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Defending Against Harmful Nanotech and Biotech
Maria Williams writes "KurzweilAI.net reported that:
This year's recipients of the
Lifeboat Foundation Guardian Award are
Robert A. Freitas Jr.and
Bill Joy, who have both been proposing
solutions to the dangers of advanced technology since 2000.
Robert A. Freitas, Jr. has pioneered nanomedicine and analysis of self-replicating nanotechnology. He advocates "an immediate international moratorium, if not outright ban, on all artificial life experiments implemented as nonbiological hardware. In this context, 'artificial life' is defined as autonomous foraging replicators, excluding purely biological implementations (already covered by NIH guidelines tacitly accepted worldwide) and also excluding software simulations which are essential preparatory work and should continue."
Bill Joy wrote
"Why the future doesn't need us" in Wired in 2000 and with
Guardian 2005 Award winner Ray Kurzweil, he wrote the editorial
"Recipe for Destruction" in the New York Times (reg. required) in which they argued against publishing the recipe for the 1918 influenza virus. In 2006, he helped launch a
$200 million fund directed at developing defenses against
biological viruses."
And I had no idea about his work in preventing bioterrorism. Hats off to you, Ray!
I would like to ask him a few questions, however, about his daily intake of vitamins. I'm sure his definition of "breaking the seal" while drinking is completely different from my own. Try drinking 10 cups of green tea in a day. I dare you.
Yeah, this is the same guy who hopes to live long enough so that he can live forever. Keep on reaching for that rainbow, Ray.
My work here is dung.
... for reporting on Luddism, creationism, global warming denial, radical environmentalism, crank physics, etc.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
"Too much is like not enough..." I'm pretty shure is peing 90% of the vitamins and minerals he takes... and just giving extra work to his body...
Is this a luddite I see before me? I see thee yet I give a damn about thee not.
A moratorium or ban is the worst possible thing we could do at this juncture. The technology is available now, and if we want to be able to defend ourselves against the problems it can cause, we have to be familiar enough with it to be able to devise a solution. Burying our heads in the sand will not make this problem go away. Like it or not, Pandora's Box is open, and it can't be closed again...we have to deal with what has escaped.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Tin foil bodysuit - problem solved!
Unpretentious Sydney reviews by unqualified Sydney reviewers
Obviously, to stop potential misuse of advancing technology, we must stop technology from advancing, rather than stop those who are likely to misuse it from having access to it and the power to misuse it...
I for one welcome our new robotic overlords.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
all they want is a home for themselves. ship 'em to kavis alpha IV.
Just because we may allow machines the ability to make thier own decisions and possible influence some of ours, doesn't mean we're headed down the food chain. For starters there will always be a resistance to any new technology, and humans consider independance an admiral, and desirable trait. For example there are many average people who will never want to, and arguably never need to, use the Internet.
While intelligent machines could improve the standard of living world-wide, we'll balance them to extract hopefully the most personal gain.
__
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"In this context, 'artificial life' is defined as autonomous foraging replicators" From the look of some of the posts here already, i think it's too late....
Guess what? the most successful and harmful representations of self-replicating artificial life forms are computer viruses and worms. Their evolution, propagation and mutation features are nearly biological. Here's a theory: Computer worm/virus gets smart enough to secretly divert small unmonitored portion of benign nanotech facility to produce nanobots that seek out CPU chips to bind to and take over...
Moderation in All Things... Especially Moderation - gurutc
So poisonous mechanical spiders are OK because they don't forage.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
I was fine up until Bio-McAfee deleted my liver and spleen.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
"Nanobots, transform!
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Depending on cup size, this doesn't neccessarily total more than 1.5-2 litres. That is about the normal water intake per day. Since tea is essentially spiced water, I see little reason why someone couldn't do this. Whether it is healthy is a different matter.
As a comparison, I drink about half a litre of strong coffee each morning, and another few desiliters at evening, and am exhibiting no symptoms - AAH ! SOMEONE SNEEZED ! IT MUST BE BIRD FLU ! WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE !
Sorry, that keeps happening; but like I was saying, I've not noticed any symptoms, so I cdon't see any reason why drinking 10 cups of tea each day would be particularly bad.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
I was going to write something deeply insightful about this but then my cranial implant suffered a general protection fault and had to be rebooted. Has anybody seen my hat?
Karma: Bad. (As in Good?)
I agree with the parent: bans are counterproductive in many cases.
Better is improved education, and I don't mean what you (probably) think... I'm NOT talking about "educating the (presumably ignorant) public" although that's important too. I'm talking about changing science education. It MUST, MUST, MUST include a high level of ethics, policy, and social study. I find it insane that people can specialize in science and from the moment they step into college, focus almost solely on their technical field.
Part of any responsible science curriculum should involve risk assessments, historical studies of disasters and accidents (unfortunately all sciences have them), and so on.
While we're at it, public research grants should probably include "educational" aspects. Scientists share a lot of the blame for the "public" ignorance of their endeavors. If you spend all your time DOING the science, and none of your time EXPLAINING the science, what do you expect?
Basically, what I'm arguing for is an alternative to banning things is the forced re-socialization of the scientific enterprise. Otherwise, we're bound, eventually, to invent something that 1) is more harmful than we thought and 2) does harm faster than society's safeguards can kick in. Once that happens we're in it good.
You know, one day we might be considered barbarians for using our computers the way we do. As property. Something you kick if it doesn't work the way you want it to. And when it gets sick 'cause it catches the latest virus, you go ahead and simply kill it, destroy all its memories, everything it learned and gathered, and you start over again.
And calling it "it"... how dare I?
I, for one, don't see the problem of having a thinking machine. We'll have to redefine a lot of laws. But having a sentient machine is not necessarily evil. Think outside the movie box of The Matrix and Terminator. But what machines need first of all is ethics so they can be "human".
On the other hand, considering some of the things going on in our world... if machines had ethics, they just might become the better humans...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Kurzweil. Sincerely, Your Daddy the Matrix
Moderation in All Things... Especially Moderation - gurutc
We have done a good job (IMHO) of keeping our nuclear power plants relatively safe, but that's mainly because the kid down the street can't build a nuclear power plant. But he can build a robot.
And imagine the robot you could build now with the resources of a rogue state. Or even a "good" state worried about it's security. Now imagine what they'll be able to build in 20 years. I could easily imagine Taiwan thinking that a deployable, independant (not remotely controlled) infantry killing robot might make a lot of sense for them in a conflict with China. And Taiwan's clearly got the ability to build state of the art stuff.
I'm not a Luddite, I'm not even saying don't make killer robots. I'm just saying that just as the guys working on The Manhatten Project were incredibly careful -- In fact alot of their genius is in the fact they did NOT accidentally blow themselves up. Programmers working on the next generation devices need to realize that there is a very credible threat that mankind could build a machine that could malfunction and kill millions.
There is no doubt in my mind that within 20 years, the U.S. Military will deploy robots with the ability to kill in places that infantry used to go. Robots would seem very likely to be incredibly effective as fighter pilots as well. Given these things as inevitable, isn't it prudent to be talking NOW about what steps are going to be taken to make sure that we don't unleash a terminator? I personally don't trust governments to be good about this either -- I'd like to make sure that the programmers are at least THINKING about these issues.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
Hats off to you, Ray!
Yah. Tinfoil hat.
..is a good offense, build a kevlar bubble with 0.000000001 micron filter and start rolling over mad scientists before they can spread their evil technology. You can work off those extra pounds and save the world at the same time.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Interesting tidbit, Robert A. Freitas, Jr's birth name is John Connor.
Let's spin this a bit more... So imagine an artificial life form. Not knowing about its maker (for some reason or another), connected to the others with some kind of network, so they can interact.
/dev/null after your final calculation?
So if a machine behaves correctly and it pleases its maker, it is more likely that he will create meaningful backups, because the machine is pleasing to him and he is glad it's running smoothly. Should it die for some reason, be it old hardware or an infection, he will more likely use his backup instead of redoing the machine from scratch...
Hinduism sure looks more appealing for computers than, say, Christianity. I mean, would you enjoy going to
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
We've already seen worms used to control Zombie-Nets for DOS attacks. When will it occur to the script-kiddie set to build a social network into worm code? The 'cpu' part of an ant's brain is incredibly simple with very few lines of code when compared to some of the more ambitious worms in the wild. All that's needed is a 'colony instinct', with a division of labor in the community. Once you have that, you'll have a simulation of the 'virtual intellect' possessed by large ant and termite colonies.
Moderation in All Things... Especially Moderation - gurutc
So it's not just an erstwhile hobby with him.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
"eight to 10 glasses of alkaline water and 10 cups of green tea....Adjustments are made as needed."
I think it is safe to say that one of those "adjustments" is going to the bathroom every 5 minutes.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
-- that he's obsessive on this?
Some people won't accept mortality. He seems to be an extreme case.
But back on topic: while I think trying to keep a lid on the nanobot box is a worthy goal, I'd put its odds of success at about the same as someone living forever. Sooner or later, Chance will get you, and sooner or later, someone will make something so awful that it will wipe us all out.
I just hope we get a viable colony off world before someone does it.
I grew up in a world where the only question was which armageddon would get us first, nuclear or Biblical. Those questions went to the back burner for a while when the Berlin Wall came down, but now we have a whole range of new threats, any one of which could figuratively or literally explode on us.
We now live in a world where the leverage a person can exert is enormous, and rapidly increasing. Nuclear bombs, jets full of people, microsubmarines, trains carrying thousands of tons steel and cars full of nasty chemical reagents, space vehicles, and the power grid are all powerful tools, especially in combination, and there are still others. The Internet and the extension of the voice network to cell and satellite phones make it possible to carry out action at a distance with these tools virtually anywhere on Earth.
What's the answer? I don't know. But I do think it's pointless to try to artificially limit the application of technology, especially if one group has it already. Trying to limit basic research might work, but the trouble is you don't know ahead of time what the application of some bit of research will be.
Just present people with the risks, let them see that their goals are advanced more surely by cooperation than by violence, and try to get groups to police themselves.
sigs, as if you care.
What's next? The Spanish Inquisition? (Nobody expects spanish inquisition :P )
Seriously, ban science? ban experimentation? what's next? This is the same kind of people who judged Galileo.
You forgot to include the 8-10 cups of water he drinks in addition to the tea, plus water that in the food we eat (a major source). So the 1.5-2 liters of tea he drinks is only at best half of the total. He is drinking at least twice the norm.
I assume his bladder is the size of a watermelon.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
I swear, I have NO idea where those pics came from, I must've somehow gotten a trojan and THAT did it.
Yeah. Right, that's it!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
In business 101, they teach that there are several ways for a business to guarantee a high profit. One way is to have high barriers to entry, and one way to achieve that is to create a bunch of safety and enviromental regulations that act like a one time cost for the billionaires, but act like an impossible barrier for small efficient competitors.
.... they are being pushed to controll the marketplace and lock in monopolies. The sooner people understand that, the better.
The bottom line is that nanotech is positioned to threaten a lot of big industrial powers, and become a trillion dollar industry in it's own rite. Contrary to popular belief, these concerns are not being pushed for safety sake, or to protect the world
exactly i'm going to laugh when he dies of kidney failure at an early age.
that being said, i take amino acids daily*, and omega-3s when my diet is low in fish/flax, and take half a 'one a day' multi vitamin 2-3 times a week.
when i take too many pills, my urine takes on a deep yellow to yellow green hue, beats peeing clear water as i do when ingesting too many caffineated drinks (what does the body do with all the 'black' in cola is it all from carbon?)
The human body is highly adapatable, it can susrvive on nothing more than bugs and water for months at a time, as we have seen so often on 'survivor' (those of you who watch it) people can and do routinely fill their bodies with poisons (capsaicin, nicotine, etc etc) and many of them live longer than people who've tried thier best to be as healthy as possible (if for no reason other than the misfortune of getting in the way of that bus)
* the formula is formulated for body builders, so i know it's pretty spot on, but i take far less than the 'bodybuilder' would.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Our friends at MIT have shown that tin foil hats enhance reception of government transmitters.
I shudder to think what a whole body suit could do!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Why don't we start making regulations for all the flying car traffic while we're at it? How many children and houses have to be destroyed in overhead crashes before we do something about it? And what about all the countries near the base of the space elevator? What if that thing comes down? I certainly wouldn't want that in MY backyard. How about:
* Overpopulation from immortality
* Quantum computers used to hack encryption
* Dilithium crystal polition from warp drives
Come on! If you are aware of the current state of nano-tech? We've got nano-bottle brushes, nano-gears, nano-slotcar motors, nano-tubes. i.e. we've got nano-progress, zilch. We are a LONG FUCKING WAY from any real problems with this tech, in fact so far off that we will likely encounter problems with other technology before nanotech ever bites us. Worrying about this is like worrying about opening a worm-hole and letting dinosaurs back onto the earth because some physicist wrote a book about time-travel.
We've got a few dozen other issues 1000 times more likely to kill us. Sci-Fi fantasy is an ESCAPE from reality, not reality itself.
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
We have done a good job (IMHO) of keeping our nuclear power plants relatively safe, but that's mainly because the kid down the street can't build a nuclear power plant.
Tell it to this kid.
Agreed. This seems as good a place as ever to link to one of my favorite short stories: Greg Egan's The Moral Virologist
If you were creeped out by the nonfiction rumors of apartheid-era South African genetic research into diseases to be triggered in the presence of melanin, Egan's story will keep you awake at night for weeks.
Try moving to Africa and living through a bug and water diet before making such idiotic comments.
The human body can adapt, but if you don't consume any vitamins at all, you age quicker. I think the point he is making is we DO need vitamins. It's debateable if these vitamins should be in the form of pills instead of food, but considering how the food industry is headed, we all will be living off artificial food in the future anyway. So we can either die of kidney failure or a heart attack. We can either eat Mc Donalds or bugs and water. We can either drink Green Tea or drink Beer. Take your pick, you'll die either way.
This whole grey goo scare is just bad science fiction. A machine that goes on replicating forever, eating everything in its path? If that were possible, don't you think that evolution would have come up with it already?
The machine would have to get enough energy, and enough raw materials, in more or less the right proportions, to do this. A general purpose eating machine would be so energetically expensive that it would stall before it could replicate. Life adapts itself to specific environments and foods because it's cheaper, and that makes the difference between life and death. Specific purpose life forms are efficient, and thrive in their ecological niche very well, but are no good outside of it. The closest thing to a general purpose life form, that can eat everything in its path, is us.
Not exactly nanoscopic, are we?
We are mortal because we choose to be. We accept mortality because we don't want to be immortal. So it's our decision to die.
If we want to die, the question then becomes, what is the healthiest way to live, and what is the longest amount of time we are required to live. NanoTech and BioTech can allow us to live healthier more productive lives, this is good for the economy.
the power of Chance.
Sooner or later, all numbers come up.
sigs, as if you care.
Rogue states? No, rogue individuals are what we have to worry about.
You have to worry about terrorists of the future getting a hold of this. It's debateable if there are any true "rogue" states, as communist states are sanctioned and isolated. North Korea is a threat, but China has influence over North Korea and it's not in China's best interest to allow North Korea to go terrorist. I don't think we have to worry about the middle east anymore, the middle east is being liberated as we speak and by the time this technology comes along the middle east will be as Democratic as Japan.
The war on terrorism is neccessary to PREVENT people from abusing these kinds of technology. INDIVIDUALS, not rogue states. You talk about states as if states arent made up of people.
You'd think these guys were FOR it the way they select the most idiotic approach to dealing with it. This technology MUST be legal and regulated, yet it also must be restricted, and not through a stupid idea like a ban. Just don't let people study it in an unclassified way. If people want to study artificial life, make it classified. If they discover something, destroy it and erase it from all records and give them money for the discovery. Use the patent systems to patent all the dangerous technologies and then don't build anything. The ban I think is just stupid.
Asimov's Three Laws were always nifty tools for fiction, and certainly gave ground for constructing interesting plots.
But the hard point about the 3 laws, and the short-shrift given them was that it was *hard* to do. At the most elementary, *how* do you recognize a human being? How do you tell it from a robot or a mannequin, so that when there's imminent danger you go right past them and save the amputee with bandages on his face? How do you evaluate the orders by one human won't cause harm to another? "We're testing this rocket against that abandoned building, shoot it," when the so-called abandoned building is actually in use.
Or an even simpler problem - recognizing and interpreting a spoken command.
Killer Robots are a heckuva lot easier to create than ones that will obey the Three Laws.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Ray has Type II diabetes so he has to be really careful with his health. According to him he has been able to make the symptoms go away with his diet and suppliment habbits. They can't really tell that he has it anymore, but he's not going to switch back to his old diet anytime soon.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Anyone else find it suspicious that the two award winners are one guy that sits on Lifeboat's advisory board, and the other guy helped design Lifeboat's website?
Sorry but your argument simply doesn't hold up. The market will go wherever it is most profitable to go... this has always been true and always will be true. Just look at some very succesful companies and tell me there's no profit in killing people.
The market is least trustworthy option when it comes to policing.
Two words that explain this: "Anthropic Principle"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
Basically if something was possible naturally that would cause us not to exist, we wouldn't be around to notice so these things haven't happened because we are hear to notice. As in the universe being favorable to naturally occurring gray goo.
This doesn't preclude something may happen in the future that would cause us to cease to exist though... Which may or may not be possible depending on which version (weak or strong) you believe).
I will also point that that we already have proof that nanotechnology is possible... The human body.
Otherwise our red and white blood cells wouldn't really be all that useful at such a small size.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Does this mean my copy of the Sims will be banned?
In this context, 'artificial life' is defined as autonomous foraging replicators ... excluding software simulations which are essential preparatory work and should continue.
Oh, nevermind.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
The human body is a chemical factory at it's most basic level. Genetics (a system of chemicals memes) predisposes you to be more or less sensitive, intolerant, needy, etc. of certain chemicals to keep the factory operating correctly and efficiently. Why is it so hard to understand that someone has analyzed their specific bodily needs, taking into account general human body plan and personal genetics, to come up with his own personalized regimin of suppliments (read: suppliments, not food replacements) that by all tests and accounts, seems to be working? He's completely beaten his type II diabetes and genetically predisposed heart conditions. I doubt he'll have to worry about "dying of kidney failure at early age" since he's 56 and biological age tests put him at the body of a 40 year old.
Call me a Ray Kurzweil fanboy if you wish, but I'd rather be on the team of someone with a proven past and current success record.
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
Nanotech? Frankly, it's not in my top 100 list of things likely to end the world within my lifetime.
No, what really keeps me up is Femtotech.
"In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-bit user. You've got your own newsgroup, alt.total.loser." -Weird Al
If that were possible, don't you think that evolution would have come up with it already?
The rest of your argument is good, but this is not a valid point. Evolution can only progress from point to point in the space of possible life forms in very small increments, when measured appropriately. (Earth evolution only, for instance, uses DNA, so Earth evolution can be measured fairly accurately by "DNA distance", but technically that's just a small part of the life-form space.)
There are, presumably, life forms that are possible, but can not be evolved to, because there is no path from any feasible starting life form to the life form in question by a series of small steps. Presumably, given the huge space of "possible life forms", the vast majority in fact belong to this class, just as the vast majority of "numbers" aren't integers (although not with the same ratio; presumably the set of viable life forms is finite, if fuzzy).
It is entirely possible that a "grey goo" machine, which would fulfill most definitions of life, can't be incrementally evolved to, yet it could still exist. It is also possible that it could be evolved to, but simply hasn't yet.
For all the complexity that evolution has popped out, it has explored an incomprehensibly small portion of the space of possible life forms.
Yes, installing stairs in your home will hold the Roombas off... but dear Lord, FOR HOW LONG?
for it is the desire for power and control
,control and knowledge is necessary . Think about you design a benevolent goody-two shoes AI, who "does no evil' how long will it fare vs. competition AI which will be ruthless , focused on gaining more knowledge, power and control without taking into account any fluffy stuff? -
I would say desire for power
The competing AI maybe not extreme from the start, but due to natural competition for resources only those with desire for power, control and knowledge will survive .
That's inevitable , because of "laws" of systems evolution .
Yeah, this is the same guy who hopes to live long enough so that he can live forever. Keep on reaching for that rainbow, Ray.
Funny you should use that phrasing, since Tom Rainbow suggested over 20 years ago that we might be the last generation who see death as inevitable.
Then again, Tom Rainbow is dead.
As someone with a graduate degree in robotics from the largest robotics research center in North America, I find the concept of robots posing any sort of threat to anything more than a handful of humans at at time to be completely laughable for now and the forseeable future. Even were we to produce robots sufficiently competent to be capable of causing intentional lasting harm, it would only be at the behest of their controllers, due to the amount of maintenance required to keep them running. A self-maintaining, much less self-replicating robotic threat of any sort is decades away, at a minimum. The current level of deadliness a robot can generate is a cruise missile, which is a robotic suicide bomber that will kill you dead, but in no poses a threat to humanity as a whole.
True, but the real point of the argument is that evolution gives us a pretty good idea of what is thermodynamically possible. A grey goo simply cannot exert enough energy to break all the bonds of all the materials it encounters indefinitely, any more than we can digest glass, plastics, and even organic fibre. And we have an incredibly complex digestive system.
Look at the fossil record. Something like 99.999% of all species that have ever existed are now extinct. More precisely, they have been transformed into species that are better adapted to exploit the resources of their niche. How can we expect it to be any different for humans? As soon as an intelligence exists that is better at allocating resources than humans, it will become the apex species. Since this intelligence appears most likely to arise as a result of human effort, it can be thought of as a transformation of humans. This transformation is different from others in that it is likely to result in a non-biological intelligence, and because it is a function of intelligence (human, mostly), rather than a function of environmental selection pressures. This will also mark an inflection point in evolution where future generations are primarily a product of thought rather than random selection.
Is there a clever name for intelligent people who feel compelled to voice an opinion outside of their field of expertise?
I want to hear more people admit they are not qualified to comment Authoratively on important issues. I've got a really good mechanic - but I dont ask his opinion on my termite problem, even though I am sure he may have some better than average insight.
Unfortunately our celebrity obsessed culture re-enforces this problem by churning the same pot of opinion and viewpoint. What does Oprah think about the middle east, what does Ray Kurzweil think about BioTechnology?
Yes, yes they are smart. But I would like smart people to defer to other smart people. There are no one stop genius' anymore
My work here is dung.
I'm sure an international legal ban on nanoweapons and "nanomalware" will keep them stopped. Kim Jong Il, Iran's theocrats, America's theocrats and their fellow capitalists, warmongers and nutjobs all respect international safety/security laws so well, now that we're all joined in the harmony of global peace and prosperity.
--
make install -not war
What you are missing is that tea is a strong diuretic. 10 cups of green tea would have you pissing all day long. Try it and see.
One side effect of Green Tea is that it helps to flush out you system. It supposedly clears our any excess pollutants that might be floating around.
I don't know it that is true or not but I know for sure is that you DO NOT go on a Green Tea Bender if you are on birth control pills.
..which just shows that the human brain is ill-adapted for thinking and was probably designed for cooling the blood-T P
You DO realize that governments are immune to patent restrictions, right? If your side doesn't explore these technologies and exploit them, then someone else's side WILL. Fact of life.
Don't just stand there, get that other dog!
Like the AIDS virus or SARS? You'd think they would have spent the money already...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
there's a recent article on salon.com titled "I, Nanobot" by Alan H. Goldstein. If the future possibility of "Nanobiobots" doesn't scare the bejezzus out of you, nothing will.
In hundreds of years, we may be able to create the first fully grown sentient being smaller than Gary Coleman.
EpiAdv - if you like Pokey the Penguin, try this comic!
States are made up of individuals. States are just places on a map, the world is flat now. Individuals are globalized, and so all this talk about states sounds pointless. Also you assume all terrorists are poor, which is ignorant.
But I have a copy of Fantastic Voyage right in front of me. What he recommends is:
- Eat well, lose weight, stop smoking, exercise, reduce stress.
- Take supplements, focusing on a limited number of 'universal' (good for almost everyone with some specific exceptions) and 'supernutrient' (very useful) supplements
- Research if you should take additional supplements specific to any health risks you have, where research can include medical tests, genetic tests, and family history, and then take those extra supplements, and
- Plan to update your supplement list as better information comes out through your personal medical tests or through medical research. For example, recommendations can change as studies on supplements are completed, as when a study found that beta carotene is dangerous to smokers and those with lung cancer.
His recommended list of supplements is fairly short. The 'universal' supplements are vitamins plus minerals (except iron)... what you can find in a single good multivitamin. Then there are 6 'supernutrients:' antioxidants and omega-3-fatty-acids. 7 pills if you take them once a day.But checking my own multivitamin- it has 25 items listed, because it details each of the B vitamins and each of the minerals. Technically then I'm taking 25 supplements a day, but it doesn't mean I'm taking 25 pillls a day.
What! Didn't it already happened? I always though that I descended from it...
Rethinking email
It's no coincidence that the company that makes Roomba's is called iRobot.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
I think the weapons we already have are about as bad as possible. Does it really matter whether one is killed by a nuclear missile or a nanovirus? It may be easier to use nanoviruses though, and harder to stop.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
hey, we should better burn all aspirin pills - who knows when they turn out to be chemical weapons and turn against us?
these guys must have watched terminator too often and got paranoid...
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
It needs extermination.
Well, okay, that's an overstatement - maybe. MOST of humanity needs exterminating, not all. That better?
Nonetheless, Bill Joy just doesn't get it. His Wired article was bullshit.
Freitas at least has some clue. I don't agree with ANY "total bans" on any sort of research, however. If you don't research it, you don't know where the dangers might actually be. And that will cost you in the long run more than taking a certain amount of risk. The notion that somebody is going to create an actual "grey goo" sufficient to do a significant amount of damage to anybody is highly speculative at best. Using this to justify a "total ban" on artificial life research in non-biological contexts is simply too extreme a position.
Most of these people are trying to make a name for themselves in nanotech by digging up "issues" they can exploit. Fine, no problem. Just don't take these "issues" seriously as it's entirely speculative at this point. It's on a par with worrying about AI taking over the world - back in 1965.
Besides, as I indicated, who says that's a bad outcome?
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I can't believe you actually wrote this. "Liberated"? From the dictator Rumsfeld himself helped install all those years ago? And "liberated" to what exactly? An oil-producing slave state with a yet-to-be-named puppet regime? Oh no, that's right, they had the elections, and the puppet regime was already installed.
Does anyone remember Vietnam? Does the word "Quagmire" mean anything to you aside from a Family Guy reference?
modern terrorist == red-scare communist == simple, effective, political demonizing device for keeping the masses in line
Don't forget the most important part. "Nano" means "magic". "Grey goo" is "nano". "Grey goo" is magic. Grey goo in scifi did not even require particular elements (at least until The Diamond Age).
If you need text styles to communicate then you don't have a message.
Evolution can only progress from point to point in the space of possible life forms in very small increments, when measured appropriately. (Earth evolution only, for instance, uses DNA, so Earth evolution can be measured fairly accurately by "DNA distance", but technically that's just a small part of the life-form space.)
This doesn't apply so simply to microbes - they can evolve very fast indeed and in big jumps by DNA exchange.
It is entirely possible that a "grey goo" machine, which would fulfill most definitions of life, can't be incrementally evolved to, yet it could still exist. It is also possible that it could be evolved to, but simply hasn't yet.
Not really. The point is that life has a common ancestry, so microbes would only have to evolve to digest a relatively narrow range of biological material. But it hasn't happened. The closest we have seen is 'flesh-eating' bacteria (Necrotizing fasciitis).
Are you guys telling me that such a machine could not be built in the next 5 years?
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
Well, not quite.
There is randomness in our universe (although probabalistic) that likely has created most molecular combinations of 10^9 atoms (out the arse number).
The thing with the 'grey goo' theory is that grey goo is by definition incredibly hardy and hungry. It would only need to develop in one place before it started 'reproducing' through the adjacent material.
Stage left: asteroid/comet impact. Millions of 'spores' from this big grey blob are now flying off into space.
What is incredibly more likely (and currently called life) is a molecule that breaks a small set of bonds and uses the atoms to reproduce. As we see everyday, such molecules are self limited due to random degradation, lack of materials and lack of energy.
That's good - because he'll need it with all the chemical/herbal supplements he's taking. I wonder how often he gets a liver function test, and what those numbers might look like.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Don't worry, though - I would never release nanobot assemblers without replication limiting code.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
...blood fueds. When the axis of maximum profits kills a muslim over there, ALL that guys relatives want revenge. Unless the US and UK engages in total 100% genocide, they will never "win". People who understand the middle east tried to tell those neocon MORONS this before they started. a lot of their own hired analyst employees, civil and military, told them this, and they all got FIRED for talking out of turn. Of course, if you read those troskyite neocon nutjobs previous essays and foreign policy papers, that was the PLAN, the "clash of the civilizations", and 9-11 was the EXCUSE they allowed to go down on purpose to implement this harebrained scheme. They are not only stupid, insane and as completely loony as the raggiest headed muslim fundy, but they are murderers of the highest order, and traitors to boot.
It will completely destroy the west over time, then the rest of the planet. It's the worst possible foreign policy gambit of the last several hundred years, bar none. You'll see it hitting hard over the next year as the phony economy continues to crumble, then you'll see the rest of the planet pulling away from the dollar, then you'll see them get real desperate and start as many wars as they think it will take to divert attention and stay in power. And when they try that stunt, a lot of the larger nations elsewhere on the planet will temporarily ally with each other and nuke the living snot out of the US and UK.
It is the mother of all screwups.
It's pretty obvious that what works for him won't work for most people; he even says that directly, his plan is formulated for his particular chemistry. He's treating much more than diabetes with it; he's also making up for other genetic deficiencies he's predisposed to, having had some key "problem" genes personally tested for in himself to see which alleles he possesses. Again, the body is just a big chemical factory. Different genes directly decide what chemicals are produced and in what quantities. One allele may not be as desirable to have as another. We can't currently change our genome directly, but we can control what we put in our bodies to counteract those negative effects.
Ray and Terry Grossman M.D. (co-author of Fantastic Voyage) aren't just some hacks pulling this stuff out of their asses. At least view the companion website to see what you think before dismissing it out of hand.
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
No. The fact that you would think that shows that the grandparent is correct that the portion of the state space explored is literally unimaginably small. We have explored a truly tiny portion of the state space for DNA, and (probably) almost none of the non-DNA state space.
Your argument about grey goo expanding outward really fast from the home planet is an interesting one, but I think you are correct that Malthusian arguments can provide a good counterpoint. But that'sno reason that it couldn't happen here.
Ban or no ban nanotechnologies will come to pass because the military will have a use for them boys and girls. And I doubt the three laws of robotics will be coded into machines that are designed for the military, it will obey one law - FOLLOW ORDERS.
Now is the right time to be talking about the ethics of nano and genetic engineering considering IT'S THE TWENTY FIRST CENTURY so debating such issues and establishing a framework for behaviour wrt developing this technology is timely.
The article pointed out that the development of such technology would probably be done by the private sector. What concerns me is that without ANY framework private industry will do what it always does and externalise all risk for us poor hapless members of the public to pay for, deal with or die by. Spell Bhopal anybody?
If nano-tech is self replicating, then does this imply that it will evolve without human interference? If that is the case then the first accident with nano-technology that allows it into our biosphere maybe the last. I doubt we have a backup of our planets library of DNA, and as it is obvious (today) that our global economy is built on a flawed premise (i.e consumption vs sustainability) coupled with our existing record of self harm, it's not unreasonable to be pessemistic about the consequences.
Nanotechnology is inevitable, cause we need it, we also need genetic engineering, but we also need a good understanding of the technology before we damage ourselves irrepairably. A ban on research won't help but what about a ban on commercial implementation?
With the pace of technology it is likely that such an encounter will be sudden. Some smart genetic engineer will figure our how to make a nano-assembler out of a bacteria, and !!!BANG!!! we will have nanotech ready or not. From that point progress will be quick.
I'd like to bet on the Human instinct to survive such an encounter, but as we have changed the state of what is 'Fit' to evolve in a Darwinian sense it's more likely that our continued evolution will depend on humans conceptualising threats before they come to be. Evolution gave us the upper hand several times before we changed the rules, I doubt we would have much of chance with a new player who is able to change the rules the same way we decide whether a cow will be a steak or a leather jacket.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
4 liters of water is not much when you do some sporting. Last winter i did a bicycling trip of about 250 km. I needed 7 liters during the trip, not to mention the water i drunk before and after. Imagine that in summer. The 1.5-2 liters is the norm if you don't move your ass.
Trust me, I work for the government.
This doesn't apply so simply to microbes - they can evolve very fast indeed and in big jumps by DNA exchange.
This is why I left the definition of "suitable distance" a little fuzzy; that wasn't oversight, that was purposeful. You probably know that the more mutations an organism acquires at once, the more likely it is to simply die. That's because the organism tried to jump too far in the "real" state space.
You can reverse the logic with reasonable effectiveness; if the organism doesn't die after a seemingly "massive" exchange, than in reality, it didn't traverse very far.
While there may seem to be an organism with a radically different gene state than any previous one after such an exchange, it's "just" a recombination of existing, "known-good" genes that existed in the gene pool (we call it that for a reason), and by the fact that it worked at all, there must be some method to the madness.
In survival terms, it may be a massive leap. In terms of exploring the state space, the new organism is very, very firmly "nothing new".
It may help to realize that the "state space" in question is easily the kind of thing you measure with things to the power of things to the power of thing to the power of things, and beyond. If you think the set of "all [practically] possible genomes" is large (mere hundreds of thousands or millions to the power of tiny little 4), it's nothing next to the set of "all possible lifeforms". Shuffling up a known-good set of genes is piddly.
Remember the context I'm putting this in: Arguing that if grey goo were possible, it would have necessarily evolved by now. In practice, we only care about the DNA space, and there your microbe example does at least represent a much larger leap than us macroscopic organisms seem to be able to pull off safely. But against the backdrop of quasi-infinite possibility, it's small potatoes.
That should be "mere tiny 4 to the power of hundreds of thousands or millions". Which is still a darned sight smaller than a million to the power of a million to the power of a million, which is probably still a breathtaking underestimate.
You know, I always see these claims from people that I will slanderously label as Supplement or Organic Nutjobs (tm)
I have some questions before I'm prepared to believe such claims:
1) which pollutants?
2) where are they hanging out?
3) how are they cleared?
4) how do you know you haven't triggered unintended consequences?
The green tea and birth control pills things seems unsubstantiated based on a moderate-effort internet scan.
Please provide citations for your assertions. Peer-reviewed research with reproducible methodology descriptions (that have been reproduced...) win bonus points.
Defending Against Harmful Nanotech and Biotech
A teflon-coated, hermetically-sealed man-sized beryllium-alloy tank ought to do it.
Unless your nanites have a taste for such things.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
What this comes down to, is the authors mistrust in people. "Politicians will make WMDs, and individuals in control of powerfull technology/machinery will not succesfully predict the consequences of their actions to the point of avoiding accidental slaughter. Or people will just deny responsability and just let a machine make decisions". Well, I could be happening already, but I dont see it happening. Ergo, the problem lies with the author himself.
And the last issue is accidental/unplaned destructive results from unforseen consequences/applications of technology. Global worming is such an event, and it goes slowly enough for people to take action (in a functional society). Fallout form nuclear tests is another such event, and was almost immediately rectified with a ban (took 20 years). So, the faster the negative consequences manifest themselves, the lower the risk and cost of lives. In the extreme case where an experiment has immediate harmfull consequences - there will be only the researchers that would die.
But what about a harmfull experiment that starts a chain reaction and amplifies itself (a deadly virus/the grey goo)?
A) Its like sayng "what if a kid accidentally makes a nuke in his back-yard?". Accidentaly making things is what nature/evolution does anyway with viruses (AIDS etc.), and when people do it its in no way accidental, but very much planed and goal driven. So - it's up to people and their decisions, and if a kid is smart enough to make a nuke, than that kid will be smart enough to put it appart and tell noone BEFORE that goal has been acheived, if its acheivable at all: http://www.dangerouslaboratories.org/radscout.html
B) Cars are such a virus (they have replicated and evolved quite fast in the last 100 years, and they are changing our ecosystem), and its not like this is going unnoticed or unregulated, and its not like the only solution is to "ban" cars right here right now.
Its ironic that fear and mistrust of technology is actually about fear and mistrust in people... And if fear and mistrust of people is what this is all about - then the solution should be about eliminating the fear and mistrust - NOT about eliminating a general technology by a general ban. Technology is a tool, what you do with it is up to people. AIs could be given control to make us into domestic animals, OR AIs could sit around doing nothing until asked - "could there be harmfull consequences of this experiment that I haven't thought of; justify your answer".
nearly ending cellular aging is possible, yes, consider the giant sequoia. what i am saying is that no matter how good his techniques are at slowing his individual cellular aging process, it doesn't reverse the 'genetic self disctruct' code in the human genome nor does it 'eliminate' the fact that semi-permiable mebranes won't remain semi-permiable forever. aka 'gradual' kidney failure.
;)
The problem is that human cells are programed to divide so many times then die. some aren't even programmed to divide, so when they begin to fail they fail catostrophically. his chemistry, all his work, someves a lot of problems, but like any 'ugly kludge' it creates problems. he's trying to use the body's chemical factories to extend his life beyond what it was programmed to achieve. until that 'program' to self terminate can be delt with none of his work will make a man live forever. And yes, a lot of genetics work will be needed if we're ever going to create a human body that is capable of remaining strong and helathy for a thousand years or two.... and even then a lot of supplements will be required to keep a body in tip top shape for 2,000 years... and of course, many 'prone to failure' organs will need to be grown and harvested from either lab cultivation, or 'organ growing pigs' kidneys livers and hearts are among those organs which people will need 'transplanted' even after genetics enhancements enable human life to extend to the 2,000 year range.
And no matter what he's billing the technolgoies as, it will not be eternal life. the best we're going to get is 2,000 years. a pretty far cry from 100 years, or 50 years... but still no one will be able to live forever
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Did you even check out the website? You think we'll still be mostly biological in 100, even 50 years?
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
Locust.
It's not a matter of how many of the possibilities have been explored, but a comparison of how many possibilites exist and how many the universe has randomly created. There is a finite number of ways a group of atoms can join together. For 10^7 atoms there are 10^49 ways for them to join together (completely random number... depends on type of atoms, enviroment, etc). Of these 10^(49-?) combinitations are actually stable. It's quite possible that the universe at large has run through most of those combinitations.... If correct, grey goo would already exist SOMEWHERE if it were possible. As the Mars rocks and meteors on Earth show, it wouldn't stay contained. If such a molecule as viral as grey goo was possible, it's likely that most of the universe would already be 'infected'.