@nyrath We have an existence proof for grey goo: it's called "bacteria" (with a side-order of fungi) and they DO eat us ... just slower than we can regenerate and/or fight them off, unless something goes wrong with our immune system and we die.
We (multicellular eukaryotes) have been around for over a billion years. They haven't evolved a qualitatively more efficient form of grey goo yet.
@cstross@nyrath
I've always figured molecular nanotechnology in a non-sterile environment would get its ass handed to it by bacteria, who have simply been at the game a lot longer and know all the tricks.
@carcosa@cstross@nyrath
You’d have to make your molecular nanotech machines out of something that bacteria and fungi aren’t interested in or can’t accumulate enough energy to take apart, like metals, ceramics, or diamond.
@carcosa@cstross@nyrath
And I imagine that the first few generations of molecular nanotechnology is going to be limited to clean or sterile labs and factories.
@demi@carcosa@cstross@nyrath at some point though humans will pour all our ingenuity into making them work outside the clean environment. Make them able to survive against green goo. Because it ends up with a cheaper easier solution. Because it sells stock.
And we'll warn them like we warned them about climate change, and they'll dive head first like they did with Uber and llms.
Don't let logic stand in the way of profit.
@cbehopkins@demi@carcosa@nyrath Best "guard rail" for nanotech in the wild is to make it critically dependent on something that's scarce in the environment. Like ascorbic acid (vitamin C)—most mammals synthesize it themselves (humans and guinea pigs are the weird exceptions) and most plants don’t bother (exception: citrus fruits). No vitamin C? Humans die. Kneecap nanotech with a similar dependency and you can put it on a choke chain.
@cstross@cbehopkins@demi@carcosa@nyrath I'm not sure how well it scales down to "nanotech", but I really like the idea of external power via cyclic magnetic or electrostatic fields. It solves the annoying problem of delivering power while inherently limiting the volume where the bots can work at all.
@cstross@nyrath you have to remember that it could happen at any moment. There have been geological epochs where the entire planet got covered in bacteria/algae and it destroyed the entire existing ecosystems.
As I'm sure you know, one of those is the reason we have free oxygen. I think another one led to a snowball earth.
@AMS@RandomDamage@nyrath I'm not sure "the non-decaying corpses of the entities that caused a grey goo event still exist in our environment 360 million years after they died" is quite a reassuring statement.
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