Meeting notice: The 02.Oct.02 meeting will be held at 7:30 p.m. at 
the Royal East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block down from the corner 
of Main St. and Mass Ave.  If you're new and can't recognize us, ask 
the manager. He'll probably know where we are.  More details below.


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Suggested topic:  NanoSpam

There is a body of thought that holds that nanotechnology 
will eradicate commercial culture as we know it.  Perhaps it 
will.  However it is worth reflecting on the chance that it 
might not, if only because there will almost certainly be a 
transition during which NT and media-driven capitalism will 
overlap.  This suggests that for at least for a few years 
advertising agencies may be able to advance their client's 
interests using replicators and assemblers.   

What will that look like?  Sound like?  Feel like?  One 
imagines the cycle beginning with nano touts projecting 
their "messages" directly onto the retina or into the 
cortex.  One's first impulse is to think that so intimate an 
assault would never be legal, but the example of email spam 
suggests that the case is not so simple.   Ad replicators 
would blow across jurisdictional borders, evolve to escape 
embedded controls, and hang around for years.  Presumably 
evolutionary feedback would be incorporated via directly 
coupling to POS systems, so that those agents that were 
responsible for more sales replicated faster than those that 
did not.  One can imagine life in the NT era as being a 
maddening and continuous babble of ads, like a commercial 
tinnitus.

On the other hand, given appropriate levels of competition, 
these nano agents will almost certainly start to be 
programmed to find and kill competing agents -- or they will 
evolve in that direction anyway, since competing agents cut 
down on sales.   (The architecture of the internet 
unfortunately prevents the development of predator spam; if 
this were permitted the problem might be easier to deal 
with.)  This might begin to be a solution.  On the other 
hand, the competing ad replicators might possibly evolve a 
joint management strategy to harvest our mindshare 
cooperatively, or they might enter into a serious arm's 
race, ending Lord knows where.  Both alternatives are worth 
exploring in more detail.  

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In twenty years half the population of Europe will have visited the moon.

				-- Jules Verne, 1865

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Announcement Archive: 
http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html.
	
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Legend:

"NSG" expands to Nanotechnology Study Group.  The Group meets on 
the first and third Tuesdays of each month at the above address, 
which refers to a restaurant located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  

The NSG mailing list carries announcements of these meetings and 
little else.  If you wish to subscribe to this list (perhaps 
having received a sample via a forward) send the string 
'subscribe nsg'  to majordomo@world.std.com.  Unsubs follow the 
same model.  

Discussion should be sent to nsg- d@world.std.com, which must be 
subscribed to separately.  You must be subscribed to nsg-d to 
post to it and must post from the address from which you 
subscribed (An anti- spam thing).

Comments, petitions, and suggestions re list management to: 
nsg@pobox.com.