I think this article was intended to be as much a warning about “the state”, as it was about nanotechnology.

The state is always used as the example of the bad actor, when actually, in many cases, it is private companies which are more guilty of subverting a population.

When we look at the underlying driver which appears hostile to life, the thing which seems inversely related to the interests of life; profit, it is something upon which companies, not governments, are declared to be founded, though we can see it often ends up driving governments, and always individuals too, to carry out territorialism and colonialism, in every case without exception the underlying driver of atrocity is profit.

In fact, governments are the only form of possible protection we might imagine in the modern world against the atrocities we see being carried out in the name of profit.

So why does this article have such an insidious anti-government message?

Because the article itself is driven by profit.

In truth it is profit which is the bad actor, the thing driving most new technology including nanotech and ai.

“Thou shalt make profit” has replaced “thou shalt not kill”, as the basic rule of all human activity, and the thing most ai and nanotech is being designed to enforce and execute.

That is the real reason we should be afraid of them, not that they might fall into the hands of bad actors, their primary reason for existing is actually anti-life, not pro-life.

I wonder when science might admit that the thing which is obviously missing in modern life, which might conceivably have countered the incredibly damaging things we see happening in the name of profit, could be something like religion?

Perhaps if science did more to find out the real reason why religion existed before dismissing it (again driven by profit!), we might be in a different place now, and science itself would surely be far further advanced than it is now, if it had not been driven always only by profit, as things are.