Editor's Blog
Predictions of the future are always wrong. It’s a fact of life every person has to accept. No matter how thorough your research, how good your data, how backed up with state of the art cutting edge technology your predictions are, they will be wrong. Nothing will ever be quite like you predicted, and history is filled with predictions that failed utterly. Even today, with some of the best minds in the world looking forward, and bookshelves filled with their predictions, we know that all of them will be wrong.
Valkyrie Ice
But, like anything, some will be far more wrong than others. In the many years of research I have done into technology, I’ve noticed some common problems that a lot of very educated, very intelligent, and very convincing writers make that more or less ensured that their predictions, despite all the logic and research that backed them up, were never even close to reality. Some of these are more or less unavoidable to some degree, but the more aware you are of these common errors the better you can evaluate how “on track” a prediction might be.
Tunnel Vision
Tunnel Vision is what you get when a futurist focuses on one single technological innovation, and then proceeds to extrapolate how the world will be changed by this innovation. We’ve had a lot of this kind of futurism, and to be honest, it’s often necessary to limit the scope of an article to deal with just the subject under discussion, but excessive focus on a single technological development almost guarantees that the predictions being made will not only be pretty far off the mark, but that five or ten years down the road, even the author may look back and scratch their head and wonder what they were thinking.
The reason this happens is that nothing exists in a vacuum. It doesn’t matter how earthshaking the technological development might be, it’s part of a vast tapestry of technological advance that not only affects how that single tech will be developed, but even whether it will be developed. Case in point, flying cars. The fact is that we have had flying cars since the 1950s. They built the Avrocar in 1958 and the Moller skycar should have been FAA approved for testing well over a decade ago, except that there seems to be some issue about whether the vehicle is a “helicopter” or an “airplane” that has been delaying things. Flying cars are easy. Flying cars that can be driven by the average driver without a year of training, in any weather conditions, and with a high degree of safety are not. The technological innovation “a flying car sized vehicle” was made a long time ago, but the interaction of that innovation with the “real world” failed to result in the “Metropolis” vision of a world where everything flies. And there are thousands of similar examples.
No one can focus on everything, but recognition that there are numerous factors and other developments that can and will affect any prediction can make the difference between a prediction that was merely wrong, and a prediction that is spectacularly wrong.
Ideological Slanting
I’ve said this countless times but it never seems to make an impression on anyone. One Man’s “Evil” is another Man’s “Good.”
Most futurists seem to ignore this fact, but it’s a quick way to take a prediction and turn it into wishful thinking that is never going to come true. To an extent, some bias is unavoidable. We are constantly told from the day we are born what is “Good” and what is “Bad” and as we grow older, some of these biases are so deeply ingrained that it’s nearly impossible to recognize those biases in play. Read a book by a “conservative” and their predictions will inevitably reflect a certain set of ideological viewpoints, one by a “progressive” will reflect another set. And by and large, any predictions made by someone with a ideological bias will tend to overplay any technologies that they see as “supporting” their ideological views, and downplay any technologies that they see as “threatening” their ideological views.
The problem is that these kinds of bias tend to be “invisible” to the readers, because these biases are likely to be shared. To give an example of how deeply hidden a bias can be I’m going describe a historical figure, then ask you to identify him based on that description.
This man commanded armies of conquest, invaded and took possession of several nations, slaughtered their entire populaces, and justified doing it by claiming that his “race” was morally and ethically superior, and that he could not allow their “impure blood” to contaminate his “Chosen People”.
It’s pretty simple and clear cut to decide that this man is “Evil” right? Now, what was his name?
If you said Hitler, you just became an example of a hidden ideological bias. That man was named Joshua, and his genocides are excused because of a shared ideological bias that “he was doing ‘God’s’ work”
The same holds true of most other ideological biases as well. People once believed we would never successfully create airplanes, since God hadn’t given man wings, so we weren’t “meant” to fly. In much the same way, a lot of “futurism” tends to reflect the political leanings of the author, and the more political the author is, the more slanted their predictions will tend to be. Regardless of what political ideology you hold, being aware of the biases that lurk in a prediction will allow you to better evaluate its probability of actually coming true.
Linearism
Kurzweil covered linear thinking pretty well in The Singularity is Near by pointing out that most people cannot really think of things in terms of “exponentials”. This makes it hard for people to understand just how quickly technology can advance. Linearism is related to this way of thinking, in that many futurists tend to think in “straight lines”, like, technology A leads to technology B which leads to technology C, ad infinitum.
The problem is that technology isn’t being developed in a linear fashion, but in a highly PARALLEL fashion. Take nanotechnology for example. Despite Drexler’s repeated statements that diamonoid based nanotech is not the only potential pathway to functional nanotechnology, you will still find large numbers of futurists who think that nanotech development is at a “standstill” and many decades down the road still. The problem is that because they are looking only at a “single development track”, they are missing all the hundreds of technological breakthroughs in DNA manipulation, graphene and carbon nanotube manipulation and creation, stemcell “programming” and even “controllable bacteria” that could be used to manipulate matter on an atomic scale. And by remaining focused on the “holy grail” of nanotech, many futurists fail to see the implications of 3d printing technologies that can build objects a layer at a time. While these technologies may not be “nanotech” in the sense talked about in “Engines of Creation” they are still a massive step towards the “universal fabricators” of nanotech dreams, and they will only become capable, and able to build on smaller and smaller levels over the next decades. Long before we can build the “diamonoid assemblers” of Drexler’s original nanotech descriptions, we are very likely to have machines able to manufacture any arbitrary product, be it organic, inorganic, or whatever, using a variety of techniques.
So basically, the more a futurist follows a linear developmental path, the more likely his predictions are to stray away from reality. A million lines of research are running in parallel, and any of them can cross in ways that could make a technological development go from A to B or even Z in unexpected ways.
Static Worldview
A static worldview is one of the most common failings in futurism. It’s basically what you get when a futurist projects a prediction into a future were nothing changes but the technologies he’s talking about. No matter how “world changing” the technology they talk about may be, they ignore any possible social, political or cultural changes that may come about because of them. Kurzweil talks about VR as if it’s just a glorified video conference call. Drexler carefully avoids any mention of nanotech being used to radically change human appearance. And science fiction writers? You would think that the future is just now with day-glo special effects. A particularly amusing example is writing about advanced medical abilities that would allow DNA modification, and whole sale body replacement, and then talking about “advanced retinal scanners” and “DNA ID security” when they had just described technology that made them utterly useless.
Population is a particularly common static worldview issue I come across. In fact, it was recently brought up in this article on H+. The static worldview makes the assumption that population growth WILL ALWAYS INCREASE AT THE SAME RATE IT DID IN THE PAST. However, the reality is that population is only growing rapidly in less developed areas, and in highly developed countries, it has dropped to mere replacement, or even less than replacement. Study after study has shown that an increase in standards of living leads to lower birthrates, and yet the static worldview of ever increasing exponential population growth remains as strong as ever.
And population is far from the only static worldview that is common among futurists. While an exhaustive list is beyond the scope of this article, being aware of the “unchanging” assumptions that may lie behind a prediction will enable you to better determine how likely it is to be close to “probable”.
Unrealistic Models of Human Nature
And now we come to the single most common error made by futurists. Unrealistic beliefs about humanity itself. That humans are “Noble” or “Evil” or “Good” or “Bad”. The problem is that we are all those things, and more. You see this kind of bias all the time in futurism articles. Either humanity will “naturally do the right thing” and create a utopia, or they will “wallow in stupidity and greed” and create a dystopia.
Yeah, they will. All at the same time. Corporations will seek to make the world a paradise for themselves, which will be a hell for everyone else. The Wealthy will buy up every rejuvenation technology and try to hoard it. The Eugenicists will try to wipe out everyone they feel is “useless” to their visions of society.
And the naturists will try to make their paradisical “sustainable environment” and the Luddites will try to prevent technological change, and etc, etc, ad nausem.
The simple truth is that humans are individuals, and every single one of them has a different view of what “paradise” is. We will undoubtedly see some of the most noble and most ignoble of human behavior on all sides as we walk into the future, and as I pointed out above, what some of us feel is “good” is what others of us view as “evil.”
But the reality is always going to end up somewhere in the middle. It’s going to tilt radically one way or the other for a time, I won’t deny that, but all one has to do is study history to see that no matter how far to one side or the other things go, sooner or later they begin to move back towards the center, though what that “center” is shifts as well.
But whenever a futurist begins painting a prediction in which someone “wins” be aware that they’ve passed far beyond the bounds of objectivity, and become an “Advocate”
Time never stands still, and any prediction that has a “at this point we’ve won/lost” is a prediction that has very little probability of actually coming to pass.
So when you next read a futuristic prediction, or when next you write one, first ask yourself if it has fallen prey to one of these all too easy to make missteps, and always remember, no prediction will ever be right, all that you can hope for is one that is less wrong.
Sign up for the Humanity+ newsletter:
43 Comments
I’ve started reading Nano, which was written in the 1990s, and it’s quite clear that even back then Drexler was talking about adapting the DNA paradigm of going from genes to proteins. This is stuff we’re starting to do now, and Drexler should receive credit for seeing it.
Nano was my introduction to Nanotech, long before I read Engines of Creation, or Nanosystems. It allowed me to recognize quite clearly that EoC was a THOUGHT EXPERIMENT, laying out possibilities, not a RECOMMENDED PATHWAY. He stated that OVER and OVER in EoC, and no-one bothered to listen. The same thing in Nanosystems.
People read what they wanted to read, not what was actually written.
As the ever great Yogi Berra (baseball not Jellystone) once said:
Predicting is hard , especially the future.
What if it turns out that Drexler’s fantasy cannot possibly work because it incorporates mistaken physical assumptions, mainly trying to impose classical physics onto the level where it doesn’t work?
By contrast, look at the rapid progress in technologies which exploit quantum mechanics instead of denying it. For example, the laser, weak cousin to science fiction’s “death ray,” went from a laboratory curiosity in 1960 to a versatile and useful tool in science, engineering and medicine by the 1970′s, precisely because of the rational application of quantum mechanics. The same goes for computer chips, certain kinds of medical imaging, solar panels, LED’s, etc. And nobody has whined that he couldn’t develop technologies to exploit quantum mechanics because of a lack of money, the delay in enabling technologies or people’s blindness about his brilliance. No, the physicists, inventors and engineers just went ahead and did it because they had the right physics working for them.
The mirage of “nanotechnology,” by contrast, has wasted time and resources for the past generation, and has evolved into a form of rent- and status-seeking for people with technical degrees who apparently can’t, or don’t want to, bother with making real stuff.
“What if it turns out that Drexler’s fantasy cannot possibly work”
It can’t. Drexler himself told so. Somehow, transhumanists ignore that and keep waving nanotechnobabble. Valkyrie Ice knows full well that nanotech is physically impossible, but since he is an UFO cult agitator, he obscures truth to get more money for cult and, therefore, for himself. Lies are profitable. Truth is not. Alas…
can Drexler’s original vision work? While it is a lot more unlikely than originally thought it’s just one single path and theoretical framework for promoting research.
But denying that biology, and life itself is a molecular machine is denying reality, and biology seems to have little problem with manipulating atoms. That makes it rather obvious that atomic precision in manufacturing with fairly low rates of error is not just feasible, but is well within possibility.
To sum up your article with one sentence: “everybody is wrong, only I, in my infinite wisdom, is right”. Pride, hubris, arrogance, conceit, vanity – born of ignorance and shallowness. Perhaps we could believe that you are infinitely wise pundit – but you hide behind 3D avatar and fake name, like some shady con artist trying to pull another scam. Sorry, pal, you are selling, but we are not buying.
Dude, Valkyrie Ice is Ben Goertzel’s sockpuppet, everybody knows that.
You missed the first line about how ALL PREDICTIONS are wrong, didn’t you?
That includes mine.
This is simply a list of the most common errors I see made. It doesn’t exclude me from making them myself to some degree or other.
You are right, Valkyrie. Only God knows the future. Too bad other H+ members don’t understand that. Stupid atheists.
The ‘elite’ are not happy with us as we are. They see themselves as gods and promise us, too, divinity through genetic engineering and technologies over time – eg. artificial intelligence, which is many times larger than our natural intelligence – as well as eternal life here on Earth! The transhumanist movement has its origins in elitist and eugenic Julian and Aldous Huxley’s fantasies on the Brave New World – as well as George Orwell’s grim prophecy ’1984′ on a global police state that regulates everything and everyone. In order to prepare the youth for the future transhumanist brainwashing, conditioning by means of psychotropic drugs and chipping, which Obama’s healthcare reform paves the way for, as well as the final goal: to change the world’s population into elements of a global computer where everybody is linked to each other – and who therefore can all be controlled, the entertainment industry has started a massive influence on our youth with trans-and post-humanist ideals of satanistic connotation.
I’d like to see a citation to that effect.
Ed Regis quotes Drexler a few years ago as saying:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/drexler.html
>Sitting on the corner of a bed in a Palo Alto hotel room, Drexler is bloodied but combative. His salt-and-pepper beard and hunched posture make him look older than his 49 years. He speaks in apocalyptic terms. “In a competitive world,” Drexler says, conjuring the frightening prospect of hostile forces wielding gray goo nanoweapons, “suppression of research in molecular nanotechnology is the equivalent of unilateral disarmament.” The outcome, he claims, could be nothing less than “the destruction of the United States as a world power.”
Which sounds like a tamer version of the mad scientist’s warning in a bad science fiction movie: “You fools! By ignoring my warnings, you’ve doomed us all!”
In other words, Drexler meets several of the criteria for a crank according to internet consensus. Specifically,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crank_%28person%29#Common_characteristics_of_cranks
1. Cranks overestimate their own knowledge and ability, and underestimate that of acknowledged experts.
2. Cranks insist that their alleged discoveries are urgently important.
3. Cranks rarely, if ever, acknowledge any error, no matter how trivial.
4. Cranks love to talk about their own beliefs, often in inappropriate social situations, but they tend to be bad listeners, and often appear to be uninterested in anyone else’s experience or opinions.
Hummm. Ben might disagree, but I found that to be rather funny, not to mention a compliment. Thank you.
We both know that you wrote this article just to back up your claim about inevitability of One World Government a.k.a. New World Order a.k.a. Reign of Antichrist a.k.a. Posthumanity. And, contrary to what you just said, you have just made the prediction:
Yeah, they will. All at the same time. Corporations will seek to make the world a paradise for themselves, which will be a hell for everyone else. The Wealthy will buy up every rejuvenation technology and try to hoard it. The Eugenicists will try to wipe out everyone they feel is “useless” to their visions of society. And the naturists will try to make their paradisical “sustainable environment” and the Luddites will try to prevent technological change, and etc, etc, ad nausem. The simple truth is that humans are individuals, and every single one of them has a different view of what “paradise” is. We will undoubtedly see some of the most noble and most ignoble of human behavior on all sides as we walk into the future, and as I pointed out above, what some of us feel is “good” is what others of us view as “evil.” But the reality is always going to end up somewhere in the middle. It’s going to tilt radically one way or the other for a time, I won’t deny that, but all one has to do is study history to see that no matter how far to one side or the other things go, sooner or later they begin to move back towards the center, though what that “center” is shifts as well.
Now, what’s the point in making a prediction if you know that it is wrong? Well, to justify this line, of course:
But whenever a futurist begins painting a prediction in which someone “wins” be aware that they’ve passed far beyond the bounds of objectivity, and become an “Advocate”
The problem is, existance of winners and losers is not a prediction, it is a fact of reality. But “in Teh Future we will have balanced in-the-middle centrism” is just a speculation. We probably will. Or we probably won’t. Somebody will be on the losing side, though – and that’s for sure.
I agree.
Singularity = Antichrist
“And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads” (Revelations, 13:16)
“And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name” (Revelations, 13:17)
Obviously, the mark is subdermal ID implant / RFID tag / microship. Transhumanists are blatant, straight-from-the-Bible-type Satanists, that want humans to be turned into remotely-controlled slaves under the rule of diabolical AI “god” and his servants – filthy rich Freemasons/Illuminati bloodlines, Wall Street banksters, sleazy corrupt politicians, etc. That’s what “human modification” is all about. Rich folks building a lifeboat and trying to get off the ship.
You totally miss the point.
When everybody is linked to each other, people THEMSELVES HAVE MORE CONTROL, and if they would not be linked to each other, they could be more controllable by someone else. Romans said DIVIDE et impera, we say UNITE AND TAKE POWER OF YOURSELVES. This is one bit making all these “world conspiracy theories” total BS.
Pity for your theory that this article was submitted two weeks ago, long prior the one I wrote on Wikileaks.
R.U. published the Wikileaks article the same day I sent it to him only because it was breaking news.
Sorry Anon, you just aren’t important enough for me to bother to write an article just to argue with you.
Hummm. Been reading Chick tracts, I see. Chick publications is one of the primary reasons I stopped being a Baptist.
I highly recommend you read this nice book called God Want’s You Dead, http://www.scribd.com/doc/2532766/God-Wants-You-Dead.
It describes the dangers of allowing an ideology to use you as an expendable host.
You know, the parts about the kings, the slaves, the warriors on horseback who fight with swords, the mythological creatures which attack people. Revelation reads more like a bad fantasy novel than a prediction of “the future.”
As for the dodge that the author had to describe tanks and artillery with inadequate language, read up on Roman tactics and siege technology and you’ll see that he could have compared modern weapons to things the ancient Romans knew about, like the testudo formation, battering rams and ballistae.
The people who’ve worked in molecular biology, genome sequencing and genetic engineering since the 1980′s have something to show for their careers in 2010. (Just ask Craig Venter.) The same goes for the scientists who’ve worked in the experimental study of aging, like Michael R. Rose.
Can you make a similar case for the now middle-aged “nanotechnologists”? And I don’t mean the real chemists and materials scientists who’ve appropriated the “nano” word to make their projects sound futuristic. They know getter than to try to construct Drexler’s physically unallowable nanomachines.
In fact, I don’t know why transhumanist conferences even bother to feature speakers about “nanotechnology” any more. They might as well give the microphone to boosters of imminent breakthroughs in jet packs, flying cars and space colonies. A Drexlerite looks like a middle-school science fair contestant compared with an evidence-based scientist like Rose.
…except there was no Internet and Wikipedia back there, or mass education for that matter, so he had to be high-ranked military officer to use language like that. And did Romans had jet fighters? Since it’s what description of “locusts” fits like a glove. Of course, that can be all just a coincidence. Or maybe not. The only way we will ever know for sure is post factum. Until then, it is just the matter of (un)belief.
I didn’t say I believe in God or something. However, ruling elite DOES. Otherwise, they wouldn’t bother making all these rituals with sacrifices and stuff. Discussing supernatural deities is one thing, discussing quite flesh-and-bone Satan-worshipping guys running the show is the other. Even if there is no God or Satan, these guys are surely real. Unless somebody doctored all those hundreds of YouTube video leaks.
>What if it turns out that Drexler’s fantasy cannot possibly work because it incorporates mistaken physical assumptions, mainly trying to impose classical physics onto the level where it doesn’t work?<
But in ‘Unbounding The Future’ there is a chapter called ‘The Molecular World’ in which the author imagines being shrunk to molecular size. It seems to anticipate many of the points raised by Richard Jones in his criticism of Drexlerian Nanotech.
In the IEEE Spectrum special edition on the Singularity, Jones wrote:
“This is a world dominated by the fluctuations of constant Brownian motion, in which components are ceaselessly bombarded by fast-moving water molecules and flex and stretch randomly”.
And in ‘Unbounding The Future’, Drexler wrote:
‘Your skin is tickled by small impacts, then battered by what feel like hard-thrown marbles. Your arms and legs feel as though they are caught in turbulence, pulling to and fro, harder and harder”.
Jones wrote:
“The van der Waals force, which attracts molecules to one another, dominates, causing things in close proximity to stick together”.
Drexler wrote: “The ground hits your feet, you stumble and stick to the ground like a fly on flypaper”.
“stuck tight to the ground by molecular stickiness”.
Jones asked: “What’s to protect a nanobot assailed by particles glomming onto its surface and clogging up its gears?”.
Drexler wrote: “All around, air molecules… whiz about as thick as raindrops in a storm, but they are the size of marbles and bounce in all directions. They’re also sticky in a magnetlike way, and some are skidding around on the wall of the nanocomputer”.
So why would Drexler, who clearly is aware of molecular stickiness, brownian motion, and surfaces assailed by particles, then proceed to outline a manufacturing system that is completely infeasible because there is molecular stickiness, brownian motion and surfaces being assailed by particles? It seems like a decidedly odd thing to do, akin to someone understanding that the laws of thermodynamics rule out perpetual motion and then going ahead and sketching a rough design for a perpetual motion machine, anway.
>The transhumanist movement has its origins in elitist and eugenic Julian and Aldous Huxley’s fantasies on the Brave New World<
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has its origins in Nazi rocket-engine expertise. For instance, Werner von Braun was a member of the Nazi party, a comissioned SS officer, and he was the director of the newly-formed Marshall Space Flight Center, where he worked as the chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle.
Therefore, anyone who is interested in space exploration, astronomy, astrophysics or cosmology is also a Nazi and they are hell-bent on Final Solutions and the Thousand Year Reich!!!
Uhhhhh no. The fact that the Mercury and Apollo space programs relied quite heavily on Nazi scientists does NOT make every astronaut, astrophysicist, astronomer, and cosmologist a closet Nazi as well. That would be a ridiculous thing to claim.
Frankly, it is just as ludicrous to claim that the modern H+ is based on eugenics, just because its roots can be traced back to the writings of Julian and Aldous Huxley. There is nothing eugenicist about advocating the use of science and technology to enable the individual to guide their self-development towards ideals they set for themselves.
>I’d like to see a citation to that effect.< If you mean Drexler saying his nano cannot work, I think Anon was referring to this passage from Engines Of Creation 2.0:
"In Engines of Creation, I pictured molecular manufacturing using "replicating assemblers" to build things, including more machines like themselves. I explained why sensibly designed machines of this sort would use and require specially prepared materials and be "useful but harmless". Further study showed that this approach would be needlessly complex and inefficient".
http://www.kurzweilai.net/engines-of-creation-20-letter-from-author
>this article was submitted two weeks ago
You are obviously lying.
Prove it.
I just finished physicist James Kakalios’s popular book, “The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics,” which gives a sense of how the real world of atoms behaves thoroughly unlike Drexler’s clankety-clank fantasy of nanomachines. Yet by exploiting the real behavior of atoms, we get lasers, solar electric panels, LED’s, computer chips, computer memory, medical imaging and other technologies which would have sounded like science fiction 50 years ago. And we’ve made progress in these technologies within our lifetimes, without having to hear the kinds of excuses offered by “nanotechnologists” for their own nonperformance, despite their fancy computer models.
So, then I take it that all the evidence to the contrary that biology manipulates atoms, and the various experiments confirming that molecules can be precisely placed, and all the various self assembling experiments that have succeeded in making molecular “machine parts” is all just made up nonsense.
Oh, and carbon nanotubes can’t be used in circuits, and graphene doesn’t enable the creation of circuits using single atom wide “nanoribbon” wires, and so on and so on.
Mark, You’re using the throughly refuted “Smalley Sticky Fingers” arguments. And ignoring all the research that has been done in nanoscale construction.\
I’m not disputing a single thing you are saying about quantum physics, and neither is anyone else who is actually working in nanoelectronics, self assembly, dna engineering, and many other fields that are working at the nanoscale. I’m simply saying that despite those issues, progress is being made that you are deliberately ignoring.
And Hal Lindsy also predicted that China would destroy Israel in the late 70′s.
Funny how no one who uses “The Late Great Planet Earth” as a reference ever bothers to note that fact.
Yo, R.U. can you confirm that I submitted this article on Date: Sun, 21 Nov 2010 14:47:11 -0600?
Not that this guy is likely to believe either of us since he’s got his paranoia telling him I’m out to get him somehow, but, what the hey.
You are missing the point entirely. It’s about the dangers of letting an ideology control you.
Which is something you appear to need very badly, since you are doing just that with these posts.
You are a hypocrite. I don’t follow any ideology. Of course, as any human, I subconsciously have narrow worldview, but there is no specific doctrine I consciously try to shoehorn my perception into. However, YOU are a transhumanist, and transhumanism is an ideology (I would say “cult”, but whatever). You position yourself as a follower of specific doctrine, yet I do not. Yet you accuse me in being ideologically-motivated. It’s pot calling kettle black.
Who is Hal Lindsy?
@ Valkyrie
I think you are being a little unfair. Nobody suggests that we cannot exploit phenomenon at the nanoscale in order to produce a range of remarkable products. What the critics are attaking is the idea that you can take the kind of automated assembly line associated with modern car factories (think of those robot arms picking and placing parts deliveved by conveyer belts) and shrinking it down to molecular-sized robotic arms picking up and positioning molecular fragments.
An analogy might be made with birds. Yes, you can point to birds as existence proof of flying machines. But you cannot scale a bird up to the size of a vehicle capable of carrying a human and have a gigantic ornithopter that takes off by flapping its wings.
Actually Extie, the ability to create “molecular assembly lines” is precisely what I am pointing out SHOULD NOT BE DISMISSED.
Will it work exactly like Drexler predicted in EoC? No. Can the original design for the “nanoarm” that Drexler proposed in “Nanosystems” work according to the exact principles that he laid out? No.
But precise Mechanosynthesis CAN BE DONE through a variety of methods. DNA IS PRECISE MECHANOSYNTHESIS. It is a PRECISELY CREATED chain of atoms, in which EACH ATOM is placed with vanishingly low rates of error. To dismiss this as “Not Nanotech” is to deliberately blind oneself to the facts, and base an objection on blind faith in an ideology, not reality.
Nature proves it can be done. We are proof of concept. Period. We might have to start out duplicating the same methods and techniques of biology to get started, but we will not stop there.
Mark is basing his objections on some extremely old and worn out arguments from nearly 15 years ago. These objections were popularized by Richard Smally, a former Bush “technology advisor” and formed the heart of a informal and indirect debate between Smally and Drexler at the turn of the century. The objections Mark has raised were quite thoroughly answered. EOC 2.0 is available online at Wowio ( http://www.wowio.com/users/product.asp?BookId=503 ) and the Drexler Smally Debate is reprinted in full as an appendix.
The guy most people who try and compare Revelations to modern war machines are quoting, whether they realize it or not.
Look him up.
Your ideology is “Elites rule the world. Anyone who suggests that elites will not always rule the world must be attacked to defend my worldview. Any advances in technology must reinforce my worldview. Anything which challenges my worldview must be attacked, ridiculed, and dismissed.”
It’s the same basic rhetoric of all conspiracy theorists. You just use “Elites” instead of “Illuminati” or “NWO” or “Masons” or “Jews”.
Thanks.
PS: About China destroying Israel… It’s yet to happen. China is oil importer, it needs Middle East resources that are currently under Western control. Sooner or later China will align itself with Arabs, just like the Soviets did. It’s economics.
>Elites rule the world
Elites rule, because elites = rulers. By definition. Claiming that elites don’t exist also mean that there is no form of rule, and therefore no governments, societies, clans, families, clubs, organizations, etc, H+ included. And all structures to think of – including your body, which is ruled by its neural system. The existance of elites/rulers, just like the existance of winners and losers, is obsvervable fact of reality. Unless you are a solipsist and question existance of reality itself, of course.
And if you are referring to the claim “single elite clan rules the entire world”, well, such claim is false of course. Freemasons/Illuminati rule the Western world (an observable fact), but the Western world doesn’t rule everybody else (another observable fact). Not that they don’t try – that’s what all this “world federation”, “single world government”, “new world order”, “eternal brotherhood of man” was all about. However, neither Chinese, nor Russians will let this come to pass.
I will believe if R.U. confirms it.
I thought I’d done this already. Just shows that even I get confused by this posting/approving messages process. Yes, indeed I had Valkyrie’s piece long in advance of his other thing about Wikileaks which I thought was timely and posted the very night I received it. So the Wikileaks article came second but went up first…
R.U.
These comments crack me up.
OK. Thanks for clearing the matter. I admit I was wrong.