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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