Accidental grey goo is unlikely to get out of the lab. If I design a nanite to self-replicate and spread through a living brain to report useful data to me, and I have an integer overflow bug in the “stop reproducing” code so that it never stops, I will probably kill the patient but that’s it. Because the nanites are probably using glucose+O2 as their energy source. I never bothered to design them for anything else. Similarly if I sent solar-powered nanites to clean up Chernobyl I probably never gave them copper-refining capability—plenty of copper wiring to eat there—but if I botch the growth code they’ll still stop when there’s no more pre-refined copper to eat. Designing truely dangerous grey goo is hard and would have to be a deliberate effort.
As for stopping grey goo, why not? There’ll be something that destroys it. Extreme heat, maybe. And however fast it spreads, radio goes faster. So someone about to get eaten radios a far-off military base saying “help! grey goo!” and the bomber planes full of incindiaries come forth to meet it.
Contrast uFAI, which has thought of this before it surfaces, and has already radioed forged orders to take all the bomber planes apart for maintenance or something.
Also, the larger the difference between the metabolisms of the nanites and the biosphere, the easier it is to find something toxic to one but not the other.
Accidental grey goo is unlikely to get out of the lab. If I design a nanite to self-replicate and spread through a living brain to report useful data to me, and I have an integer overflow bug in the “stop reproducing” code so that it never stops, I will probably kill the patient but that’s it. Because the nanites are probably using glucose+O2 as their energy source. I never bothered to design them for anything else. Similarly if I sent solar-powered nanites to clean up Chernobyl I probably never gave them copper-refining capability—plenty of copper wiring to eat there—but if I botch the growth code they’ll still stop when there’s no more pre-refined copper to eat. Designing truely dangerous grey goo is hard and would have to be a deliberate effort.
As for stopping grey goo, why not? There’ll be something that destroys it. Extreme heat, maybe. And however fast it spreads, radio goes faster. So someone about to get eaten radios a far-off military base saying “help! grey goo!” and the bomber planes full of incindiaries come forth to meet it.
Contrast uFAI, which has thought of this before it surfaces, and has already radioed forged orders to take all the bomber planes apart for maintenance or something.
Also, the larger the difference between the metabolisms of the nanites and the biosphere, the easier it is to find something toxic to one but not the other.