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2006 GUARDIAN AWARD WINNERS DEVELOP DEFENSES
AGAINST HARMFUL NANOTECHNOLOGY AND BIOTECHNOLOGY
The Lifeboat Foundation Guardian Award is annually bestowed upon
revered scientists or public figures who have heralded the coming of a
future fraught with danger and encouraged provision against its perils.
This year's recipients are
Robert A. Freitas Jr. and
Bill Joy, who have both been proposing solutions to the
dangers of advanced technology since 2000, two years
before the formation of the Lifeboat Foundation.
ROBERT A. FREITAS JR.
Robert A.
Freitas Jr. is a Lifeboat Foundation Scientific Advisory Board member
and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for
Molecular
Manufacturing. He is author of the Nanomedicine
book series, the first book-length technical treatment of the medical
implications
of molecular nanotechnology.
Volume
I: Basic Capabilities, was
published by
Landes
Bioscience in
October 1999;
Volume
IIA: Biocompatibility, was published by Landes Bioscience
in October 2003.
Rob has published four theoretical
nanorobot scaling
studies,
including the
respirocytes (artificial red cells),
microbivores
(artificial white cells),
clottocytes (artificial platelets), and the
vasculoid (an artificial vascular system).
In a recent major collaborative effort, artist
Gina Miller has finished
work on a 3-minute long
animation that nicely illustrates the workings of
his proposed
programmable dermal display (essentially, a
video-touchscreen
nano-tattoo that reports real-time medical information to the user, as
reported back by numerous nanorobots stationed in various locations
inside the body).
He was also the peer expert reader in
the fields of nanotechnology and cosmology for the 2005 Ray Kurzweil book
The Singularity Is Near : When Humans Transcend
Biology.
In 2000,
Rob
wrote
Some Limits to Global Ecophagy by Biovorous Nanoreplicators, with
Public
Policy Recommendations which showed that in the worst
case scenario one uncoordinated
grey goo attack at just one location
could eliminate all life on the
planet within three hours.
In 2004, he coauthored
Kinematic Self-Replicating
Machines with Ralph C. Merkle.
While others were debating whether self-replicating nanotechnology
was possible, Rob took action and
described
the 137-dimensional map of
the replicator design space which suggests a large number
of
ways that replicators can be preemptively disabled or rendered
incrementally
safer. This map for defense is the first list of its type that has
ever been
compiled,
and it is very extensive.
Recommendations for desired/undesired replicator
characteristics (relative to safety) drawn from this list could be
used in a very specific regulatory regime for machine
replicators.
View
the multidimensional Freitas-Merkle kinematic replicator design space!
His upcoming Molecular Manufacturing: Too
Dangerous to Allow?
which will be published in the journal
Nanotechnology Perceptions in
March 2006 and his upcoming What Price Freedom? in
the journal
Nanotechnology Perceptions in May 2006 discuss the implications of a
future with advanced nanotechnology.
BILL JOY
Bill
Joy joined
the venture capital firm
Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers (KPCB)
as Partner in January 2005. One of Silicon Valley's best-known VC firms,
KPCB was an early investor in Amazon.com, America Online, Compaq, Electronic
Arts, Genentech, Google, Lotus Development, and Sun
Microsystems.
Bill was Cofounder and Chief Scientist of
Sun Microsystems. He led Sun's technical
strategy from the founding of the company in 1982 until September, 2003.
While at Sun, he was a key designer of Sun technologies, including
Solaris, SPARC, chip architectures and pipelines, and Java. In 1995 he
installed the first city-wide WiFi network. He has more than 40 patents
issued or in progress.
Before cofounding Sun, Bill designed and wrote Berkeley UNIX, the first
open source operating system with built-in TCP/IP, making it the backbone
of the Internet. His many contributions were recognized in a
Fortune
cover story which called him the "Edison of the
Internet".
In 2000, he wrote
Why the future doesn't need us:
Our most powerful 21st-century technologies — robotics, genetic
engineering, and nanotech — are threatening to make humans an
endangered species in Wired magazine. This well publicized
article included quotes such as
"I think it is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further
perfection of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond
that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation-states,
on to a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals.",
"An immediate consequence of the Faustian bargain in obtaining the great
power of nanotechnology is that we run a grave risk — the risk that
we
might destroy the biosphere on which all life depends." and
"...if our own extinction is a likely, or even possible, outcome of our
technological development, shouldn't we proceed with great caution?"
In 2003
he wrote
Hope Is a Lousy Defense in Wired magazine.
In 2005, he and
Guardian 2005 Award winner Ray Kurzweil wrote the editorial
Recipe for Destruction in the New York Times in which they
argued against publishing the recipe for the 1918 influenza
virus.
In 2006, while others were debating whether a bird flu pandemic or other
biological disaster was likely, Bill took action and helped launch a
$200 million fund directed at developing defenses against biological
viruses. The goal of the KPCB Pandemic and Bio Defense Fund is to accelerate innovations for
worldwide pandemic preparedness and global health over the next three
years, with a focus on surveillance and detection, diagnostics, vaccines
and drugs. He also advised on Lifeboat Foundation's web design in 2006.
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