🚀 go-pugleaf

Nanotech is certain to cause tremendous political upheaval if the
appropriate steps are not taken in advance.

For example, what if nanotech makes it possible for one man to become
dictator of the planet.  The first man to realize how to do this may
choose to do it in order to prevent anyone else from doing it.  Even if
Conra ...er the first man decides not do it, the second or the third man
will.  He'll have to do it in order to keep someone like Robert Morris
(the author of the Internet worm) from using nanotechnology to perform
massive destruction just for the hell of it.

Doesn't this imply that as soon as the end goal of nanotechnology gets
within sight, the government or the military will have to snatch it out
of the hands of the technologists and wield it for their own purposes?
They will be forced to do this, because if they don't, some Shi'ite or
some undergraduate will sooner or later get his hands on the technology
and use it for their own destructive purposes.

The kind of political control that will be needed will be very severe indeed.
Nuclear technology, though awesome, has never needed this kind of control
because the infrastructure needed to make a bomb from scratch is so immense.
But stealing nanotech might be as simple as dipping the point of a pencil
into a test tube full of nanoassemblers.  Using a stolen nanoassembler might
be as simple as plugging in an interface card into an IBM PC, and loading
a communications program.  (Here I'm assuming that control of a nanoassembler
might be as simple as shining a properly modulated beam of light on it,
for example an LED controlled by a register bit on the bus of a personal
computer.)  If nanotech experiments
can be done in the kitchen, the government will need to have the power
to enter and control the goings-on in every kitchen in the world.

So nanotech represents the greatest threat to individual liberty yet
devised. It will put events in motion which will bring about an oligarchy,
if not a personal dictatorship.  And this will not be a dictatorship
limited to the three score and ten of a man's life in the pre-nanotechnology
era.  It will be a dictatorship which will last for the rest of man's 
existence.