X-Message-Number: 18990
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2002 09:52:43 -0400
From: Thomas Donaldson <>
Subject: CryoNet #18984 - #18989

Hi everyone!

Mike Darwin expanded on my arguments about the impossibility of curing
ALL diseases, and did well when he did that.

As for what I take to be your arguments, they still do not consider
the many many ways in which errors can happen ... not to mention those
in which we go off into genuinely new settings and there meet with
problems we did not foresee (as happened historically with radiation
sickness).

The point is that even if we make nanobots, we can commit errors when
we do that; and if we made nanobots which in their turn made other 
nanobots (perhaps free of our own errors) then they too would commit
errors. Not lots of errors, but enough to cause a problem. Nor would
such errors necessarily be immediately fixable. Computer bugs differ
a lot in how hard they are to find and fix. Bugs we make in designing
or programming our nanobots will act the same way: some too hard to 
do immediately, others simple. Most would be in between.

And sure, if we wanted to make a machine totally without bugs, we
might well do so, but it would take an infinite time to catch all
possible bugs. We end up once again the the region where errors
are likely, even if we have tried our best to avoid them. Not only
that, but if we work hard enough to eliminate known bugs we can
easily introduce new UNknown bugs while doing that.

I am actually optimistic, not because I believe that we'll ever
create a perfect world, but because I believe that we can keep
on improving the world (ie the universe) in which we now live.
But that improvement will forever remain less than perfection.

		Best wishes and long long life for all,

			Thomas Donaldson

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