You can be an idiot and survive because you just go to McDonalds for your food, and you go to work and do some sort of inane job, which is nobody taking any responsibility - it's always up the line - and then you watch the Super Bowl, and that's it. But in the old days, you really had to know how your world works. You don't need that anymore.
Imagine if we had stopped science in 1904. Yes, there would have been no nerve gas and no Bhopal, but there would also have been no penicillin. All science is a trade-off.
Saying that we should stop nanoscience is tantamount to saying we should stop science.