Mechanical Components Blog

I'm not persuaded the "gray sludge" scenario is inevitable, but I do think it is silly behavior to jump into something as all-encompassing as that without a thorough study of what COULD go wrong. The asbestos analogy is not a bad one!

I agree wholeheartedly. We need to be cautious about this new area of technology and research the downside more thoroughly; however, even the asbestos issue is somewhat overblown. Only a small fraction of asbestos is shown to have harmful effects, yet we continue to spend multiplied millions on cleanup of all asbestos rather than spending the money and effort to isolate the harmful fraction for removal.

Asbestos = microscopic fibers of naturally-ocurring glass.

Fiberglass = microscopic fibers of man-made glass.

Difference = natural vs man-made. Health effects? Difference not known, but suspected to be similar. Yes, some forms of asbestos are completely innocuous, but the known harmful forms are so similar to fiberglass to be downright scary. Do we even look at these similarities? No. Guess Owens-Corning has better lobbyists than Johns-Manville, eh?

Asbestos fibre under under 10 microns fits between cells causing tumors and yes they made fibre glass under 10 microns after they knew asbestos was dangerous, creating the same problem. Nanotech sizes are they going to cause the same problem in redundancy or are they going to make nanobots self destruct to atomic sizes. The major problem is big business is going to want to make money out of them, so like asbestos that was know to be dangerous in the 1930s any thing goes. The really scary thing is the military are going to want to make killing machines out of them. The first law of robotics "Robots must not be able to hurt humans" was ignored before the ink was dry by design engineers. Big (government) money into research just means more resources for manufacturers to steal from so they can create the gray sludge quicker than governments produce regulations. It took over 70 years for governments to respond to asbestos and longer for tobacco, mobiles phones are another example of slow responce and no government research money if it is going to handicap a money making industry. Nanotech is going to go the whole hog the same as tobacco and asbestos unless nanotech researchers act responsibly and create public awareness of the dangers that will force regulations into place. Which opens up another can of worms as responsible researchers are the ones that don't get research money.