FC: Dangers of Bill Joy's nanotech-thinking, from National Review

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

********

Date: Thu, 06 Jul 2000 13:28:08 -0400
From: Glenn Reynolds <gharlanr () bellsouth net>
To: declan () wired com
Subject: Nat'l Review Online on Nanotech

FYI, a piece on the dangers of Bill Joy's "relinquishment" approach,
inspired by Ed Regis' book on biowar.

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment070500c.html

   Wait a Nano-Second
   Crushing nanotechnology would be a terrible thing.

   By Glenn H. Reynolds, professor of law, U. of Tennessee, & Dave Kopel,
   Independence Institute

   Richard Nixon was re-elected to the Presidency twenty-eight
   years ago. That's 112 years in Internet Time, for which three months
   equal one year of ordinary time. Does the Nixon era have any lessons
   to teach us about high technology in the twenty-first century? In
   particular, nanotechnology, an emerging hot-button issue?

   Absolutely -- if you read Ed Regis's excellent history of biological
   warfare, The Biology of Doom. Regis's account of the British and
   American biological warfare program, from 1940 to its abandonment in
   1972 when the Biological Weapons Convention was signed, is a
   fascinating and chilling one. Though Regis manages to give a readers
   an understanding of why scientists and military leaders thought the
   biowar program was important, the story is so disturbing that the
   program's eventual abandonment at the orders of President Nixon comes
   as no small relief.

   But not for long. Because it turns out that the treaty outlawing
   biological warfare had exactly the opposite result that its sponsors
   intended. Before the United States, the Soviet Union, and other
   nations agreed to a ban on biological warfare, both the U.S. and
   Soviet programs proceeded more or less in tandem, with both giving
   biowar a low priority. But after the ban, the Soviet Union drastically
   increased its efforts. (So did quite a few smaller countries, most of
   them signatories of the Convention.)

   With biological warfare outlawed, and the Americans likely to abide by
   the agreement, the stakes were much higher: now it was possible for
   the Soviets to obtain a decisive advantage. As a result, the USSR
   created a new research organization, called Biopreparat, and
   drastically increased deadly disease research. The Russians not only
   expanded their stocks of traditional biological warfare agents -- like
   anthrax, tularemia, and such -- but also "weaponized" smallpox,
   accumulating huge stockpiles of the virus, specially bred for
   virulence and lethality. (Those stockpiles still exist, making the
   "triumph" of smallpox eradication a rather contingent accomplishment).

   This example is relevant today, because we are beginning to see calls
   for relinquishment of another technology. In this case, it is
   nanotechnology, a technology that so far exists only in computer
   models and some very early practical work. Bill Joy of Sun
   Microsystems, of course, has famously argued that we should consider
   abandoning this technology before its birth, to spare the world the
   potential consequences of its misuse. (Perhaps that will save Joy's
   boss Scott McNealy from having to hector the Department of Justice to
   bring a frivolous antitrust lawsuit against the first company to
   outcompete Sun in nanotechnology.)

   Though Joy's argument has so far met with a fairly cool reception --
   not only from techno-commentators, but even from techno musicians --
   it is worth considering what might happen if his ideas start to take
   hold. That is not so farfetched a scenario, despite today's
   high-flying technology sector. Europe is already facing a growth of
   neo-Luddite sentiment -- visible in things like opposition to genetic
   engineering. In California and the rest of the nation, Ralph Nader's
   Green Party is doing pretty well by offering Luddites a genuine
   anti-technology choice, rather than an echo of pro-business
   Republicrats.

     More generally, Luddite intellectuals are successfully propagating
   "the precautionary principle," which states that we should never try
   anything new unless we are certain that it is absolutely safe. Look
   for the precautionary principle to start showing up in EPA regulations
   around 2002 if there's a Democratic President, or around 2007 in case
   of a Republican one that follows in the footsteps of George Bush III's
   EPA head William Reilly.

   Crushing nanotechnology would be a terrible thing. In fact, the
   example of biological warfare offers the depressing possibility that
   adopting Joy's "relinquishment" approach to nanotechnology might
   actually make things worse. First of all, relinquishment would deprive
   us of the potential benefits of benign nanotechnology, such as cheap
   space travel, cancer cures, bodies that stay younger and healthier for
   longer. Even worse, "relinquishment" would probably accelerate the
   progress of destructive nanotechnology. In a world where
   nanotechnology is outlawed, outlaws would have an additional incentive
   to develop nanotechnology. And given that research into nanotechnology
   -- like the cruder forms of biological and chemical warfare -- can be
   conducted clandestinely on small budgets and in difficult-to-spot
   facilities, the likelihood of such research going on is rather high.
   Terrorists would have the greatest incentive possible to develop
   nanotechnologies far more deadly than old-fashioned biological
   warfare. This makes Joy's relinquishment argument hard to swallow. At
   the very least, it suggests that Joy and those who agree with him need
   to step up to the plate and make some more sophisticated arguments. No
   one doubts that Joy and the rest have good intentions. But as the
   example of biological warfare illustrates, good intentions, even when
   embodied in popular agreements to abandon a technology, don't
   necessarily have good consequences.

   There is, however, a bright side. As Ed Regis also notes, the story of
   biological warfare research is a sinister one in many ways. But, in
   fact, all those dreadful weapons were never used. Why that is the case
   has puzzled many people, but the best argument seems to be one set
   forth by Regis: political and cultural factors that militated against
   the use of biological weapons trumped the technological factors that
   made them possible.

   [...]

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