Notes .

"The Twenty-first Century technologies - genetics, nanotechnologies and robotics - are so powerful that they can spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses. Most dangerously, for the first time, these accidents and abuses are widely within the reach of individuals or small groups. They will not require large facilities or rare raw materials. Knowledge alone will enable the use of them. Thus we have the possibility not just of weapons of mass destruction but of Knowledge-enabled Mass Destruction (KMD), this destructiveness hugely amplified by the power of self replication." - taken from the article, 'Why the future doesn't need us', by Bill Joy, Wired Magazine, April 2000 - as quoted by John Gray in 'Straw Dogs' (Granta, 2002).

Some more quotes from John Gray's 'Straw Dogs':

  • "Science enables humans to satisfy their needs. It does nothing to change them - they are no different today from what they have always been. There is progress in knowledge, but not in ethics. This is the verdict both of science and history, and the view of every one of the worlds religions...The advance of knowledge deludes us into thinking we are different from other animals, but our history shows us that we are not."
  • "Writing gave humans the power to preserve their thoughts and experiences from time...whereby humans can enlarge their experience beyond the limits of one generation...At the same time it has allowed them to invent a world of abstract entities and mistake them for reality..."

Nanotechnology is defined as anything created between one and a hundred nanometers in size. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter- almost at the atomic scale. The first uses of the technology were in creating new alloys and coatings, but in the early 2000's scientists and engineers began talking about the possibilities of the next generation. Governments and corporations have been investing billions in research and development programs to create increasingly sophisticated machines with moving parts, and eventually robots and computers- all so small they would be undetectable without an electron microscope pointing precisely at them. At the time, the talk was of medical applications - remote controlled or autonomous 'nano bots' sent into human bodies to repair organs or tissue from the inside.

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