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The only realistic alternative I see is relinquishment: to limit development of the technologies that are too dangerous, by limiting our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge.
Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, in the April issue of Wired
Bill Joy is nobody's Luddite. As co-founder and chief scientist of Sun Microsystems in Palo Alto, California, he can match technophile credentials with anybody on the planet. So when he argued that research into nanotechnology and other fields should be stopped before it wipes out humanity, humanity took notice.
To the legion of chemists, physicists, and materials scientists who spend their lives trying to understand and manipulate matter at the nanoscale, Joy's warning-published in the April issue of Wired magazine-felt like a bucket of ice water poured over their heads. Others had raised similar concerns for decades. But Joy's status among the digerati tent his allegations new heft. His fears of nanotechnology, genetic engineering, and robotics research were broadcast worldwide by news organizations including the Los Angeles Times and CNN.
Other voices joined the chorus of woe. In June, a group of nanotechnology aficionados released what they called the Foresight guidelines. Like Joy, they raised the specter of nanotechnology out of control. But rather than simply calling for a halt to research, they outlined measures they said would encourage governmental oversight of nanotech's development. Such supervision, they argued, could help prevent accidental catastrophe, much as the National Institutes of Health's guidelines on recombinant DNA technology helped the emerging biotech industry avoid accidental releases of genetically modified organisms.
At first, stunned nanoscience researchers quietly shrugged off the concerns. But more recently, they've begun to fight back, arguing vehemently at meetings that what Joy and others fear is at best implausible and more likely plain wrong. "The research community needs to divorce itself from the lunatic fringe," says Steven Block, a biophysicist at Stanford University in Palo Alto.
These fears date back to the 1986 book Engines of Creation, by K. Eric Drexler. In it, Drexler, a theoretician and chair of a nanotech think tank called the Foresight Institute, paints a picture of...