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Why The Future Doesn't Need Us
Atec Февраль 29 2008 20:16:19
Книга только для ознакомления
. It didn't make sense, given his
vision, to stay up all night, all the time.
Drexler's vision also led to a lot of good fun. I would occasionally get to describe
the wonders of nanotechnology to others who had not heard of it. After teasing
them with all the things Drexler described I would give a homework assignment of
my own: "Use nanotechnology to create a vampire; for extra credit create an
antidote."
With these wonders came clear dangers, of which I was acutely aware. As I said
at a nanotechnology conference in 1989, "We can't simply do our science and not
worry about these ethical issues."5 But my subsequent conversations with
physicists convinced me that nanotechnology might not even work - or, at least, it
wouldn't work anytime soon. Shortly thereafter I moved to Colorado, to a skunk
works I had set up, and the focus of my work shifted to software for the Internet,
specifically on ideas that became Java and Jini.
Then, last summer, Brosl Hasslacher told me that nanoscale molecular electronics
was now practical. This wasnew news, at least to me, and I think to many people
- and it radically changed my opinion about nanotechnology. It sent me back
toEngines of Creation. Rereading Drexler's work after more than 10 years, I was
dismayed to realize how little I had remembered of its lengthy section called
"Dangers and Hopes," including a discussion of how nanotechnologies can become
"engines of destruction
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