Of course the question of whether nanobots will reduce the biosphere to “grey goo” only in works of science fiction is open to debate…
Every once in a while, I find myself devilishly advocating technological improvement to some aspect of everyday life that irritates someone. For example, my best friend Barry and I mix it up over whether or not people need safety devices in cars. I can paraphrase his take on the topic like so:
“Idiots buy SUVs, minivans, and Volvos and because think they are safe, they drive like idiots. They ought to be forced to pay attention to the road, stay focused, and not rely on all those electronic nannies because it just makes them less competent drivers. When people drive a car that forces them to think, they drive better.”
A logic that I partially agree with. But at the same time, I can’t advocate closing the door on life saving technologies like air bags, crumple zones, and rollover protection because, as I always point out, not all car accidents are caused by incompetent driving.
At that point, we debate the percentages, but since neither of us ever feels like digging up stats from the NHTSA, we always end up agreeing to disagree.
Similarly, Heather loves to pour cold water on any ideas I put forth that indicate that humans and machines are going to “merge” in the near future in to cyborgs. It’s a future that makes her tingle in a bad way, sort of like Spider-Man’s spidey sense. A common theme in her response to such ideas is that it will, ultimately, destroy our humanity to become dependent on machines.
To which I say that it isn’t unusual for a species to use its environment to “create” enhancements for itself. We don’t grow shells like snails, but we do shelter ourselves in structures that we build, much like wasps building a nest out of mud…
…or how trapdoor spiders adapt their environment to assist them in catching prey.
But that said, there is a justifiable concern about some applications of technology. For example, there are legitimate concerns about the use of genetically engineered food. Of course, when our pigs have to live in high-tech clean rooms, it makes you wonder if we’re on the right track…
So despite my love of technology, and my belief that we have a biological imperative to use technology to improve the human condition — and not to lose our humanity in the process! — I periodically like to dredge through an archive I keep of articles I enjoyed reading for this gem by a fellow former employee of Sun Microsytems, Bill Joy (a.k.a, the guy who created the vi editor UNIX geeks know and love… unless they use emacs, which was ported to UNIX by another Sun guy, James Gosling who is also known as the father of the Java programming language).
Why the future doesn’t need us.
Our most powerful 21st-century technologies – robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech – are threatening to make humans an endangered species.
By Bill Joy
From the moment I became involved in the creation of new technologies, their ethical dimensions have concerned me, but it was only in the autumn of 1998 that I became anxiously aware of how great are the dangers facing us in the 21st century. I can date the onset of my unease to the day I met Ray Kurzweil, the deservedly famous inventor of the first reading machine for the blind and many other amazing things.
Ray and I were both speakers at George Gilder’s Telecosm conference, and I encountered him by chance in the bar of the hotel after both our sessions were over. I was sitting with John Searle, a Berkeley philosopher who studies consciousness. While we were talking, Ray approached and a conversation began, the subject of which haunts me to this day.
I had missed Ray’s talk and the subsequent panel that Ray and John had been on, and they now picked right up where they’d left off, with Ray saying that the rate of improvement of technology was going to accelerate and that we were going to become robots or fuse with robots or something like that, and John countering that this couldn’t happen, because the robots couldn’t be conscious.
While I had heard such talk before, I had always felt sentient robots were in the realm of science fiction. But now, from someone I respected, I was hearing a strong argument that they were a near-term possibility. I was taken aback, especially given Ray’s proven ability to imagine and create the future. I already knew that new technologies like genetic engineering and nanotechnology were giving us the power to remake the world, but a realistic and imminent scenario for intelligent robots surprised me.
It’s easy to get jaded about such breakthroughs. We hear in the news almost every day of some kind of technological or scientific advance. Yet this was no ordinary prediction. In the hotel bar, Ray gave me a partial preprint of his then-forthcoming bookThe Age of Spiritual Machines, which outlined a utopia he foresaw – one in which humans gained near immortality by becoming one with robotic technology. On reading it, my sense of unease only intensified; I felt sure he had to be understating the dangers, understating the probability of a bad outcome along this path.
I found myself most troubled by a passage detailing a dystopian scenario:
THE NEW LUDDITE CHALLENGE
First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained.
If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can’t make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all the power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.
On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite – just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite. Or, if the elite consists of soft-hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone’s physical needs are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes “treatment” to cure his “problem.” Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or make them “sublimate” their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they will most certainly not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals.1
In the book, you don’t discover until you turn the page that the author of this passage is Theodore Kaczynski – the Unabomber.
…
Click here to read the rest on Wired.com.
Of course, if all of this deep thought about the impending nanotech apocalypse makes bothers you, take comfort in the fact that it is also the basis for a cute videogame. 
Mmmmm! Our planet is delicious!