An Interview on Nanoweapons

NewsMax ^ | Friday, Sept. 26, 2003 | Ryan Mauro | Lev Navrozov

[tortoise]

In 1985 I did some contract work for a company that claimed to be researching "artificial intelligence" along with a lot of other buzzwords. They had a guy at the front desk guy working the phones full time giving this line of bull to potential investors and writing up press releases. It was sad because I knew one of the programmers who told me how their demos were all faked, etc. They took the money and ran.

What does your anecdote have to do with anything? Rhetorical fallacy is NOT a compelling argument. So you worked for criminals, but what does that have to do with the rest of the world?

[tortoise]

Like I say, though, I don't know if they really believe in it or if the people who research nanotechnology are sincere.

Seeing as how most of the money is coming from millionaires and billionaires who also happen to be engineering executives, they are fully competent to evaluate the technology. The people putting many of these companies togethers are people who've accomplished real things and are highly respected for their contributions to the pool of human knowledge and technology.

More to the point, who exactly are they ripping off? A lot of these companies are funded primarily by the scientists and executives that created them, and the credentials of many of the people involved are as good as they come. In other words, the only people who are going to lose if it fails are the people who created the companies in the first place. It sounds like clean American capitalism to me.

[Dan Evans]

My point is that there are a lot of criminals in the world. There are about two million of them in jail, but those are just the dumb ones, the ones that got caught.

You can seldom recognize a smart criminal by talking to him. He knows that other people want to know if he's a crook so he does everything he can to appear to be honest so he can take your money. He might even have a legitimate Ph.D but it could come from a diploma mill, the company may be registered with the SEC but that doesn't mean anything. The SEC and the FTC have no way to insure that businessmen are competent or honest.

Criminals in business are not rare and it is nearly impossible to prosecute them. It happens all the time.

So you need to understand:

1) There is money to be made in fooling people.
2) There are millions of criminals willing to do it.
3) The risk of getting caught is nil.

That means you have to make a judgement about whether what they are telling you is true. You have to use your head. Evaluate the source, if you can, and what they are saying.

Regarding self-replicating machines. We have machines, industrial robots, that build other machines. But we're talking dozens of robots each performing one specific task. Can you imagine how impossible it would be to build a machine out of Tinker-Toys and Lego blocks that would make a copy of itself? Can you imagine how impossible it would be to do that on a molecular scale?

[Dan Evans]

Why would having "credentials" mean that a person is honest? Men with "credentials" have ripped off people before and it will happen again. It happens even more today because schools and professional organizations are a lot more tolerant of cheating and amoral behavior. Look at how Mr. & Mrs. Clinton ripped off that bank and then went on to the White House.

 I have no doubt at all that there are people in this field who completely fund their own firms. That would make them appear to be honest. But I suspect they aren't really doing research, they are just hyping the field. Although the lobbying has to be done with private funds, the big money comes from NASA and the NSF grants.

The folks getting ripped off are the ones who pay for people (mostly government employees) to go to the seminars, conferences and tutorials for $1000.00 a head. In other words -taxpayers. The folks who will be getting ripped will be the ones eager to get in on the ground floor by investing in those other start-ups run by the nano-guru's brother-in-law.

 But the big con will be when they convince congress to fund a "Manhattan Project" for this stuff. Then there will be no limit. It will be classified with no peer review of the "science".

[anymouse]

Nano-nano.

[Dan Evans]

The dotcom bust was not just a market bubble caused by bidding up the price of stock. There were some 800 companies that went broke. Some went broke because they were mismanaged or badly conceived but likely some of them were fake companies. The firms you worked for turned out to be legitimate because the chances of getting a job in a fake company are nil -- fake companies don't hire a lot of people, they just rake in a lot of cash.

The dotcom crash was the inevitable result of a new industry shakeout just like the electrical industry in the first part of the last century. Crooks are attracted to that climate because there are a lot of people don't know what they are doing.

However there are other industries, like cold fusion, AI, and now nanotechnology that are almost exclusively run by charlatans.

[tortoise]

However there are other industries, like cold fusion, AI, and now nanotechnology that are almost exclusively run by charlatans.

Whatever. Empty assertions don't carry much weight, and that you are only vaguely familiar with the field itself isn't exactly bolstering your position either.

[Sabertooth]

ChiComs and SciComs...

[Paul C. Jesup]

Dan Evans, it isn't just figuring out something be mass-producing it.

By the way, nano-scale technology is already here in curcuitry in store bought CPUs, which scale is measured down to 13 microns.

[DoughtyOne]

Thanks for the ping. If the nanotec folks could create something like this, it seems to me it wouldn't be a very good idea to use it. Replicating nano-assemblers could run-away destroying far more than nuclear weapons.

[Rudder]

...destroying enemy human beings as cancerous polyps could be developed--leaving the nation's infrastructure intact to be repopulated.

ewww!

Thanks for the ping.

the first could build a duplicate copy of itself. Those two then become four, become eight, and so on. This compounding capital base could lead to a massive and decisive force within days.

What do these little beasties eat, or are they powered by a perpetual motion device?