“Foresight Guidelines for Responsible Nanotechnology Development”

– http://www.foresight.org/guidelines/current.html

…document about not using replicating agents – e.g.:

“When molecular manufacturing systems are implemented, they use inherently safe system designs with no autonomous replicators.”

Since this risk is more imagined than real, can we now classify that as a PR exercise?

Aristotle speaks of all of the capabilities of animals, beyond those of plants, as “nutritive in potency.” He makes a comparison to reduction of polygons to triangles: In much the same way that any polygon can be reduced to triangles, all animal capabilities can be reduced to their capability for nutritive activity. That is, they all relate to the single, comprehensive activity of replication of the animal’s kind. In an especially striking passage, Aristotle, usually understated and sober-seeming, makes his point quite dramatically by speaking of all the ends of nutritive activity as an animal’s gods. The animal stretches itself forth to the divine in all the ways it presents itself to the animal: food, shelter, mates, babies, according to the animal’s capabilities and way of life. The animal reaches out toward “what always is and is divine,” and this is “continuity as one in number” and “continuity as one in kind.” But continuity as one in number can’t be maintained indefinitely; thus, all animate activity tends toward continuity as one in kind, or “self-replication,” as some would have it.

Aristotle seems to have given us a starting point for the risk assessment we have in mind: A kind of machine becomes dangerous as it becomes recognizably an animal. It becomes recognizably an animal as it orients its capabilities and activity toward ends that tend to its reproduction. It is fully animal when it is fully at work maintaining itself and being what it must be in order to go on being. A machine kind will be most dangerous when it works as if the continuity and well-being of its kind is its religion.

I’m not 100% sure I understand all this, but if I do, that’s the question, isn’t it. Maybe I’m naive, but it seems to me we’re not in danger of a runaway situation, if we have to keep feeding either acetylene or nanoblocks to the machine. But if we set it up to acquire those things on its own, or if it somehow “learns” how to do so, then perhaps we have a problem.

They don’t? Won’t one of the first things built, be something that automatically makes these ‘containers’ and brings them to the user?