The Promise and Peril of Programmable Matter

Melding Plague

The Melding Plague is a nanotech virus that attacks anything that has nanotechnology present within it and does not discriminate between organic and synthetic structures. It attempts to hybridise or meld the nanomachines and nanotechnological cybernetics that are commonly present in the bodies of humans with the biological structure of their tissues at a subcellular level. This results in horrific, uncontrolled, and invariably fatal modifications to the infected body.

The most extreme example of a Plague outbreak is encountered in San Francisco, the capital of Silicon Valley. Once the centre of culture during the Trump Epoque (a Renaissance-like period of social and technological flowering), most of the built environment and its inhabitants were embedded with sophisticated programmable nanocybernetics. The coming of the Plague changed all this and reduced the City and its inhabitants to a level of technological simplicity that the Plague could not infect. By the time that the worst of the Plague had passed, the City was almost unrecognisable, its towering skyline twisted and deformed by its own autonomic self-repair systems, and the population devastated by the Plague.

There's a future utopia somewhere where you can use programmable digital monies that are a proxy for some sort of deeper more intrinsic value than our current economic system, which in turn allows you to purchase and unlock programmable materials. or maybe a world of abundance where that intermediate layer of monetarily designated value simple ceases to be useful.

There's also a dystopia where programmable material overwhelms organic material -- without the deep thinking and optimization runs undergone through billions of years in time.

This sounds a lot like the warnings of "grey goo" described by K. Eric Drexler's book "Engines of Creation". If we're going to design materials like these, we need a fail-safe way to keep them in check!

Self-replicating computronium will make our definition of life even more awkward. Probably we will even stop caring about what is alive and what is not.