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Over the past two years, Mexican scientists involved in bio- and nanotechnology have become targets. They’re not threatened by the nation’s drug cartels. They’re marked for death by a group of bomb-building eco-terrorists with the professed goal of destroying human civilization.
A violent fringe group with anarcho-primitivist views — its name roughly translates to “Individuals Tending to Savagery,” although “Tending to the Wild” might be more exact — ITS sees technology and civilization as essentially doomed and leading humanity to an ecological catastrophe. Technology should be destroyed; humans should revert to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle; and all of this, ITS says, is for our own good. Nanotechnology is a particular scourge: Self-replicating nanobots will one day escape from laboratories to consume the Earth; and weaponization of nanotech is inevitable.
As 1900 dawns, the Seacoast faces a shocking new technology. Is electricity safe? Is it just another toy for the rich? Do we really need it when gas lights work just fine and horses are easier to ride than cars? Should we develop this new science or leave the genie in the bulb?
Electric, electric, electric! The way people bandy that word about nowadays, you'd think electricity is the new salvation of mankind. That attitude is particularly "on the wire" this week as the Old Town by the Sea hurtles relentlessly from the comfortably familiar 19th century into the unknown landscape of the 20th.
This writer, however, urges caution as we contemplate the coming Electric Age, admonishing readers not to entertain Utopian flights of fancy. Certainly this modern miracle has its usefulness, but for every labor-saving benefit, electricity brings us -- something, we fear, is lost in the trade.
After all, if we lived through the horrific inventions that came out of the industrial revolution, I think we can make it.
Originally posted by 3n19m470
If you cannot see the dangers in nanotech... Then there's no point in having a conversation with you about it,.frankly. Yeah, people were worried about nukes and still are... Two cities already got wiped off the map from nukes, so clearly they have a good reason.
Originally posted by FuturePeace
again the human habit of blaming the tools and not the handler.
Keeping these powerful tools away from megalomaniacs should be the goal, not stifling our progress as a collective species.