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Top Physicist Advocates Scientific Self-Censorship
spamania writes "The San Francisco Chronicle is running this article about a new book by Britain's astronomer royal, Sir Martin Rees, that advocates restricting scientific research in certain fields in the interest of public safety. In "Our Final Hour", Rees lends a sober, respectable voice to the oft-irrational ranting about nanotech, biotech, and other fields."
technology has potential to annihilate
...as well as the potential to protect us from annihilation.
I can see it now: "If nanotechnology is outlawed, only outlaws will have nanotechnology!"
Facetious, but nevertheless relevant.
Not all scientists will self-censor, nor are all scientists working toward the greater good. Sometimes it's not their choice (see: Germany, 1940, and Iraq, 1988) to censor themselves.
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Seems to me if you restrict research, not everybody will comply. This will lead to someone other than ourselves having a headstart on the research. The research will be done by SOMEONE so it might as well be us.
Classifying it is all well and good, but the government itself isn't spotless. Hell, when they detonated the first nuke 60-some years ago, they were pretty sure it wouldn't ignite the atmosphere or start a planet-destroying chain reaction.
The usual over-sensationalistic /. headline is, as usual, over-sensationalistic. This is not censorship, but self-control and self-direction. It's not about not publishing things which exist and have been researched (that would be censorship), but about deliberately avoiding avenues of research which are too dangerous given our current rather low level of social evolution.
However, it's very hard to decide which avenues of research should be avoided. Biotechnology, Nanotechnology and all that promise great benefits, potentially helping us progress socially much faster (eliminating hunger and disease wouldn't do us much harm socially, would it?). The only ones that should clearly be avoided are clear-cut cases like nerve agents, genetic creation of deadly diseases, and all that. Otherwise, it makes little sense to restrain research in other directions...
Daniel
Carpe Diem
This makes an interesting counterpoint to an article from last week about an editorial by Sheldon Pacotti, one of the designers of Deus Ex. Rees seems to think self-censorship is the best defense, while Pacotti thinks it's best to spread the knowledge far and wide, so that everybody has the information necessary to devise defenses against technological threats.
TheFrood
If you say "I'll probably get modded down for this..." then I will mod you down.
If research is truly dangerous then classify it.
Yes, because we all know that nobody would ever leak classified research to a foreign government.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
I have never understood "banning" certain types of research. What do we hope to accomplish?
Information longs to be free, and technology inherently desires improvement. If we don't allow certain scientific research, then this research will simply move to other countries, and the United States and its citizens will lose the opportunity to shape the methodoligies and goals of this research.
Perhaps a self-censorship system moderated by an international panel would work nicely, but it is utter foolishness (IMO) to let public opinion blindly dictate the direction of science. Enhancing the lives of the common citizen should always be the primary goal of science (IMO), but that doesn't mean that the public always/ever knows what is best.
I guess this is a step in the right direction. Have the most skilled in those fields moderate themselves. Sure, but I cringe whenever I see the words "censor" and "science" together in a sentence.
...we would still be living in caves. Seriously, because some things may lead to something which could be warped to 'bad' uses, we should halt the progress of science?
Knowledge on it's own can not be defined as 'good' or 'bad' - it just is. It is what we use the knowledge for that can be judged on a moral level. And what some people consider to be a 'good' use, other people may see as 'bad' or even 'evil' use of the knowledge.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
This has long been the useless prattle of luddites..
And who decides what should or should not be done..
I believe it has always been in the interest of man to protect against the effects of technology but not against the pursuit of technology.
I.E We can outlaw chemical weapons, and biological weapons because we know they are freakin' dangerous... but don't outlaw stem cell research or technology that we do not fully comprehend the effect of because we are scared of the "possible" consequences..
Anyways.. it is not about right or wrong that we control technology.. it is usually a matter of power.
"No decision to go ahead with an experiment... should be made unless the general public is satisfied..." An interesting question is not simply the scientific realities of dooms-day science but the implied obligation of all people to the worldwide community. It seems as the years pass we get closer to having a serious discussion, as citizens of our individual nations, as to whether our responsibilities lie with our own flag or a "global" identity.
Only outlaws will have science. By restricting access to certain types of research, we limit knowledge in those fields, making it more likely that we will not be able to discover antidotes to technological mishaps. Will it reduce the chance of those mishaps? I doubt it. If the process of scientific discovery was exact and well known, perhaps, but simply limiting information won't stop progress. Who knows where crucial breakthroughs in, say, nanotechnology will come from? If we limit access to scientific knowledge off all fields that might lead to the development of "grey goo" we will stagnate, and won't garauntee that "grey goo" won't get made. All we will garauntee is that we won't know how to fight it if it does get made.
Maybe if we did away with the massive iniequalities that fuel destructive behavior we won't need to limit access to knowledge, because no one will have any reason to destroy. There may still be accidents, but limiting access to information because of possible accidents is like the proverbial ostrich sticking its head in the sand to escape detection. Just because the ostrich doesn't see the lion sneaking up on him doesn't mean he isn't about to become lunch.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I am really getting frustrated by the amount of traction the whole "grey goo" meme is getting.
Sure, it's possible that when nanotechnology gets going, that somehow a nanomachine that can convert just about any material to energy and raw materials to copy itself could be accidentally created. It could then convert the entire Earth and everything on it to copies of itself. It's POSSIBLE.
But then again, it's also possible that some species of bacteria could mutate and start doing the same things. And it's probably not any less likely than a nanomachine doing it.
A machine that could convert just about anything on the planet into useful materials, and duplicate itself endlessly, would probably be difficult to make INTENTIONALLY, let alone accidentally. It would also be extremely easy to insert safeguards to prevent anything like that from happening. Either require the presence of a particular molecule for the machines to duplicate themselves. Add replication limits to the nanomachines. Never include self-replication in the same nanomachine as one that can break down most/all things into raw materials.
Unless nanoengineers are incredibly sloppy, maliciously so, then it's not going to happen by accident.
INTENTIONAL creation of such machines is an issue of higher importance. And the type of people who would make such nanomachines are not the type who are going to listen to people saying "we can't research/develop this technology, it might be dangerous". Would a law against using aircraft for suicidal terrorism have stopped Al Queda from taking down the WTC? Nope.
The best chance at preventing/defending against such actions is to develop the technology and focus some research on using it to prevent such uses. Not saying "stop all research!"
Now, I would be enormously in favor of a global treaty banning research into nanotechnological weapons. The thought of militaries working with such technologies does scare me.
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
So, what he's saying is, "We could find lots of horrible and dangerous things if we keep researching in this direction, so we shouldn't do it."
What that actually means is, "Since we actually have the kind of restriant not to use this stuff, let's let someone with less restraint come up with it first."
When Einstein gave the US his aid in building an atomic weapon he did it on the principle that someone would discover it, and that it was MUCH better that it be us, than the Nazis. It's much better that we know, and can prepare, than it is for us to be caught flat footed by something so awful we didn't even let ourselves think about it.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I find it interesting that this man is an astronomer. I guess he figures that his particular branch of science will never be considered "dangerous" and need to be "limited", unlike those other blighters in physics.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Sure, I can handle the truth, but I don't have much use for it after I have been reduced to subatomic particles in the quest to find it.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say this is a good idea. I don't think most of us would question whether emerging fields such as biotechnology could open up a pretty nasty pandoras box for people with bad intentions. No one wants the small group of unbalanced bad guys to be making super-smallpox in clandestine labs located in some state that would be unable or unwilling to counter them.
There will be some control over technology like this, and we all should want there to be. Technology will make it more and more possible for bad people to do ever more terrible things with ever fewer resources. We all remember Steven Hawking and others taking about the challenge facing us due to technology and our own possible self-destruction. Will we survive another 1000 years? We have to make sure the answer is yes.
You had better believe the government is concerned with it, especially with everything that has happened. recently. There WILL be some kind of controls, the only question is what form they will take. Technology can be an incredibly powerful thing. We always, always need to respect that, and it should start, as it most sensibly should, with those who pursue the science that can bring us further forward, or use our own insights to destroy us.
It is the nature of the human spirit to explore the unknown, and it shocks me that someone supposedly recognized as a scientist wold want to supress that spirit in any way. I can only conclude that he's forgotten why he became a scientist in the first place, but until he remembers, he probably needs a sabattical.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I can't beleive anyone in the scientific community would ever consider the issue of self censorship. Knowlege is supposed to be used for the betterment of human kind, even dangerous military technology has been used for the benefit of all (think nuclear power). Would any of us really be so naive as to beleive that if someone in the biotech industry had developed a great genetic code for new amazing eyes that would let us see in the ifra-red spectrum and with amazing accuracy and clairty, that the code for such a thing would not eventually end up on a P2P system being traded around for anyone to find? We can no longer put the genie back into the bottle on these types of things, and in alot of respects it's better to have ALL knowledge out at once than to restrict and keep hidden that which our "betters" would like to keep from we the unwashed masses. E.g would you be so affraid of the public camera's if we could all tap in and see what was on them, rather than some hidden secretive agent? Right now as we turn a corner in humanity we should not be trying to retard our development with these restrictions, but rather to embrace the knowledge so that we can all push forwards. Yes, bad things will happen, but big deal, we can all make homemade bombs and naplam (think jolly rogers handbook, or the anarchists cookbook). But people using these things to cause widespread panic and death are INCREADIBLY rare.
Isn't it funny how the US military conveniently forgets Vietnam whenever it wants to? Agent Orange any one?
If memory serves, Agent Orange was a defoliant and not a chemical weapon. It's kind of like complaining about the Orkin man using chemical weapons: technically true but not really what is meant by a chemical weapon. Sure there were probably people in the jungles that were defoliated but its not anything like dropping a nice efficient nerve agent.
I'm really curious about how long it's going to take people to accuse the US military of chemical warfare because so many people are dying of lead poisoning.
-jaded- walking the earth as a living corpse is in somewhat questionable taste
Exactly. There is no security in obscurity or ignorance. The only way to know how dangerous something is -- and to learn how to deal with it if it is dangerous -- is to study it.
..." Regrettable, but I suppose it's part of human nature.
... yes, the risks are real, but the potential rewards are so great that it would be criminal either for scientists to restrict themselves or laws and/or social pressure to lay restrictions on them.
As for the "some experiments could destroy the earth" bit (really just a variant on There Are Things Man Was Not Meant To Know) IMO Rees is doing the typical crochety-old-scientist act. An awful lot of scientists who do brilliant work when they're younger seem to adopt an attitude of "Well, the search for knowledge was all well and good in my day, but you kids these days
I can't think of a single area of research in which the benefits of aggressive experimentation and open reporting don't outweight the risks. Not a single one. Biotech, nanotech, high-energy physics
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Care to back that up?
Well, as you're too damn lazy to google yourself, here are the results of a simple search with the criteria "US Iraq chemical weapons sales".
Here are a couple of paragraphs pulled from some of the first few articles that the search pulls up:
"The US not only helped arm Iraq with military equipment right up to the time of the Kuwait invasion in 1989, as did Germany, Britain, France, Russia and others, but also sold and helped Iraq to integrate chemical weapons into their US-provided battle plans while fighting Iran between 1985-1988.
"According to a New York Times article in August, 2002, Col. Walter P. Lang, a senior defense intelligence officer at the time, explained that D.I.A. and C.I.A. officials "were desperate to make sure that Iraq did not lose" to Iran. "The use of gas on the battlefield by the Iraqis was not a matter of deep strategic concern," he said. One veteran said, that the Pentagon "wasn't so horrified by Iraq's use of gas." "It was just another way of killing people _ whether with a bullet or phosgene, it didn't make any difference."
Note, the New York Times quoting a US defense intelligence officer. Not some anti-US, pro-Iraq stooge.
" The article cited above describes U.S. and British weapons sales to Iraq through the 1980s & even after the Persian Gulf War until March 1992. It quotes a U.S. Senate report which states that the U.S. provided materials that enable Iraq to develop "chemical, biological and missile-system programs."
- In the 1980s, the U.S. sold weapons to both Iraq and illegally to Iran (Iran-Contragate). Without these weapons the two Mideast powers couldn't have sustained their war.
- The U.S. continued to sell Iraq weapons materials even after Iraq's deadly gassing of the Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988.
- An Iraqi report leaked to the German paper Die Tageszeitung (Dec. 19, 2002) lists 24 U.S. companies which provided Iraq with materials for biological, chemical, nuclear, and conventional weapons.
Quoting a US Senate report. Your own government, not some foreign bunch of trouble-makers.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
>
> "Some experiments could conceivably threaten the entire Earth," he writes. "How close to zero should the claimed risk be before such experiments are sanctioned?"
>
> He isn't talking about research that has potentially dangerous applications if it falls into the "wrong" hands, he's talking about potentially dangerous experiments. The kind of experiments where something going wrong could, say, create a minature black hole and thus destroy the planet.
>
> When you're talking about an experiment going that wrong then you don't really give a damn who's performing it, "them" or "us".
Hey, if you look at cave paintings then you would grok Shaman Roa's big think for banish Caveman Og:
"Og's big fire think scary. Fire could burninate entire grassland where tribe hunt all meat things", Roa speak. "Fire come from Gods, not tribe! Roa know Gods, Roa eat happy mushrooms, talk to Gods every day! Og not talk to Gods, he too busy with fire think. Roa not want Og make Gods angry with two stick rubbing thing! Tell Og put sticks down!"
Og's fire think not scary-but-good because fire keep tigers away at night. What if Gods angry, make Og drop fire? Og burninate all grass! No grass, no antelope, no fruit! Whole world burninate! Like three rainy season ago when Gods sent fire from sky, burninated grassland! Half of tribe starve!
Og's fire think bad. Roa know! If Og not care what Roa think, Shaman Roa say send Og away forever!
A black hole of that size would be fairly useless and "limp", and would evaporate rather quickly.
It's like the idea of creating fusion in a small area. Yeah, it's fusion, yeah that's a bomb, but it isn't going to make the whole planet/solar system/universe blow up. For those to be destroyed, you don't need "fusion", you need [I]a lot[/i] of fusion.
Same thing here. A low-mass black hole (they can exist, don't ask) might pass by you without you taking notice. Might have just happened. There, it might have just happened again. Now, get one with "significant" mass (moon-size, earith-size, sun-size) and you have a problem...
JD
So far there seem to have been a lot of replies complaining that it's silly to abandon research of dangerous topics, because if it's ignored then someone much worse will discover it first. I agree with this almost completely, but I think there are also times when it makes sense once a threshold has been reached where making things worse gains no strategic advantage.
The one I was thinking of was thermonuclear war. Before he died in 1996, Carl Sagan argued in The Demon Haunted World (and probably other places) that the development of the Hydrogen Bomb by the US was strategically pointless, because it didn't accomplish or deter anything that couldn't already be accomplished or deterred by existing nuclear weapons. On the other hand instead of simply destroying an enemy, a thermonuclear war would induce a nuclear winter and wipe out most of the world. Furthermore, there wasn't any intelligence that the USSR was developing it, nor that they would have if the USA hadn't started.
Apart from that I'm not familiar with the whole situation, so I won't go into it further. But I don't think the argument that it's necessary to research ultra-dangerous topics before an enemy does holds up all the time -- especially when the only advance from existing technology is that it leads to a lose-lose scenario instead of a win-lose scenario.
> Hey, if you look at cave paintings then you would grok Shaman Roa's big think for banish Caveman Og: ...
If Shaman Roa knew that Og was careless/thoughtless, and knew that fire was dangerous if mishandled (light fire, cause sparks, don't have water, light nearby grass etc, cause Massive fire that destroys village, hunting grounds, etc) then that shaman's right. "Big fire" is scarey if not properly handled.
Now, if you'd speculated on doing some safe experiments within caves, with plenty of water nearby, etc, that would be different. But, you strike me as the Og type - "What the hell, let's Light It UP! After all, what's the worst that can happen, right?..."
not to draw flame on myself, but....
for once, there's virtually no rational comment to the article (at least out of the top-modded ones).
The point of Rees's statement is not that we must beware of developing a horribly powerful weapon. The point is that in the course of regular experimentation a horrible tragedy can occur. It is not that US must develop the BHM (black hole missile (tm)) before Syria, cause then they'll destroy the world, cause after all, they're bad guys that have black hate in their veins. The danger is that the black hole can happen *accidentally*. Thus, the argument "better us than them" is pointless. It is in no way mitigated by the fact that us refraining from destroying the world doesn't prevent others from doing it.
How real are the dangers of accidentally destroying the universe? If a top british physicist says they're real, i believe him. Virile nanobots? probably not, but its just an example, really.
Can self-sensure achieve desired goal? to some extent, you bet. No "underground organization" is going to build a particle accelerator for high energy physics. This stuff doesn't appear out of thin air, it takes BIG BUCKS. True, some doomsday methods are within easier reach (bio weapons in particular) But at least some of the more dangerous experiments can be avoided.
I repeat, "let's make a black hole before they do!" does not make sense/is not applicable.
Rationality shouldn't be abandoned, even in science. The hope may be faint (i think his 50-50 prognosis is optimistic) but its no reason not to try or to disparage the messenger.
Actualy I was agent white a lot on my lawn to kill weeds, a lot of people do. White phosphorus was used a a smoke agent, it was normaly loaded in artilery shells and WP sharpnel would re-ignite spontaniously on contact with air makeing surgical removal of WP sharpnel a bit tricky, the surgon had to operate on the victem while the wound is maintained under water so the WP wouldn't burn. A bit of copper sulphate in the water slowly reacted with the WP to make it glow and a lot easier to find. WP is one weapon that strike pure terror in the hearts of infantryman, nasty stuff. WP was replaced in the US arsenal by red phosphorus, which isn't as nasty and terririfing but the smoke has much bettter infra-red obscurant properties.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds