Tin eye

His Virtualness thinks that nanotechnology and other futurist doomsayers like Michael Crichtton have it wrong, as he notes in this casual aside: "the scary Crichton scenarios are easy to debunk (see this Crichton debunking by Freeman Dyson, for example)"

I think the professor works too hard to read, sometimes. It's hardly a debunking at all. Dyson refers to Bill Joy's famous essay, Why the Future Doesn't Need Us, and his only arguments are that we haven't caused much known harm in 25 years from biotechnology, and the power structure was afraid of the printing press, too.

Color me unimpressed.

The most important thing he says is "I assume that the basic message . . . is true. I assume that the growth of biological knowledge during the century now beginning will bring grave dangers to human society and to the ecology of our planet. The rest of this review is concerned with the question of what we should do to mitigate the dangers."

The second important thing is how to respond, of which the most important elementn is "Relinquish pursuit of that knowledge and development of those technologies so dangerous that we judge it better that they never be available."

Yeah, well, good luck. The only real response is an escalating arms race, so that whatever harmful, individuality-destroying technologies develop are countered by other technologies.

On that, you can color me pessimistic. (And in any case, you can find a much more thoughtful presentation than Dyson's here, at least in outline.)