Alternative Models for Managing Self-Replicating Nanotechnology

Flowchart of Controls
Figure 1 is a flowchart of the Foresight Institute guidelines that clearly identifies what they address and what they neglect.

Figure 1

If we start with Roman numeral block I, the first question to ask is whether or not MNT is self-replicative. If the answer is no, then anything that is ecologically healthy (especially in terms of healthy for the workers, but including public health as well) and that does not threaten national security is okay. Therefore, anything that meets these three criteria is okay as long as self-replication is not involved.

If self-replication is indicated, the next question to address is seen in diamond two, which is whether or not the self-replication occurs in a controlled environment. If the answer is no, then the guidelines are clear: It is banned. If the answer is yes, then you move on to decision block three, which asks if there are replication audits, meaning that we monitor where the nanobots have been, what they have done, and what they know. Are all these things highly controllable even within the controlled environment? If the answer is no, again, it is banned even though it occurs inside a controlled environment.

If these controls do not exist, then that technology is banned under the Foresight Institute guidelines. If they do, it is okay as long as the party that is operating that technology is an ethical party. The criteria that defines whether a person is an ethical party is strict and that party will probably be someone who had a perfect score on the scorecards mentioned earlier.

Critique
Here is a quick critique of the Foresight Institute guidelines, based on the flowchart. The guidelines seek specificity in terms of the exact level of consequence, whether it's a marketplace access consequence, an economic penalty consequence, or a legal sanction. They seek a lot of specificity based on the nature of the risk, yet the overall philosophy is one that asks for minimal regulation. My experience, as an attorney at least, is that these two goals can be antithetical. The more you try to spell something out, the larger it gets. In fact the reason why the Code of Federal Regulations is much longer than any of the law books is because they try to explicate every different possibility in all of the different areas of our economy and our lives. So when you try to get specificity, you quickly lose minimality in your regulation.

While the Foresight Institute guidelines want minimal regulations, they actually include strong anti-misuse penalties and even criminal sanctions. The guidelines seem to take the position that self-replication is unnecessary, uneconomic, and therefore unlikely. Yet they are overwhelmingly consumed with the issue of self-replication to the point that nearly half of the guidelines deal either explicitly or implicitly with self-replication.

So one might worry that even though they say that self-replication is unnecessary and unlikely, perhaps the authors of the guidelines are not very well equipped to deal with the "black goo" scenario. Instead, our fear of man-caused harm that we see every day overwhelmingly dominates our thinking. For example, even though the news tells us about one Terry Schiavo who dies or one person who gets shot in L.A., we obsess about that one person. It is horrible that 52 people died in London. It is horrible that more than 3,000 died in the World Trade Center. However, it is also a fact that 150,000 died in the tsunami that followed in the wake of a volcanic eruption in Southeast Asia and that 20,000 people die every single day of hunger. The question is, how do we deal with these situations?