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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.
Let's hope the kill switch is not a lysine dependency.
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.
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"
I believe the movie you're looking for starred Harrison Ford and Rutger Hauer.
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?
They should talk to Craig Venter. He'll beat DARPA by 5+ years.
Only if they're Scottish androids.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
How could it possibly go right?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
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
I believe the movie you're looking for starred Harrison Ford and Rutger Hauer.
Just because it's been done before doesn't mean it can't be remade with more special effects, a higher budget and worse actors.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
You wonder if our technology is developing faster than our enlightenment? We already have enough weapons to kill everybody on the planet 100 times over, and our top priority is watching "Jersey Shore"... does that answer your question?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
You realize that without DARPA you'd not be whining about defense spending on the Internet, right?
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...
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.
[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
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.
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.
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 got any evidence for either of those?
*sigh* back to work...