Lev Navrozov
Friday, June 25, 2004

Story Continues Below

You see, Bill Joy, the Silicon Valley deity, is not only a dazzling success and nothing but.

Four years ago in an article he wrote for Wired magazine, Joy declared that the headlong race in biotechnology and nanotechnology might prove catastrophic.

See how complex, multidimensional and self-contradictory human nature, or at least the nature of this American scientist or technologist, is? On the one hand, he is a Silicon Valley deity – success, money, esteem verging on worship. On the other hand, here we read what the Silicon Valley deity wrote for Wired magazine! Gartner shows to what extremes of free thinking the thoughts of Joy go:

Joy has been especially provocative [!] on the threat of tiny self-replicating “nanobots” reducing all earthly matter – us included – to dust.

Actually, Joy repeats what Eric Drexler, the founder of nanotechnology, wrote 18 or even 23 years ago, but, according to the New York Times Magazine article, Joy is “especially provocative” in this statement of his in 2004.

Yet there is a difference between Drexler’s statements and Joy’s “especially provocative” reminiscences of them 18 or 23 years later.

Every psychiatrically normal adult can realize that if “tiny self-replicating nanobots” may be dangerous to the population in a friendly environment (such as a lab or a test in Nevada), they may be infinitely more dangerous if used by a powerful enemy country as a weapon to annihilate the United States or the West as a whole.

But here Joy has a mental block, along with the New York Times Magazine. An enemy country? A war? An enemy country’s annihilation of the United States?

The United States recently faced one enemy country – Iraq. Hussein had a nervous breakdown when the Coalition’s invasion of Iraq began last year and never recovered. A war? There could only be a war against Iraq before and after Hussein’s nervous breakdown. A weapon? There could only be Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction,” once fantasized by the CIA.

Hence the New York Times Magazine article resembles a view of sexual love as expressed by a child between 3 and 5. He or she may say “Love is strong as death” if his or her uncle is prone to quote this saying from King Solomon’s “Song of Songs.” But the child may not know what role sexual love plays in procreation. Joy and the New York Times Magazine do not know what role molecular nanotechnology may play in the development in China of post-nuclear superweapons in seven fields.

Actually, the revelations of Joy, which he has been intending to express in a book of his (and a publisher signed a “six-digit advance” contract with him) do not go beyond a film that is being made out of Michael Crichton’s sci-fi novel “Prey”: American scientists were engaged in a molecular nano test in Nevada, and an apocalyptic annihilation resulted. Moral: Stop American molecular nanotechnology, for the apocalypse can come only from American molecular nano tests.

The New York Times Magazine article is entitled “Proceed With Caution.” This is the advice to American molecular nanotechnology. In “Prey” they did not proceed with sufficient caution; hence the end of the world.

How to proceed with caution? According to Joy, the obstacle is free, and much too free, enterprise – the “financial markets.”

Actually, the Manhattan Project of the 1940s was a federal government project, for what was the financial value for “financial markets” of the two nuclear bombs dropped on Tojo’s Japan?

On the other hand, in China the Sino-American trade surplus exceeds $100 billion a year, and the “supreme leaders of China” can pour this golden rain on the development of molecular nanoweapons without any Congress. But this is, of course, not for children from 3 to 5.

Joy repeats bits from Drexler of 18 or 23 years ago and avoids what Drexler has always said about the danger of molecular nanoweapons developed and used by a powerful enemy country. In Drexler’s recent article “Safe Exponential Manufacturing,” published in the Institute of Physics “Nanotechnology,” he argues that a laboratory nano accident is not the concern, but the development and use of molecular nanoweapons by a sufficiently powerful enemy country is.

That is, the stand of the founder of nanotechnology, a nano scientist of genius, is the diametrical opposite of that of Bill Joy and the New York Times article about him. Characteristically, it is the BBC, and not the U.S. media, that paid much attention to Drexler’s article. The New York Times Magazine piece did not even mention Drexler, our outstanding compatriot and contemporary, either.

So much for the New York Times Magazine article. What about the article in Window Open to Good Winds, the Chinese newspaper? I devoted my June 3, 2004, column to this article of 2000, describing (in 2000!) molecular nanotechnology as one of seven fields of development of “top-notch weapons of future warfare.”

The contrast between the two articles is staggering. The Chinese article of 2000 seemed to be published in a militarily technologically advanced civilization , while the New York Times Magazine article in a backward Third World country whose denizens do not know in 2004 what was common knowledge in China in 2000.

Bill Joy, the “provocative” Silicon Valley deity of the New York Times Magazine, does not even hint at the possibility of using molecular nanoweapons (which Eric Drexler predicted 18 or 23 years ago), while such weapons were described in a Chinese newspaper in 2000 in addition to six other “top-notch weapons of future warfare.”

Several years ago I began to use my term “the geostrategically lobotomized West.” The New York Times Magazine article and its “provocative” free thinker exemplify this geostrategic lobotomization, especially in comparison with a randomly sampled article from a Chinese newspaper of 2000.

For information about the Center for the Survival of Western Democracy, Inc., including how you can help, please e-mail me at navlev@cloud9.net

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