Grey goo

No one may find this interesting, but in virtual worlds, this is a very big problem. For example, in Second Life, if a bug report/ticket contains the terms "Grey Goo" (or) "Gray Goo" it is immediately taken care of. To the point where, if you are a worker who can handle it, you will be given a phone call and you must drive to your office immediately- it doesn't matter what else you are doing. Grey Goo can destroy a server in a matter of seconds.

This assumes that some artificial organism we construct would be more robust and efficient at self-replication than run-of-the-mill single celled organisms.

It's going to need a power source external to what it eats. Contrast: there already is grey goo built to work on local (not transmitted) energy, and it's called bacteria. It doesn't eat the world, because local energy isn't really that abundant relative to the cost of carrying around the means to utilize it.

Self-replicating-nanobot Earth-death final-state.<p>Things like this always make me think of Sam's Archive's "Geocide" page. Which, by the way, points out that this does not in fact bring about the <i>destruction</i> of the Earth: <a href="http://qntm.org/destroy" rel="nofollow">http://qntm.org/destroy</a>

In a battle between Grey Goo and a Paperclip Maximizer, who wins?<p><a href="http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer" rel="nofollow">http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer</a>

There are all kinds of disastrous applications of technology waiting for us.<p>like an microorganism or device designed to impregnate every women on the planet<p>or maybe people will start modifying their offspring to worship them<p>my personal favorite are tiny robots that interfere with the unjust use of force worldwide, causing the collapse of most governments

<i>Self-replicating machines of the macroscopic variety were originally described by mathematician John von Neumann, and are sometimes referred to as von Neumann machines.</i><p>I suppose their memory holds both code and data?

"They might be "superior" in an evolutionary sense, but this need not make them valuable."<p>A good reminder for businesses. If your only goal is to dominate the market, it is not a worthy goal.

Drexler thinks it's nonsense:<p><a href="http://nanotechweb.org/cws/article/indepth/19648" rel="nofollow">http://nanotechweb.org/cws/article/indepth/19648</a>

Reminds me of what humans are doing with this planet.