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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jerry in Omaha who wrote (1400)	9/25/2001 10:31:52 PM
From: MSI	Respond to of 281500

Not to get OT on the FADG, but this is an important combination of technology & military policy... One argument on the Missile Shield is that it is an inevitable development, so we should keep ahead of the curve to stay ahead of our enemies. The other side of that argument is the Bill Joy (founder of Sun Microsystems) position, who says, essentially: put a cork in scary technology development, fast, while we're still only dealing with teenagers in Japan fouling the internet for a few hours. Joy includes nanotech, biotech, self-replicating robotic threats, and the like, and posits that we're screwed if we don't try to put on the brakes. The problem is that knowledge is irreversible. Our only way out to avoid eventual annihilation is to ramp up defense methodologies as rapidly as possible. The Missile Shield would be one of these defensive methodologies, in spite of the political, moral, and financial hazards involved, as always, in big military/tech projects. We're dealing with low-tech threats now, but this is an inevitable issue in the not-so-distant future, in our suddently defense-aware society.