2006 Guardian Award Winners Develop Defenses Against Harmful Nanotechnology And Biotechnology

March 12, 2006 | Source: Lifeboat News

This year’s recipients of the Lifeboat Foundation Guardian Award are Robert A. Freitas Jr. and Bill Joy, who have both been proposing solutions to the dangers of advanced technology since 2000.

Robert A. Freitas, Jr. has pioneered nanomedicine and analysis of self-replicating nanotechnology. He advocates “an immediate international moratorium, if not outright ban, on all artificial life experiments implemented as nonbiological hardware. In this context, ‘artificial life’ is defined as autonomous foraging replicators, excluding purely biological implementations (already covered by NIH guidelines tacitly accepted worldwide) and also excluding software simulations which are essential preparatory work and should continue.”

Bill Joy wrote “Why the future doesn’t need us in Wired in 2000 and with Guardian 2005 Award winner Ray Kurzweil, he wrote the editorial “Recipe for Destruction” in the New York Times in which they argued against publishing the recipe for the 1918 influenza virus. In 2006, he helped launch a $200 million fund directed at developing defenses against biological viruses.