanofactories will make available cheaply, licensing and energy budgets are a must to ensure that dangerous products do not fall into ignorant or malicious hands. Crowd-mediated reputation markets will quickly label the black and white hats in the fabrication business, leaving massive paper trails for both law enforcement and avid groupies. Try to model and fabricate a torture device, and certain design privileges are temporarily suspended. Design a useful product, and you are rewarded with an increased energy budget.
The most widely-used and largest products will have the highest energy budgets – storage containers, automobiles, housing, civil systems, renewable power plants, and agricultural tools. Nano-built products will quickly outperform and underprice variants manufactured using older technologies. The rate at which this occurs will depend upon the improvement of the underlying nanofactory/API technology. The most necessary, universal, and algorithmically simplest products will be the first to be ported to nanofactories. Products containing any subset of the nanofactory technology itself (actuators, computers, sensors, purifiers, other electronics and structural elements) will become immediate candidates for design and licensing.
Because they will be competing for the finite energy budget of the consumer, firms designing new products will have a reason to care. Successful firms will be granted larger energy budgets and perhaps even greater design flexibility.
Complex organic products like food will not be built by the early, all-diamond nanofactories. In fact, anything that can’t be made exclusively from diamond will continue to be produced by traditional industries. But if I look around my house, it’s difficult to find objects that can’t theoretically be made from diamond – okay, maybe blankets, stuffed animals, mirrors, pasta, pineapples, and certain clothing can’t be made out of diamond, but what can? But how about stoves, tables, chairs, televisions, lamps, lampshades, clocks, computers, storage units, pots, pans, walls, locks, and boxes? Quite likely. Most diamondoid products will be made of 99% air or vacuum and will be ballasted by water vapor, but they will serve their function.
Quick and efficient recycling for nanotech products is a must. A large household storage tank for temporary or permanent deposit or withdrawal of water, carbon, and other feedstock or byproducts will quickly become universal. This will be built into a new civic infrastructure.
All products will be fabricated with multiple inbuilt copies of its signed safety certificate and an associated key – a simple “watermark” that lets law enforcement know the legal status of the product while ensuring that product designers get to collect their well-deserved licensing fees. If a product is found to be dangerous, the associated key is revoked, and the product is either deactivated remotely or added to a warning list. To enable the immediate deactivation of any dangerous product, designs should incorporate emergency shutdown features that respond to broadcasts of revoked safety keys.
Nanotech economy
After the initial wave of diamondoid products will come new functionality – traditional materials like simulated wood, metal, ceramic, stone, and the huge polymer family, which includes all plastics. These optimized materials might be made of different molecules than the originals but will offer superior performance and safety while consuming fewer resources.
Investors will balk at the falling prices of real estate, raw materials, energy, and just about everything. To ensure that runaway hyperdeflation does not occur will require a minimum price tag per kilogram of product in conjunction with a personal energy budget. Then comes the question – should everyone on Earth have the same allotted energy budget, or should it vary based on salary, education, productivity, reputation, honesty, or some other characteristic?
The world may need to make a choice between pure democracy and simple survival. To preserve the status quo and maximize continuity with the past, some system based on a combination of money in the bank and credit may be chosen. Or perhaps something more modern, like PageRank, where engineers and designers are assigned budgets based on referrals. Or a system closely tied to attention like Alexa.com, where the engineer’s designs are judged based on the number of people aware of them – their “reach”. Or, perhaps most appropriately, an unbiased, flexible inference engine that assigns projects preference and resources based on sophisticated volition-extrapolation models of every human individual. Science-fictional-sounding maybe, but nanotech will make it possible.
In order for the human race to go on, it needs to survive the nanotech era without too large of a disaster. As such, the probability of disaster should always be kept below a certain threshold. Varying acceptable disaster probability thresholds (DPTs) will ostensibly be voted upon by communities at the local, regional, national, and international levels. Ideally, different regulation sets will correspond to known DPTs. Stringent regulations minimize the probability of disaster, lenient regulations increase it.
Unfortunately the analyses underpinning these thresholds will no doubt be politically sensitive and value-laden. Because nanofactory issues will be global in scope, there will be strong pressure towards the interaction and unification of political parties across national lines. A global political party or even government could emerge.
Potential dangers will come from several main categories – chemical, biological, nuclear, and physical. Nanotech will deepen all these threats and magnify nascent dangers such as electromagnetic and virtual weaponry. Electromagnetic dangers will include satellite-based microwave beams and other forms of lethal and non-lethal directed energy. Virtual weaponry will include advanced Artificial Intelligence, robotics, and decision support systems.
We may see that the more dangerous products can be defined in terms of complexity rather than by size or energy consumption. This may lead to a personal complexity budget alongside an energy/matter budget.
The speed of new computers will be considered a problem. Extremely fast supercomputers running arbitrary code is dangerous. As a result, supercomputers should only run code signed by a safety authority. Computer scientists should require licenses to operate or manufacture supercomputers above a certain speed limit. This speed limit should be only slightly past the limits of conventional semiconductor technology – this is something like 100 times the power of today’s computers, and should be sufficient for most purposes. Computers built using new operating principles, such as plasmonics, photonics, and DNA computing should also respect this speed limit. Quantum computing may prove hard to enforce limitations with. If it turns out that quantum computing allows rogues to easily design and simulate virtual or physical weapons, it could end up being forbidden altogether.
Personal computers should also have speed limits, also hovering slightly past the limit of conventional semiconductor technology. Hobbyists who desire crunch power for special projects will fabricate special-purpose computers that are only mechanically able to run certain safety-verified algorithms.
Breakthrough technologies
Even though nanotechnology itself is a revolutionary technology, it could give rise to even greater ways of controlling the structure of matter. This includes cybernetics, including human intelligence augmentation, and Artificial Intelligence. Limits should be placed on products designed to modify human biological characteristics. For ethics and safety reasons, steps in this direction should be taken slowly and carefully. Worldwide enforcement of these standards are a must. Because the proprietary nanofactory technology will presumably be universal, standard enforcement will be feasible if the machine is tamper-proof and only builds approved products.
If the world continues to be democratic in nature, the prospect of accelerating the human birth and growth cycle (“nano-fertility”) could present itself as a strategy for certain countries or cultures to tip the scales in their favor. As a result, products designed to accelerate the cycle of pregnancy should be forbidden. The prospect of life extension (which should be regulated less stringently than pregnancy) will prompt the setting of a child limit in the civilized world – something like two or three children per couple. As women are educated, contraception becomes universal, and manual labor is less valued, developing countries will follow the trend.
The most interesting (and potentially destabilizing) prospect of cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence is the potential to create geniuses from average individuals using enhancement procedures, or to create human-rivaling AI from scratch. These forays should be limited until safety studies determine the best angle of approach.
I remember thinking about these same ideas when I wrote my “Replicator in Every Home” essay (way back when).
The fact is, you are proposing nothing more complex than a Digital Rights Management system. Of course, we see DRM primarily associated with media, and we’ve seen how well that’s worked. I can download DRM-protected media that has been cracked, hacked, or generally reverse engineered.
All it takes it one cracked industrial-grade nanofactory source code leaking out to create chaos. You could get on Limewire and download the latest music along with the nanofactory schematics for a hand grenade.
Well, the idea is that you wouldn’t be able to manfaucture rogue nanofactories because no one would ever get the source code. Nanofactories would be associated with a specific safety key. If the factory lacks that key, then clearly the entire surrounding region is eligibile for saturation bombing from orbit.
This whole writing is slightly a joke because I doubt any licensure system will work for long. It’s mostly a matter of delaying disaster as long as possible, so Friendly AI can be created.
The rollout is a difficult thing to predict. So kudos on putting up a thought out strawman article for discussion.
One company even one with strong IP will not be able or be allowed to control technology this powerful. They would not be able to surprise everyone with secret development and then use the technology to make themselves invincible. Going from corporation power to being able to not be coerced or killed by forces of the USA (CIA, military) or the equivalent world agencies.
IP, laws are just paper agreements.
Once someone got any worthwhile precursors to a nanofactory would trigger nanhattan projects all over. No country would let themselves be dependent on such a vital resource/capability. For something less important like a PC operating system, china is now developing its Red Linux so it does not depend on Microsoft.
Also, other production means exist now and will exist then. Other products exist and if they function adequately need not be replaced. I own a perfectly good glass and wood table. It looks good in my home decor. I do not have to go swap it out for a diamondoid, water ballasted table. The products made with nanotech will have to have features that are valued by people so that they displace the existing or alternative product. Most people can buy more accurate clocks than they are using but they don’t. The ones they have are good enough. The internet offered many improvements in retail and products, but ten years into it and most people still go to physical stores. New markets and opening new frontiers that is where the growth and action will need to be.
Limits on energy, computing, and having a managed economy will be non-starters.
Brian, you’re probably right on all of this. Even if it’s only controlled by a few central agencies, I’d like to see the licensure system as proposed here.
The technology is powerful enough that energy limits will not prove a stumbling block. Societal benefits of utopian portions will arrive within months, not years, even with restrictions. Note that energy limits exist even today – for example there is a limit to the amount of energy you can put into a radio tower. There are limits to the side and energy consumption of cars. There are limits to the power of civilian firearms. As Chris says, there is a need for limits.
Of course other production means will exist. But nanofactories will trump them all. Aesthetic objects like tables will be the last items to be replaced. For everyday poor people, a nano-product will be better than no product, of course. Industrial process equipment will be replaced. Of course new markets will push things forward too.
Unrestricted nanofactories are doom. The second they’re released, you have mountains of nanotrash, gigawatt lasers, robotic swarms, mirrors, sensors, and ad hoc solar cells all over the place, militias claiming hundreds of square kms of land in places like Antarctica and the ocean floor, etc. The buzzword we can use to describe that possiblity is “nanarchy”.
Hi, Michael,
Very interesting conversation you have here.
I’ve come to somewhat the same conclusion. One thing we can do is slow down the diffusion of technology and try to keep ahead of the people who want to hurt us. Another is treat people right so they don’t hate us any more than they do now.
I was thinking a combination of an internet data delivery system using a PGP key as long as needed(arbitrary,I know), a central server with approved designs (as you suggested), and a Nanofactory built to commit suicide as soon as it’s security is broken, is the best we can do to secure the operation of a nanofactory. And that is not enough to stop anyone who gets access to early nano tools which can build anything simple without a certified nanofactory.
See my blog at http://www.actionart3d.com/nanofuture/
we seem to all be coming to the same conclusions, ie, there’s nothing we can do for a permanent solution, mainly due to worldwide development of simple nano tools. Even if we never released anything until we release a certified, protected nanofactory, that protection will fail due to basic research done somewhere else (NF invasion robots). But what is worse, at first, the NF will emerge in pieces from a hundred labs without any effective protection or limitations at all. It just means we have a mess no matter what we do. And the best solution is to ride the wave and stay on it’s leading crest. Fall behind the people who want to hurt us and we will hurt indeed.
John
I understand the driver for this kind of story, but 1. I don’t think it would hold up for more than a month or two (consider the turn around time on cracking the latest DRM. That only involves free access to music/video content. Imagine if your motivation was the ability to construct whatever takes your fancy). 2. It only takes one breakdown. If one desktop factory is liberated from the constraint, it could crank out restriction free machines (kinda like sharing music with your friends, only writ a good bit bigger). Finally, 3. The plan places too much control/power in the hands of the government/central authority/big business. I don’t think it takes a lot of imagination to suggest that “vested interests” would make sure that the “safety authority” was absurdly restrictive on “approved” or “safe designs” in order to hang on to their business models & current position. Such a structure would unquestionably crush a great deal of creativety & development.
I think a better over all strategy is public discussion (so that people would be aware of the real dangers). Alerts of some kind to suggest that development of a certain kind had resulted in bad effects (think of the security alerts related to virus/wyrm problems on the web). & a rapid response team trained to pursue containment & resoltion of a dangerous nanofacture deployment.
Even if the restrictions could work. It would virtually guarantee the company adopting them was turned into a technology backwater overnight (I can’t imagine the developing world would be willing to follow our silly restrictions at the expense of their own development. Their response to environmention restrictions is instructive)
Never the less…it’s a discussion we have to thrash out. Because I suspect it’s an issue that could fall on us more swiftly that we can anticipate.
Quick question: if prices for everything are likely to fall, why will it be necessary to ensure that ‘hyperinflation’ doesn’t occur? Did you mean ‘hyperdeflation’?
Also, why would real estate prices decrease given that the availability of real estate will not be affected?
About the hyperinflation/deflation: sure, counterfitting money, diamonds, or any scarce prduct will be much easier, which would lead to hyperinflation (hyperdevaluation, actually, cause no one would trust currency, even if it was watermarked somehow; does anyone think the general populace will attempt to understand nano-watermarking systems?).
Simultaneously, consumer products will fall to near-zero cost, thanks to effortless nanomanufacturing.
So, combine a hyperincreasing inflation curve with a hyperdecreasing Consumer Price Index, and you reach a point in economic history that was never thought possible: the end of scarcity as we know it.
>>>>Also, why would real estate prices decrease given that the availability of real estate will not be affected?
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Because with any form of advanced nanotech, we could terra form new land from any existing terrain. Antarctica would surely become the new Miami Beach South. Mars would be Earth 2. The moon would become as green as the trees outside my window.
Yeah, I meant hyperdeflation. Fixed.
Haislip brings up a good point about the money and diamonds – the value of these objects will drop to zero.
Meanwhile, services like sex will increase in value, at least temporarily. Respect and reputation may matter more than ever before, because they’re some of the only things we’ll have.
It’s funny, about 4 people I’ve shared this piece with have perked up about the real estate bit. If you think that nanotech will revolutionize manufacturing but not touch the price of that house you’re working so hard to make payments towards – you’re quite mistaken. Your house in a desirable suburb will be worth close to nothing when any bum can set up a self-sustaining mansion in the middle of the desert for $1000, and fly to it from a city center in minutes with a $10 aircar.
Michaels
I think there will definitely be economic impacts. I think there will be some impact on housing but over a longer timeframe and with less impact than you are presenting. But the case for deflation is not a slam dunk.
something for you to consider:
1. What happened historically with a large scale opening of frontiers for migration/colonization
ie. North America opened up 1700-1929. What happened to Europes real estate.
2. Price of equal in terms of the building and land 2000sf, 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom places less than 0.5 miles can vary by 1.5 to 2X in price.
Same availability of services. Specific examples are currently on SF Bay area peninsula. No extras like one has view and another does not (10-20% price difference), no one is facing a park and the other is 1 block away (10%). The difference is just the neighbors and neighborhood. They can reach the same city centers in the same time.
3. Diamonds. Perfect gem diamonds can be made now. Various 3 carat methods and even one that can make up to 100′s of carats. Yet diamond prices are not effected. Motivated individuals are nations could get the chemical vapor deposition tech and start pumping out diamonds. The artificial produced diamonds can be made for a fraction of the price. They are chemically diamond…not almost diamond they are the real deal.
Perfect rubies have been able to be made for many years. Yet the natural ruby market holds up.
1. What happened historically with a large scale opening of frontiers for migration/colonization
ie. North America opened up 1700-1929. What happened to Europes real estate.
Even then, the price of frontier land was worthless until someone put labor and resources into it. To an 18th century farmer, 10 acres of scrub brush and pine trees was hardly valuable, but with some effort, that same plot became valuable farmland. With advanced nanotechnology, a plot of farmland could be quickly converted to a manufacturing plant, or into a diamond mine, or into whatever. Land itself will become a commodity, differentiated only by location or traditional emotional attachment.
2. Price of equal in terms of the building and land 2000sf, 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom places less than 0.5 miles can vary by 1.5 to 2X in price.
Same availability of services. Specific examples are currently on SF Bay area peninsula. No extras like one has view and another does not (10-20% price difference), no one is facing a park and the other is 1 block away (10%). The difference is just the neighbors and neighborhood. They can reach the same city centers in the same time.
Again, this example is based on fixed geographic features (i.e. a view of the ocean, or a view of the park). With any advanced nanotech, terraforming is instananeous, so that ocean view may be a mountain view ten seconds later. It just depends on your demand. The technology itself becomes the infinite supply. This flattens the supply/demand curve for land. All demand can be instantly supplied.
Diamonds. Perfect gem diamonds can be made now. Various 3 carat methods and even one that can make up to 100’s of carats. Yet diamond prices are not effected.
You are forgetting the manufacturing costs of such artificial diamonds. Ultimately, it is still cheaper per capita to mine diamonds rather than manufacture them (this include costs of labor and processing).
Advanced nanotech will ultimately lead to one of three scenarios:
1. A scarcity-free economy
2. The creation of artificial self-improving intelligence via flat-out copying of the human brain
3. Extinction of life
1 will quickly lead to 2 or 3.
A machine that can output its own weight in product in an hour = inevitable deflation
John Smart likes to say that 90% of our paycheck is actually for work done by machines. In an era of nanofactories, 99.99% of our paycheck will come from machines.
Nanofactories could easily make conventional currency obsolete. The increase in travel/colonization ability conferred by the new machinery is incompatible with any historical examples. Go anywhere for cheap, build any type of habitat for cheap.
Will it be scarcity free?
Cyberspace property has value
http://www.moneyweek.com/file/6556/in-2006property-prices-will-soar–in-cyberspace.html
some is more valuable than others. Why?
It depends upon more people wanting one over another.
Time – relative personal productivity
Interaction – other people
Different value for internet domains.
Different ability to monetize. Setting up different businesses in different locations.
The Brand of a location, will be slower to change. The value of the brand.
You would be spending energy and effort and time to make your fake view of the ocean. People would still know that you were faking it. There would still be a different value and exclusiveness (perception exclusiveness) to the real deal.
Though you wrote this last April, I only now just found it during research on post-scarcity economics etc., for a science fiction story I’m writing. I really like the way you envisioned the processes and consequences of PNs. Your scenario is one that authorities/corporations certainly would wish for, but like many of the other commentors, I believe open source and pirated PN systems will flourish.
your idea of protecting the source code for the nanofactory is a good goal. However it is doomed to failure. If even one working nano-factory existed that would mean it is physically possible to build. Therefore it could be built by anyone given time and effort. They do not need any source code. They can create their own plans and device. Also your idea of dolling out energy seems a little off. In a world with nanotechnology energy would be nearly free any artificial valuation could easily be worked around with a solar panel. Thanks
If anyone can build it with enough time and effort, then why haven’t terrorists built nukes yet? Because the requisite tech is hard, and you can keep a lid on it. Everyone who has the tech will play within the rules, and punish lawbreakers before they get far enough to open the Box.
Solar panels provide puny energy. Certainly not enough to level a building, which is the type of energy level I am concerned with.
Good point solar energy probably could not level a building. As to terrorist’s building nukes. North Korea has one thankfully it is not self replicating.
After reading your article and replies… The only logical conclusion to the whole idea is that:
Mankind would have to converge together and create peace or else face extermination. Kind of like the 60′s.
Oh man! Think of the ACID you could create with nanotec, or better yet, you could re-engineer a brain to process even more data, infinite intelligence…… whoa… sounds like we should either commit suicide or build it and commit suicide…..
Interesting, with endless possiblities we are at the mercy of our primitive instincts after all.
With a nanofactory, you are going to have to trust in free market economics, and Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of self-interest. Really, sure people could manufacture AK-47′s and hand grenades, but nanofactories would also eliminate a lot of the scarcity and demand that cause people to use them on one another in the first place.
I think P2P file sharing is a perfect model for the coming CAD/CAM/3D printing revolution. You are going to have dinosaurs trying to protect their antiquated industrialist manufacturing business models, and you are going to have an opensource and hacking community that will swallow them up.
I don’t see much evil becoming of the P2P movement, and I think human beings are generally apt to take the path of least resistance. Why are they going to grenade their neighbor when whatever they want could just as easily be manufactured on their desktop.
Eventually, wouldn’t advanced technology make it possible to create habitats in space? Industrial scale nanofactories building you your own torus shaped world with a tropical archipelago on it? And if you could do it with just a few parameters entered in, and a push of the button, wouldn’t that be easier than invading and conquering people living on the original archipelago?
Well, we certainly don’t want people to get their hands on nuclear weapons.They might bomb Japanese cities with them, or use depleted uranium as ammunition and turn entire nations into radioactive wastelands. They might even write into their doctrine the possible use of low yield tactical nuclear warheads for in the mountains of Afghanistan. Yes its a good thing we keep this technology out of the people’s hands and leave it solely in the hands of our competent, very responsible, and humane governments.
Seriously though, we are on the edge of a post-scarcity society. There will be no laws, there will be no black box technology, there will be no DRM – its already slipping away even as I type.
So what we really need to do is urge our respective governments to stop trying to stifle this and try to usher it in in an orderly manner.
Every time I read DRM I get a bit of a laugh. I live in Thailand, and I find it difficult to find legal copies of anything for sale. I’ve seen some very complicated and almost ludicrous measures put on software to protect it – and its just bypassed.
Even Apple and their iPhone. Talk about closed box technology… We had that before most Americans did, and it was completely unlocked and ready for use on any network here. After a while we stopped buying the iPhone and instead started buying one from China, at a fraction of the cost and no real discernible difference – it was an absolute hit.
We are trying to engineer tomorrow with yesterday’s tools. We need to take a serious look at sociobiology and see what is REALLY going to happen when everything becomes free and governments and nations dissolve into technocratic tribes where the only real currency is ideas, talent, and innovation.
So interesting to see otherwise intelligent people waste their time discussing how to ‘control’ what would be the most disruptive technology ever.
You’re talking about stopping the spread of a machine that can make anything, including itself.
Abundance is already here, all we have to do is be willing to accept it.
What happens when person X abundantly manufactures botulinum toxin-bearing heatseeking microbots and distributes them using the Gulf Stream? Just give up and let that person rule the planet?
“What happens when person X abundantly manufactures botulinum toxin-bearing heatseeking microbots and distributes them using the Gulf Stream? Just give up and let that person rule the planet?”
No, someone quickly invents a seeker nano that takes care of that problem. And everyone builds poison-sniffers so that they don’t get poisoned.
Yes, that does lead to an arms race, but so do most attack and defense technologies.
On the more general subject, the DRM-model proposed in the main article really WON’T last long (relatively) even if non-restricted nano-facs have to be redesigned from base principles by libertarian, open-source hardware hackers. You CANNOT let someone else decide what THEY think you should be able to do.
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This view of a highly regulated DRM future where people are not allowed access source code is very backward-thinking. Open-source is the way forward without regulation. People and machines should be free to regulate themselves. We should be free to create our own medicines and perform surgery on ourselves without needing acquire a licence. Knowledge should not be and will not be limited/restricted. Any supposed dangers/threats/catastrophe regarding lack of regulation will not be problem because lack of regulation will empower everyone equally so that anyone can easily counter any threat in the future. The whole concept of threats is paranoia based on resource-scarcity. In a post-scarcity future all threats will be obsolete. Colossal intelligence is coming. It is funny to see people focusing on the problems of today regarding technology of the future. Problems of today relate to our technological level of today. When our level of technology radically changes in the future the primitive problems and fears of today will be obsolete. Your view of the future seems shockingly authoritarian. Thankfully such controls will not happen. Restrictions on computing power and restrictions on what code computers can process leans towards neo-Luddite techno-phobia.
thanks, I love the part with the glass ;).. wow
Can someone answer this with a simple answer. What exactly would prevent a person from sharing the source code t A bomb on limewire
I meant sharing the source code for an A bomb on limewire
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