X-Message-Number: 5673
Date: Sat, 27 Jan 1996 13:50:50 -0500 (EST)
From: Robin Helweg-Larsen <>
Subject: Re: Financial protection through the Singularity

When nanotech hits, it will hit human consciousness very fast, it 
will cause a change in thinking and in options, but it will only be 
implemented over decades at best, centuries at worst.

When the first nanotech production capacity is demonstrated, the world 
will still need human-and-robot-built vehicles for many years before the 
worldwide demand can be filled through nanotech; GM will still make many 
profits in that time, and quite likely will adopt nanotech (because after 
all, they still have the design, brand name, marketing, distribution, 
financing networks in place) and not be pushed aside.

In point of fact, if that first nanotech demo was staged with appropriate 
targetting and pizzazz, it might cause a rush to dump GM (or whoever 
the demo targetted), and that would be an excellent time to buy GM, 
because the stock would recover because even if GM didn't adopt nanotech 
and died, it would only die over many many years during which time it 
would still have ups and downs in stock price.

Even when consciousness changes rapidly, as with the understanding of 
ecology and of the futility of all-out nuclear war, driven by the first 
pictures of earth from space, it doesn't mean that either pollution or war 
stopped within days.  Maybe they both will stop eventually.  But we live 
on a big planet, in terms of the capacity for human diversity.  The fact 
that we developed factories and had an industrial revolution doesn't mean 
that they came into everyone's lives overnight.  There are still people 
living in the stone age (and not just Rush, but people actually using 
stone-based technology for their daily existence in New Guinea).

The Singularity, in my view, will be a transition point in human history 
that will appear to be an overnight change in retrospect, but will 
actually take many years to work through.  As stock prices reflect the 
expectation of future profits, and as existing companies can be expected 
to make profits after the Singularity whether they adopt nanotech rapidly 
or not, the stock market should be made a little less certain as regards 
individual companies, but overall should rise in price because 
nanotechnology will allow for the creation of enormously greater wealth 
for the human race.

Robin HL


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