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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.
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.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Tin foil bodysuit - problem solved!
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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...
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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Laugh DAILY funny adult videos
"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
I was fine up until Bio-McAfee deleted my liver and spleen.
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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 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.
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
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.
"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
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
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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make install -not war
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
Actually, I believe Vernor Vinge first coined the term 'Singularity' (in the socio-technological sense), though I could be mistaken.
Don't just stand there, get that other dog!
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.