Microsoft Word Kurzweil, Ray The Singularity Is Near doc

development
capability should be restricted whenever possible, to 
responsible actors that have agreed to use the Guidelines. No such restriction need apply to end products of the 
development process." 
Other strategies that the Foresight Institute has proposed include: 
•
Replication should require materials not found in the natural environment. 
•
Manufacturing (replication) should be separated from the functionality of end products. Manufacturing devices 
can create end products but cannot replicate themselves, and end products should have no replication 
capabilities. 
•
Replication should require replication codes that are encrypted and time limited. The broadcast architecture 
mentioned earlier is an example of this recommendation. 
These guidelines and strategies are likely to be effective for preventing accidental release of dangerous self-
replicating nanotechnology entities. But dealing with the intentional design and release of such entities is a more 
complex and challenging problem. A sufficiently determined and destructive opponent could possibly defeat each of 
these layers of protections. Take, for example, the broadcast architecture. When properly designed, each entity is 
unable to replicate without first obtaining replication codes, which are not repeated from one replication generation to 
the next. However, a modification to such a design could bypass the destruction of the replication codes and thereby 
pass them on to the next generation. To counteract that possibility it has been recommended that the memory for the 
replication codes be limited to only a subset of the full code. However, this guideline could be defeated by expanding 
the size of the memory. 
Another protection that has been suggested is to encrypt the codes and build in protections in the decryption 
systems, such as time-expiration limitations. However, we can see how easy it has been to defeat protections against 
unauthorized replications of intellectual property such as music files. Once replication codes and protective layers are 
stripped away, the information can be replicated without these restrictions. 
This doesn't mean that protection is impossible. Rather, each level of protection will work only to a certain level 
of sophistication. The meta-lesson here is that we will need to place twenty-first-century society's highest priority on 
the continuing advance of defensive technologies, keeping them one or more steps ahead of the destructive 
technologies (or at least no more than a quick step behind).