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nano morals

Wednesday,  02/20/08  06:55 PM

Did you enjoy the nano art gallery I posted a couple of days ago?  Did you feel like maybe you were doing something wrong by viewing it?  Or that the technology which yields such pictures was somehow wrong?  No?

Well you might be interested to hear that two-thirds of Americans think nanotechnology is morally unacceptable.  "In a sample of 1,015 adult Americans, only 29.5 percent of respondents agreed that nanotechnology was morally acceptable."  These people don't think it doesn't work, or won't work, or can't work, or has dangers, or anything like that; no, they think it is morally unacceptable.  This could be the most dramatic evidence yet for Unnatural Selection; it seems the IQ level of our fellow citizens has plummeted.  I am always astonished by evolution-denial, but this is even more astonishing.  My goodness.  Morally unacceptable.

I can't wait for someone to take out a Bible - a series of books written 2,000 years ago by men of that day, and later translated to English by other men of a later but still ancient day - and quote verbatim from some passage they claim "proves" nanotechnology is morally unacceptable.  Well, maybe I can wait.  But I doubt I'll have to wait long.

A good cure for this intellectual hangover is to re-read Richard Feynman's classic 1959 talk: There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom.  His title refers to the fact things could be made orders of magnitude smaller, but it could equally apply to the bell curve of intelligence.