After a few days of

After a few days of resisting, I finally bought Prey: A Novel while on vacation in California. I couldn't resist a novel about nanobots, no matter how cheesy and commercialized and lame. Truth is, the first few chapters gave me nightmares, because it turns out I really am afraid of tiny self-reproducing evil robots that take over the planet. The scariest part about the book, in my opinion, is that Michael Crichton really went out of his way to make them appear harmless and easily defeated. To write a real horror about nanobots would probably be more than the general reading public cares to voluntarily partake in. They're too scary for a horror novel.

All Consuming has picked up some of the discussion. If you plan on reading this book, and haven't yet, you might not want to read further, because I'm going to list the points that I think Michael Crichton skirted around in order to make the humans capable of defeating the nanobots.

1) The nanobot swarms were isolated to the desert. They were in Nevada and had luckily been "programmed" to never stray too far from "home", which happened to be the airtight building that had somehow been equipped to be able to keep out even nanobots that were 1000th the size of a hair's diameter. If the nanobots would have ever managed to make it to a city, they would have quickly become impossible to fully eliminate and would have surely taken over in no time.

2) The nanobots behaved as unified organisms that were limited by space and movement... for example, they were constantly forming tightly packed "swarms" that blocked entrances and even tried to sometimes punch or kick the humans. If I were a swarm, I would regularly expand to gigantic size and I would make sure that there were some nano-representatives in every square inch possible so that there was no single target for the humans (ie, a couple sticks of dynamite wouldn't kill every single nanobot).

3) The nanobots were only defeated because they supposedly became dependant on biological organisms (E. Coli). Had they remained independant of this rather weak organism, the final resolution would not have been possible. Even then, the fact that their demise was so quick and complete was pretty lame.

4) It's as simple as this: Nanobots rule, we are doomed, close your bank accounts, move to the country, do whatever you want, we are DOOMED!

In a way though, I think it's okay. When we create a self-replicating digital organism, they will quickly surpass us simply because I believe digital evolution is so much faster and more efficient than biological. Just think of the thin permeable barrier that is currently preventing robots from being better than us in all ways: they lack consciousness, the ability to deal with ambiguity, and the ability to recognize patterns at the level that we're able to. That is a thin wall, friend. We cannot resist the inexorable march of technological innovation that will quickly hurdle these last few challenges, and all of a sudden being beaten at chess or worrying about online privacy will be the least of our worries. Hopefully we'll figure out some way to hitch a ride--storing our memories digitally or something--and not become completely extinct, but fair is fair. If they're better, they win. Maybe I'm getting a little carried away, maybe nanobots are just a science fiction for the moment and will never ever run the four minute mile or learn how to map the country or store the entire history of literature in a machine-readable format.

If you don't resist, it won't hurt as much. I hope someone takes the horror story potential here and really scares us with it. It would be a shame for fiction to miss this opportunity to entertain our most inevitable fears.

By the way, I'm moving from mockerybird.com to erikbenson.com, because there was just too much signifier junk in mockerybird.com. I know that I've spoken out in the past about registering websites that are your name (see The Great American URL), but oh well.

Comments

[Dani Filth]

none
hey man, i'm doing some work on nanobots, and i was wondering if you could send me like all the info that you have on them, wheather it be good or useless, i really need it.
Thanks man,
Dani Filth