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DARPA Aims for Synthetic Life With a Kill Switch
jkinney3 writes to mention that DARPA's mad scientists have undertaken a new program designed to create synthetic organisms, complete with a "kill switch." The project, dubbed BioDesign, is dumping $6 million into "removing the randomness of evolutionary advancement" by creating genetically engineered masterpieces. "Of course, Darpa's got to prevent the super-species from being swayed to do enemy work — so they'll encode loyalty right into DNA, by developing genetically programmed locks to create 'tamper proof' cells. Plus, the synthetic organism will be traceable, using some kind of DNA manipulation, 'similar to a serial number on a handgun.' And if that doesn't work, don't worry. In case Darpa's plan somehow goes horribly awry, they're also tossing in a last-resort, genetically-coded kill switch."
History has no evidence of any organism managing to evolve away from a lethal or maladaptive feature. The killswitch should persist in the population indefinitely.
that introduces the kill switch in to soldiers and spies. For national security, of course.
I can see this as a movie entitled "Kill Switch" with Arnold Schwarzenegger.......
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
What could possibly go wrong?
what could possibly go wrong?
I cannot envision any possible way this could turn out to be a bad idea.
Let's hope the kill switch is not a lysine dependency.
For this project, DARPA is creating a lot of art and branding around the concept of a stylized red-and-white umbrella viewed from above.
jkinney3 writes to mention that DARPA's mad scientists have undertaken a new program designed to create synthetic organisms
Ok, this stupid meme that everyone who works with applied biology is some sort a crazed wild eyed 'mad scientist' arrogantly playing God really needs to die. If you can't say something without that sort of emotional language, don't say anything at all.
Putting aside the sarcasm, any self-replicating technology, or technology that could be self-replicating, needs to have multiple safeguards in place to prevent over-replication. Unless you are willing to declare any such research absolutely off limits and enforce it somehow, then I think they should be credited with doing the right thing here.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Let's hope they dont detect the killswitch and rewire themselves to remove it...
That what popped into my mind. "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die."
It seems as though the "kill switch" option is an attempt to hard-wire an equivalent to Asimov's laws of robotics (obey all orders / don't harm humans / protect self).
However, Asimov's "I, Robot" stories were written to highlight how even something hard wired could have its pitfalls - and that was someone who wrote the stories and also the 'rules' behind the stories.
Be interesting to see how this one pans out.
"She's furniture with a pulse"
They should talk to Craig Venter. He'll beat DARPA by 5+ years.
We'll find that out soon enough, it seems.
Why has everything Alex Jones has been fear mongering about been happening in the past 5-8 months ?
How could it possibly go right?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
When I start seeing developments like this, I wonder if we as a species are developing faster technologically than we are maturing as a civilisation.
Are we wise enough to use such a technology, if it were developed to it's full potential ?
I have a unusual vision problem which the NHS has failed to diagnose. Can you help? More at failedbythenhs.blogspot.com
That's the obvious tag.
Seeing as they seem to be going for something biological, I'm going to guess they'll regret summoning Azathoth.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Hello, my name is Windows SEVEN of nine.
In the novel Systemic Shock by Dean Ing, special ops agents have devices in their skulls to provide radio communcations, data processing, and a remote kill switch. Ostensibly, the kill switch is for cases where an agent is captured, and is only to be used if the agent explicitly requests termination ... but some of the agents suspect that they may be terminated for reasons other than explicit request. Decent novel; moderately recommended.
-kgj
They should have named it, D.A.R.Y.L
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Well, maybe our new genetically superior, kill switch deactivating lords and masters just might be flying pigs small enough to come out of my butt?
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
Sure sounds like it to me.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
Cows are host organisms, man is their primary parasite.
-kgj
If this synthetic life ends up looking anything like Max, am I able to place an order for a few?
Reading about that kill switch, I'm reminded about the quote from Jurassic Park about how Life always finds a way. I'm not sure that say 20-30 years post development when we may need a kill switch that it'll still work. Because things probably won't go haywire to the point of needing a kill switch right away. And even if they do, if the problems get worked out and these things become more common, I don't know if the kill switch tech will be updated with each iteration to account for possible evolutionary changes and adaptations.
-"Those who fought today will die tommorow."-
I see nothing good coming of this. It's like a plot from some bad made-for-TV SciFi movie -- and it'll end just as badly, if it gets off the ground at all.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
The killswitch needs to be incorporated into critical sections of the organisms DNA to give it even a chance of working. The deadly gene needs to have a beneficial purpose, or (even without selective pressure) the section that codes for the killswitch will randomly mutate with no adverse effect on the organism.
To put it another way, a car alarm built into your rear bumper is not nearly as useful as one built into the ignition.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
I know your UNATCO killphrase: Laputan machine. Take your best shot, Flatlander Woman.
WARNING: Gunther Hermann and Anna Navarre should NOT read the above text!
"Mein Führer, I can walk!"
Chaos twist the minds of these Adepts and bend them to its will all while working its way around the kill switch.
Shits about to seriously hit the fan.
This move will cause others to panic, now they too will start their own programs.
Someone, somewhere is going to screw things up. *
Biological war anyone?
I'm building a vault, you pay me $10,000, you'll get your own section of the vault.
* Of course, there is the chance this has already previously happened.
SARS is claimed as being a case where things in the lab screwed up and someone become infected.
Swine Flu was also apparently mishandled, the virus being recreated from a previous similar outbreak decades ago.
You realize that without DARPA you'd not be whining about defense spending on the Internet, right?
From what I've read no computer can model DNA behavior faster than DNA itself can manipulate a supply of proteins. The kill switch might be there so that they can "run" massively parallel variations and use the kill switch as a sort of debug breakpoint. But IANAMB (molecular biologist).
So DARPA's just licensing stuff from Monsanto these days?
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Wouldn't this be a stage one laundry list for creating next gen bioweapons? First we want to target it and then we want to control it. There was a recent Fringe episode along a similar lines concerning targeting a toxin based on genes. The idea has been around for years but it looks like they are trying to find some one that can make their dreams come true. Most seem to think they are talking higher life forms, most jokes are about that, but it seems they are looking to control bacterial life. Something similar to the "Terminator" gene the FDA developed for crops. Create a harmful bacteria that can't reproduce more than one or two times or exposure to a chemical turns on the "Off" switch causing it to be rendered harmless. Gee how can this go wrong let me count the evolutionary ways. I know they are hoping to take evolution out of the equation but that's unlikely. I'm guessing why they are asking for synthetic life is to avoid junk DNA which could help the organisms to evolve unwanted traits. A tall order.
is...
Nexus 6 Roy Batty... "I want more life f....er"
Kill switch... sooner or later that life form will want to extend its life... the same as we humans do.
I would like them to make simulations with the basic structures of e.g. human DNA.
I always have the impression it would be better to use robotic technology as body implants to improve human capabilities. Read: Why should we create robots instead of us becoming the robots/cyborgs? Wouldn't this sort of solve the controlling problem at the root? Of course such a choice might have it's own perhaps unpleasant implications, which I haven't thought of yet...
If DARPA wants to follow movie themes, maybe a light review of the SyFi Series "Caprica". The basic concept is that when one dies, their memories are downloaded into a clone, the clone is "animated" and there you are, ready for the morning rush hour. Arnold Schwarzenegger starred in another movie variation of this concept, "The 6th Day". If the Bad Guys can't kill you, then elementary solvable problems like Toyota's can be effectively discounted. But if DARPA wants to get snotty with the bad guys, then develop a Mutagen that maintains average skin tissue to be as resilent as when a person was in their early 20's. Nothing makes a Bad Guy look ugly like a good looking victim.
My "what could go wrong scenario" is this: If there's a killswitch, that makes it a survival imperative to not have it thrown. If the organism wants to survive, it has two options:
1) obey and do everything the creators say. And being human, this is likely going to be conflicting or confusing (HAL9000 anyone?)
2) kill the people with the finger on the switch.
I saw this movie before. It was called BladeRunner
You don't think the "Droid Nexus One" was a simple naming mistake, do you? How long will it take them to get to a model 6?
Can you say "I want more life, fucker"? I knew you could!
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I suppose this has nothing to do with commercial considerations, such as ensuring customers have to re-stock, or enforcing the payment of licensing fees?
Well we already have a video game franchise on this called Assassin's Creed. Oops, did I just put a spoiler...
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Will they dream of electric sheep?
Setting his threshold to 5, Sparky eliminated most of the trolls on /.
Before the government got involved, health care in the US was affordable to even the poor.
There were also some advances in medicine in the meanwhile that raised the price independent of government involvement. Chemotherapy back in the day may have been cheap enough to afford out of pocket, but that's because it was booze.
I guess you could still claim that since the government funded much of the research that led to these advances, they were still responsible though.
...that was an exaggeration about the chemotherapy being booze, BTW. Sorry for the confusion that may have caused.
DARPA: if you will put a kill-switch inside politicians, I am ready to send you some money by PayPal.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
The killswitch in Systemic Shock is a cortex bomb. Not sure how messy, we don't actually see it happen in the novel. (Some of the agents know that is happened to one of their own, but the event is not described.)
-kgj
[citation needed]
There's a reason Medicare and Medicaid exist, and it's precisely because the poor *could NOT* afford health care.
The idiots who look at the past through rose-colored glasses really piss me off -- there were no "good old days". The government programs we have today were largely the result of a problem needing to be addressed. What, you think that the magical budget fairy appeared and said, "Hey everybody! Let's give money for health care to people who can already afford it!"
And there is something fundamentally retarded about someone who believes that an unregulated system would result in a better outcome. Newsflash, retard -- when entities are allowed to act completely in their own self-interest, they do so, to the detriment of others. The insurance industry is a private tax on health care (a portion of everything lines someone's pockets). Why shouldn't the beneficiary be the general public (via a federal system) instead of a small group of extremely wealthy people?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
What is life?
Sexually transmitted disease with 100% mortality.
I was going to mod you up, but the mod system only goes to 5. This post deserves an 11.
Does your tax money go where you want?
Well my first choice of where my tax money should go is "in my pocket", but that is just my selfishness speaking.
My next choice (or my first realistic choice) is for my tax money to go to my government.
Woot, it is! So yes, it's going where I want it.
If my tax money went to something other than our government, I'd be a little ticked possibly.
And yes, I realize you feel you are somehow entitled to claim it is still your money after it is no longer your money, and that you also feel you have some say over how not-your-money should be spent by those whose money it is... But that is just silly talk!
Haven't they seen ANY film at all?
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Some Muslim sects are full of people who are very loyal.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Before the government got involved, health care in the US was affordable to even the poor.
Leeching out bad humors was less expensive than an MRI is.
Of course your statement is untrue. It was a lack of available healthcare that caused medicare and medicade to be enacted to fill the gap.
There is something supremely retarded about you kids. You see government fail miserably at almost everything it does, yet you somehow believe the solution is more government control.
Perhaps because we see that non-government-controlled healthcare in the US is unaffordable, and we notice that it is private healthcare charging the government those high prices. We likely also notice that things like that law that makes it illegal for medicare to bargain for cheaper drugs was written by private healthcare companies.
More likely though, we just notice that everyone else has cheaper (often by half), more effective, universal healthcare than we do.
Please feel encouraged to mod me off-topic, right after you do the same to the parent. This isn't an article on healthcare or right-wing ranting about a time that never existed.
if the rest of the genetic coding goes wrong, why is the kill switch going to work?
See http://www.amazon.com/Killswitch-Cassandra-Kresnov-Joel-Shepherd/dp/1591027438
It just happens to be a novel about an attempt to engineer loyalty into a synthetic organism. Oh, and it's totally awesome.
And now we get off your lawn...
Seriously though, I wish I saw more comments like that online.
artificial life, with serial numbers on DNA, and a pre-programmed lifespan... where did DARPA replicate that idea from, and when can I get a basic pleasure model?
Looks like they were reading Mark Stanley's excellent webcomic "Freefall".
It examines these issues in detail, with considerable humor.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
This is a really good idea. I just can't say enough good things about this idea and the common sense in which it seems to be rooted.
Once again, Deus Ex predicts the future!
There was this movie from 1993 called Jurassic Park... it didn't really turn out well in the end I think someone at DARPA should see it.. ...and that's all I have to say about that..
There are so many things morally wrong with this, it's not even funny.
How is it really any different from "creating" normal human children and implanting kill-switches?
If whatever they cook up is even close to us intellectually, using it like they plan to is nothing more than slavery.
You don't like slavery, do you, you slavery liker, you.
This is how it ends. Weaponized grey goo, that is only meant to fight the 'bad guys' devours the entire world. We need a moon base ASAP !
Listen. Your anecdotal claims backed up by zero statistics are surely fascinating. And I'm so excited that here in the "science" section of slashdot, hearsay is apparently super awesome.
If you want to go back to 50s medicine, you're welcome to it. People who have heart problems can die twenty years earlier. Severe forms of diabetes can go back to being lethal. Patients with mental illnesses can be lobotomized and put in a walled garden somewhere. Let's just throw out the massive advances in medical technology just so you can make some cheap, baseless, and most importantly, false political points.
Medical care is now highly specialized, with many, many fields, staffed by many different doctors, and I can guarantee you that that leading oncologists, heart surgeons, and neurosurgeons will not visit your house for an extra fifty cents. Sorry, but your childhood fantasy is just a childhood fantasy.
Out in the rest of civilization, the best way to cope with the increase of medical technology is to socialize it to reduce overhead. This is because it is very difficult to incentivize keeping someone healthy in a pure market. Without regulations, companies have no reason not to charge you outrageously for everything, since the cost you're willing to pay to live his virtually no limit.
FYI,
Darpa's Budget is about $3 Billion
http://www.darpa.mil/Docs/FY2011PresBudget28Jan10%20Final.pdf
Just in comparison Nasa's budget is about $18 billion
The NSF (National science fund) is about $7.5-8 Billion.
Also for the cost of the bank bailout($700Billion) we could of gone to mars and back($55Billion) about 13-14 times
Mostly, yes.
darpa is critical to technological innovation and ground breaking ideas. Most will NOT be used to kill people, but be used to improve peoples lives.
Yes, we ALSO need health care but it isn't an either or concept.
Darpa, NASA, Education, Healthcare. All these things will be needed to continue to be a top player in the changing world.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I’m synthetic. But I’m not without feelings.
Bishop
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Dr. Simon Tam: A phrase that's encoded in her brain, that makes her fall asleep. If I speak the words, "Eta...
Jayne Cobb: Well don't say it!
Zoë: It only works on her, Jayne.
Jayne Cobb: Oh... Well, now I know that.
This is more of the story:
DARPA had an endless amount of taxpayer money for killing people and destroying their property. Some DARPA employees got off-topic and wanted to network distant DARPA computers together. They were successful.
But there was extreme opposition to making that work public. Al Gore insisted that ARPANet become a public network, and got that okayed in Congress before most Senators and Representatives knew how to type.
That information about Al Gore comes from an email message I received from Vint Cerf, whom some people call the "father of the internet". I don't know Dr. Cerf, but he replied to an email I sent him asking for the facts.
Frog DNA substituted where dinosaur DNA was missing in Jurassic Park? Yeah, Jurassic Park was fiction, of course.
However, organisms mutate, what's to prevent said organisms from mutating out the "kill switches"?
I know it's in poor taste to comment on the moderation, to complain about it...
But parent to my post is not moderated troll or flamebait, and calls people like me retards...
So I'm not sure why my response would be considered any more troll or flamebait than his post.
Other than the fact, of course, that some moderators happen to disagree with what I said, and felt that using mod points was the right way to make their voices heard.
Whatever. I know the OP made a specious claim, and can't back it up. I just hope that people reading it realize that fact.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Of course, the safeguards could fail. So, they will have to engineer something capable of hunting down and killing the synthetic life. Naturally, the synthetic life killing synthetic life will require even greater safeguards. Which could fail...
As long as all the synthetic organisms are as hot as Jessica Alba, I'm pretty ok with this...
- Take your best shot, flatlander woman.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
In an environment full of myths, this is the most popular. DARPA did not invent the Internet, several individual system admins, annoyed by the need to have three or four terminals on thier desk, had already worked out the basic processes and were using them on a daily basis. Their bosses realized there was money to be made on this concept and created a proposal for DARPA. The military has the best propagandists though, so all you hear is that the brilliant beancounters at the DARPA headquarters invented the concept of inter-networking computers out of thin air.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
"retire", not "kill".
I remember reading a theory that virus could copy a bit of DNA from one organism, and implant it into another. Isn't that one of the ways that they use to genetically manipulate plant DNA?
What happens if this "kill switch" get copied into our own DNA?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
This is ridiculous. We still do not fully understand bilogical evolution, yet we are gunna give it a red-hot-go anyway.
Is it only me who can imagine unintended bilogical mechanism within this organism, that closely interact with the functions of the killswitch? Here are some examples:
a) A seperate bacteria/virus evolves to mimic/steal some of the functions via gene addition/deletion. This function then becomes a killswitch owned by the virus/bacteria. This sequence could then be injected back into healthy cells and executed. You think AIDS is bad?
b) The killswitch is eventually inadverdantly triggered within the organism autonomously via unintended biological mechanisms. This becomes a repeatable phenomena, and failing complete extinction, within an unknown period of time the organism evolves an adaption which disables the killswitch.
Dont try and convince me that we haven't evolved to avoid cancer where possible, we have. And any killswitch that has an autonomous trigger within the organism will also be bred out. When considering the entropy presented to DNA from duplication, the environment, virus's and so on - how much is it we believe we can gaurentee?
I say 99.999% in the first generation - and it drops away rapidly from there.
Wait, didn't a genetically programmed kill switch fail to work in Stargate Atlantis?! Does Rodney know about this?
Meg Whitman has revoked your Paypal account.
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/12/why-does-us-health-care-cost-so-much-part-iv-a-primer-on-medicare/
We can't fund Stem-Cell research and treatment to help millions of suffering in the U.S. (not to mention the rest of the world), but we can LITERALLY "play god" for a WEAPONIZED LIFE FORM?!?
Thanks for that heads up. I totally feel like you've things under control. After all, what could go wrong? ...go wrong. ...go wrong.
Sigs? We don't need no steekin Sigs!
I thought Monsanto already had a patent on this particular technology.
the second one is yellow
These exercises are mostly pointless. Yes, in a perfect world we could have communism or a completely free market. But to completely destroy your first hypothetical in an instant, all you have to do is realize that there are many products which are owned by one company. Even if there wasn't a patent system, they could quite easily buy off any competition as it arises, and continue to charge whatever they like. This would make progress impossible. Nearly all alternatives would be eliminated in their infancy. The market works when there is competition. Sometimes you need more government regulation to foster competition, and sometimes you need less.
Your second paragraph ignores the fact that insurance companies are now doing the choosing for their patients. While there may be some good arguments for decentralizing these bureaucracies, they already exist in the insurance industry. And in your imaginary world, insurance companies would have no incentive to keep treating their most expensive clients. Just as they do now, they would find some technicality to kick them off their rolls, and rope-a-dope with lawyers until their former clients give up or die. A government bureaucrat has no reason to deny you the health care, and I think it would be trivial to anonymize any patient information that could lead to discrimination.
I propose that the fairest solution is to let the decision be based on the patient's values, priorities, and resources.
The subtext to this proposal is that poor people deserve to die more than rich people. I think it's pretty obvious that most Americans disagree with this sentiment. (In fact, I'd trade any out of work blue collar employee for a thousand Paris Hiltons.) Do you really think anyone who happens to be low on money and in a car accident deserves to die? Or that any kid without parents who comes down with the flu should be patted on the head and sent back to work?
The problem with the hardline capitalist viewpoint is that it ignores the fact that people have bad luck, that accidents happen, and fails to recognize that society is much better as a whole when everyone has a fair shake at life. I'd challenge you to find anyone even ten people who truly believe that the consequences of complete deregulation are acceptable.
acts in their own interest, to the detriment of the citizens who support them?
Also, all gov entities are 'regulated', right?
In case you aren't keeping up, our government is currently engaged in an effort to assassinate a US citizen in Yemen.
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/
Doesn't seem like the regulation is working.
Also, being pedantic, 'doing good' is not the same as 'doing net good'. It is far from clear that our society is better off today than it would have been without all of the gov assistance we have paid for.
"The Constitution, the WHOLE Constitution, and nothing but the CONSTITUTION."
Why shouldn't the beneficiary be the general public (via a federal system) instead of a small group of extremely wealthy people?
Duh. Because the only reason the 'general public' even exists is to support the lifestyle of the extremely wealthy people.
Also for the cost of the bank bailout($700Billion) we could of gone to mars and back($55Billion) about 13-14 times
Well, yeah, but then where would the top guys in those banks have gotten their multi-million-dollar bonuses that they need to encourage them to keep up the job they've done on^Wfor the banking system in recent years? Do you think that NASA would have given them their needed bonuses? And they were running low on the funds they needed to buy up smaller banks that were annoying them with that weird "competition" stuff.
The money went where our leaders knew it was needed, and the bankers will surely reward them by generous contributions to their next campaigns. Going to Mars wouldn't have gotten them anywhere near the same contributions.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
"There is something supremely retarded about you kids. You see government fail miserably at almost everything it does, yet you somehow believe the solution is more government control."
Ooh, you'll have Sarah Palin to answer for that!
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
I think that's inaccurate (especially the claim that the DoD and its expert propagandists somehow milked the creation of the internet for military gain). But it's worth noting that something like the internet would have evolved anyway. It's a natural progression in networking, bordering on the obvious. I think that's a more solid argument.
If networking had come before the Internet, you might have a point. Since it didn't, no points for you.
The Internet was born several years before networking - with serial cables and such - for the purpose of passing email. It was some time before the IP stack matured enough to share resources like printers and storage between systems, so at first systems did their own routing. It was many years before we had Ethernet, with its bus and star topology in what we commonly refer to as "networking" - and competing technologies nearly killed it.
The good news for us is that a $40 router today has more computing power than the first 50 computers connected to the Internet, and more bandwidth than the first 1000.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I don’t think monopolies are nearly as much of a problem in a free market as opposed to one that’s been heavily regulated.
Look around the world to see the results. Strong regulatory states dominate GDP per capita. This is because a powerful regulatory body steadies the market as it inevitably moves through it's cycles.
these arguments come down to a moral one: is it okay to forcibly take from one person in order to provide a basic level of care for another? I don’t think that’s morally sound, in fact, I think it’s horribly unjust
Ah. So, building roads is okay. Rail, airports, municipal buildings, all fine. Fighter jets, tanks, helicopter gunships, and we're still on the moral high ground. And the second an orphaned child receives state funded care, you think it's "horribly unjust." You're really just full of shit, aren't you?
You will always be forced to make unconscionable choices: who deserves to bear the burden of supporting the others? Why shouldn’t we take equal amounts from everyone, why should some bear a higher burden than others from a moral perspective? What do you define as the bare minimum that everyone deserves?
So, the more unconscionable choice is to decide to let your countrymen suffer because you won't come off an extra 10% on your taxes? Do you have any idea what happens to a society when wealth inequality leads to starvation, or what an economy looks like when a vast majority of the country is illiterate, uneducated, and wallowing in poverty?
If a poor person needs an $1,000,000 surgery in order to survive, should he get it or not? If that person needs $10,000,000, should he get it? Or should we just let him die? At what point is it okay to let a person die? I would never want to be the one making these decisions because I don’t believe there are right answers here. They are all wrong.
If poor people aren't worth keeping alive, why not sponsor hunts like the good old days in the Wild West? We could offer $1,000 for the head of any minority (since they're most likely to be poor), or offer them $1,000 in exchange for getting sterilized so they won't breed. I'm sure none of the major businesses would suffer if the lowest wage they could pay an employee was $15 an hour, since all of the people who earned a minimum wage are now dead. I'm sure prices wouldn't go up a bit. And I'm sure you would never get caught up in that cycle, where the bottom 20% of the population is wiped out, jobs are cut, more people sink to the "poor" level, and another round of head bounties begins.
I'll get serious just for another moment. Here is a list of the most expensive uninsured hospital expenditures. The top one translates to about $52,000 per procedure, which is an AMI/heart attack, for a total of 2.08 billion. The next is a pregnancy and delivery, at $9,300 per person, for a total of 2.04 billion. And the costs go down from there. As far as I can tell, the total cost of uninsured care which doesn't get paid is $40 billion per year. So, less than three months of war spending, or half of what we spend a year on cigarettes.
That's a fine moral argument you're making. If you're a complete lunatic.
It's definitely not crazy to have a History Eraser Button. It's only crazy to push it. Not crazy at all to have one sitting there.
The enemies of Democracy are
Anna Navarre = Flatlander woman
New Economic Perspectives
There is something supremely retarded about you kids. You see government fail miserably at almost everything it does, yet you somehow believe the solution is more government control.
Wait, I thought it was "the kids" who were the most high on this libertarian "let's shrink government and privatize everything" kick.
... and then they built the supercollider.
After reading all the comments it emerged to me that I'm not much different from this project's aims.
I am synthetic form of life, made by my mom and dad (who btw did not plan having me, and who are not alive to benefit from my existence). I have a long-term kill switch embedded my DNA and several not-immediately-lethal switches embedded in my food, my environment, my education, my society, my government and my money.
You might argue that I am a 'human' and a 'citizen', I have freedoms and human rights and constitutions and laws protecting me (from what? the kill switches?), but these do not have any effect on my kill switches.
I should be glad they are trying to replicate me, I have no brothers or sisters.
Simple, we'll just program them to die after 4 years.
If so, I hope to god that a) they name the first models Roy, Pris, Zhora, and Leon; and b) the lead developer wears really good eye-protection.
-Styopa
It's certainly a lot more sensible to spend money on bioengineering war monsters than on some kind of communist plot to improve health care.
If networking had come before the Internet, you might have a point. Since it didn't, no points for you.
No. It's not even an argument worth making. Networking is an obvious innovation that would have come no matter how you define the internet.
The Internet was born several years before networking - with serial cables and such - for the purpose of passing email. It was some time before the IP stack matured enough to share resources like printers and storage between systems, so at first systems did their own routing. It was many years before we had Ethernet, with its bus and star topology in what we commonly refer to as "networking" - and competing technologies nearly killed it.
In other words, networking was born several years before networking as you define it was created.
An actually lethal gene, correct. A potentially lethal gene can easily be evolved away from.
As long as the organism has the ability to reproduce, there is potential to evolve away from a given genotype.
Consider Tay-Sachs disease. Get a single copy from your parents, you can live a normal life, Get two copies and die. Genes like this are culled from the pool fairly quickly until they get down to fairly low levels.
Consider susceptibility to bubonic plague. Typically this will run through a population, kill from 1/3 to 2/3 of the population, then the population has no further outbreaks for a few centuries. Consider the relative immunity of Europeans and west hemisphere natives to smallpox, measles, and mumps,
Breeding bacteria to be immune to a given antibiotic is fairly easy. But it isn't a stable mutation. Remove the antibiotic from the bug's environment and it loses it's immunity in a few hundred generations. Immunity costs energy. A bug that is immune can't reproduce as quickly. So a back mutation is very successful.
A while ago I read a report of fly in texas that not only developed an immunity to DDT, it developed a requirement for it. It apparently used DDT like a vitamin. Needed a few ppb in the environment.
A 'kill switch' has to be carefully thought out to be resistant to mutation:
* Evolving away from the gene should have an energy cost, thus not having the gene puts the organism at a disadvantage.
* It should not be a single gene. It needs to require multiple mutations.
* A single mutation should be fatal.
* The organism should not have an alternate biochemical path.
As an example: Lot of our clan have lost the ability to synthesize vitamin C. This was not a harmful mutation -- there was lots of C in the fruit and veg we ate in the trees, and grubbing around the jungle floor.
C is used in a bunch of places in our metabolism. Evolving away from a need for C or evolving to produce it again would be hard.
So if the organism is created with a need for a synthetic compound, and that need is incorporated into several chemical pathways, then you may have a viable kill switch. Better: incorporate dependence of several synthetic compounds.
To test this, you take the organism, and give it just enough of the synthetic to stay alive. Cut back until some organisms die. Breed from them. See if you can breed a variety that no longer needs the compound.
That said, I'm not very worried. A super organism would be designed to be efficient. Efficiency is the enemy of robustness. One of the reasons organisms can evolve at the biochemical level is that there is usually multiple ways to get a job done. Some of the alternatives are less efficient.
Example: Pheromones are used as lures to remove breeders from insect populations. The original thought was that the bugs couldn't evolve immunity, since if they ignored the pheromone, they wouldn't breed. Problem was that the bug didn't produce a single chemical, it produced a bouquet of chemicals. This selected for bugs that ignored the original, but were still sensitive to one of the others. The bugs had a backup signal system.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
As always, reality is catching up to fiction.
Say no to bio-engineered clones, always adopt.
A message from the Society for the Protection of Humans.
when entities are allowed to act completely in their own self-interest, they do so, to the detriment of others.
Totally agree. Just look at 19th century factories in Europe. Back then there were no workers' rights, no labor laws, or safety regulations. It was partly in response to the abysmal working conditions that Karl Marx proposed his theories on communism and (my conjecture) the fear of losing out to total communism resulted in better laws and regulations.
Let companies work in total 'self interest' divorced from regulation and control and we'll go back to that scenario.
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
We can even call them "Face Dancers!"
Eras(e)mus?
Have we all watched Battlestar Galactica? Nope? No worries, things got blurry after season 3.
Write it into law, Synthetic life is not life, but machine. If said inate protections fail, recall the merchendise, scrap the model. Much like "Second Renessance part I".
Keep the Synthetics dumb enough, there should be no problem. Why even have higher brain function anyway; it would avoid all problems. Keep your product within the boundries of the task it needs to accomplish, thats why you don't see UAVs try to cook you dinner, or Roombas drawing out a complicated battleplan in congress. You never saw a Mac II destroy any- Ok, bad example.
What I mean is have highly specified models instead of a few which are good at a lot of things - Thats why the Homo Spaiens thrieved. We did not do any one thing particularly well, but we where clever and could do many things.
If Leon could not conseive anything past loading and unloading missles, he would not have rebled, found his way to earth, killed that other Blade Runner and Hans Solo would not have slept with Rachel.
I honestly don't see a need for "smart" Synthetics other than to build better Sex Robots.
You see? You probably don't want them TOO smart.
-Koala MeatPie
Most living things (if not all) already have a genetically built in kill switch (if not more), which due to it's implementation, has proven to be non-removable (at least for the last couple eons).
Still waiting for someone to remove the "Aging" kill switch.
You don't know what "Internet" means, do you? It's short for "Inter-Networking", building a network of networks. Serial cables and such? You do realize that even RS-485 serial connections are only good for 4000' max, don't you? Networking started with modems and ISDN and leased lines between different college campuses scattered around the country, passing data files from, for example, an IBM System 36 at MIT to a VAX at Stanford. Eventually they got tired of having one terminal on their desk for the IBM and another for the VAX, so devised protocols to log into the IBM and talk to the VAX. **THAT'S** the origin of the Internet.
Email came much later.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Commander Data said it best: "If you had an off switch Doctor, believe me, you'd be careful who knew about it."
How smart are these organisms going to be? If they're smart enough, the "kill switch" will be the first thing they override, isolate, or workaround.
Oh DARPA, please be sure to double-check the math!
It's a laudable idea, and a noble purpose, but don't FORCE people to pay for OTHER PEOPLE. That is nothing short of forcibly STEALING with the threat to use use FORCE.
My qualm is that it's mandatory. It's good to support things that make life better for some, but please also recognize this idea's shortcomings.
Ohhh they're totally ripping off HP Lovecraft, making shoggoths like that.
You are certainly not allowed to know about any secret projects of DARPA.