Copio un fragmento de Future Imperfect: Technology and Freedom in an Uncertain World
When considering the downside of technologies – Murder Incorporated in a world of strong privacy or some future James Bond villain using nanotechnology to convert the entire world to gray goo – your reaction may be “Stop the train, I want to get off!” In most cases, that is not an option. This particular train is not equipped with brakes.
Most of the technologies we are discussing can be developed locally and used globally. Once one country has a functional nanotechnology, permitting it to build products vastly superior to those made with old technologies, there will be enormous pressure on other countries to follow suit. It is hard to sell glass windshields when the competition is using structural diamond. It is even harder to persuade cancer patients to be satisfied with radiation therapy when they know that, elsewhere in the world, microscopic cell repair machines are available that simply go through your body and fix whatever is wrong.(...)
Even if it is possible to block or restrict a potentially dangerous technology, as in a few cases it may be, it is not clear that we should do it. We might discover that we had missed the disease and banned the cure. If an international covenant backed by overwhelming military power succeeds in restricting nanotechnological development to government-approved labs, that might save us from catastrophe. But since government-approved labs are the ones most likely to be working on military applications of new technology, while private labs mostly try to produce what individual customers want, the effect might also be to prevent the private development of nanotechnological countermeasures to government-developed mass destruction. Or it might turn out that our restrictions had slowed the development of nanotechnology by enough to leave us unable to defend against the result of a different technology – a genetically engineered plague, for example. (pág. 26-27)
