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

[Dave Farber <farber@cis.upenn.edu>]

>
>
>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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