Mike Linksvayer

Mike Linksvayer at

@cwebber@identi.ca Agreed. I haven't really looked but don't know that any non-evil entity is working on the problem, and that's very bad. I occasionally like to mention one idea from 2001 - https://www.foresight.org/SrAssoc/spring2001/challenges.html#DesAhd 

Challenge #32: Open Arms

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the early days of nanotechology is the prospect that it may be easier to design offensive nanotech weapons than to design the defenses against them — possibly producing a time gap in which only the offensive weapons exist, with no defenses available.
Although it has not been proved, this seems likely to be the case...without proactive work on our part.
This potential time gap is not due to a difficulty in manufacturing the defenses — it would result from the longer time needed to design the more complex defensive systems, especially since the assumption is that this work cannot be started until the offensive systems are already built and available to study.

Senior Associate Mark Miller has proposed a possible solution for this problem, termed "Open Arms." This would be an open source-style project to "design-ahead" both the offensive and defensive weapons in parallel, thereby eliminating the dangerous timegap between when the two can actually be built.The risky part of this proposal is that the offensive weapons designs would be public knowledge — at least among those within the project.

Do you find the Open Arms proposal a plausible one, either as is or with modifications you suggest? If so, should Foresight actively advocate it — even sponsor it? If not, can the group come up with another idea on how to close the postulated dangerous time gap between offensive and defensive nanotech weapons availability?

Christopher Allan Webber likes this.