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Ask Slashdot: What Are the Most Dangerous Lines of Scientific Inquiry?
gbrumfiel writes "The battle over whether to publish research into mutant bird flu got editors over at Nature News thinking about other potentially dangerous lines of scientific inquiry. They came up with a non-definitive list of four technologies with the potential to do great good or great harm:
Laser isotope enrichment: great for making medical isotopes or nuclear weapons. Brain scanning: can help locked-in patients to communicate or a police state to read minds. Geoengineering: could lessen the effects of climate change or undermine the political will to fight it. Genetic screening of embryos: could spot genetic disorders in the womb or lead to a brave new world of baby selection.
What would Slashdotters add to the list?"
Can you say Gray Goo?
Ask Slashdot: What's your favorite Sci-Fi apocalypse?
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Where I live, certain ethnic minorities (actually, taken together they are actually a majority) are notorious for screening embryos for gender. Then they abort the females until a male is born first. It's become such an issue that it's now illegal to specify an embryo's gender until the window for legal abortion has passed (I don't remember how many weeks/months that is).
If you're white, the doctor will still tell you if you ask though.
All forms of scientific inquiry have "dual use"
You may as well try to go back in time and stop Og or Urgh from figuring out how to make fire.
Fuck this shit.
--
BMO
"Geoengineering: could lessen the effects of climate change or undermine the political will to fight it."
Isn't this a bit like the whole "teaching condoms in school is dangerous because then teens will have massive amounts of sex"? You're omitting a valid (even if imperfect) solution that may help stave off tragedy if people choose a particular path in order to defend and mandate that your "morally superior path" is the only option presented.
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Once you start blacklisting/limiting the release of scientific information, science is essentially dead. Science should be all about sharing of knowledge, collaborative work, cross confirmation of results. It's not scientists that should handle the 'risks' to society (taking into account ethics) - that's a job for politics (IE, you can publish how to make an atomic bomb but dissemination of nuclear material should be controlled by law). And in any case, any information you try to blacklist will eventually get out. Of course, I suppose there's a limit to that too - if we arrive at a point where a scientific discovery can lead to virtually anyone creating a WMD at low cost and with readily available materials, then there is a problem. But we're not there yet and anyway, at that point, there's no easy solution (though I personally believe a 'solution' should then be more along the lines of changing the root of the issue: why those people would want to create WMD to begin with).
Sapient artificial species which don't die of natural causes and can live virtually will more radically threaten our culture, society and civilization than any other change in technology.
For all of human history we've been adapting to the same species using different technology. We've never in history dealt with the fundamental nature of man changing before.
Steal a baby from 2,000 BCE and it'll probably grow up like any other human. Steal a baby from 2,500 AD and it will most likely be a new species.
White people have rarely been minorities but we know all about being discriminated against. Like when you make a statement completely unrelated to race and it magically makes you a racist, not because of what you said, but because you are white.
I think the theory is, that geoengineering is unlikely to succeed in the long term and so it's just kicking the problem into the long grass. I see your point, though, that kind of statement is playing into the hands of AGW deniers by implying that the only reason to worry about AGW is because we have an ulterior motive for making people panic over nothing.
Og may have been first to file, but it was Urgh who invented the method.
are banned in advanced technical civilizations, for good reasons.
Suppose scientific experimentation confirms the existence of the soul, and that we all end up in Hell (or some very unpleasant equivalent), but the older you are when you die, the more painful it becomes? Or, that afterlife is extremely pleasant, better than anything you've ever experienced on earth, and the scientists build a machine that can give you a brief preview of this?
That's right, mass suicides. The population of an entire planet disappeared this way.
There are a couple of things to be remembered.
First: Everything man has ever created has been used for such negative things as murder and war. For that matter, every thing we ever will create will also be used for such things until such point as mankind has surpassed the need and desire for such negative activities.
Second: Once a thing has been done, it will be done again. Once it is known by anyone that something is actually possible (as opposed to theoretically possible or even believed impossible) it becomes capable of being repeated. Just look at nuclear proliferation for an example. It was believed that splitting the atom was impossible. Once it was demonstrated to be possible, many others repeated the discovery despite the best attempts at others to prevent that from happening.
The only thing they are really doing by blocking research from those in that field is to waste resources duplicating effort, and reducing or eliminating potential benefit from that knowledge while failing to prevent it's eventual and inevitable misuse. I would even hazard to say that such censorship increases the devastation that will be caused by such inhumane uses by limiting if not eliminating the positive research and understanding that comes from shared research and peer review.
Only a moron, a paranoid, or a politician could come up with such a stupid and counterproductive scheme as censoring research.
I always thought it went along the lines of "...so what would happen if we turned this thing loose downtown?"
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Don't worry, we'll get rid of your gray goo with our black hole ;-)
I that that artificial intelligence that is more effective than human intelligence is the main long term issue. I don't expect it in the next few decades as some do, but sometime in the next 1000 years, someone is going to build a machine that is better at general problem solving and design than a skilled human. And a little while after that, human intelligence will be largely obsolete. This holds by far the most powerful and dangerous possibilities.
Pure and innocent Scientific Inquiry in the pursuit of knowledge generally hits a pretty thick wall pretty quickly as soon as it steps into the realm of things that already being researched, with the qualification that they are things the military is researching, or has researched within the past decade.
Even now, just to use the results of certain types of this research -- such as very accurate nuclear interaction cross-sections (discovered for the purposes of nuclear weapons, but) used for the purposes of cancer treatment -- puts you under the watchful eye of the FBI.
Yes, not everything falls under this category, and no, nobody needs to be reminded of the benefits of such research like how our microwave ovens defeated the germans, but just think about some of the examples we DO know about:
WWII to Cold war era: Nuclear Science
Cryptography (Government mandated PGP backdoor, anyone?)
Sources:
MCNP:
http://mcnpx.lanl.gov/
PGP:
http://books.google.com/books?id=cSe_0OnZqjAC&pg=PA352&lpg=PA352&dq=pgp+government+mandated+backdoor&source=bl&ots=cVtmm3vwYK&sig=fwjn6mfbXVWngTS0pgHIFWFV9bE&hl=en&sa=X&ei=5OyZT8_pLsXUgAf3gNX1DQ&ved=0CDoQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=pgp%20government%20mandated%20backdoor&f=false)
Because you know the only people who can get it will be Dick Cheneys.
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
Each of those four items are the potential subject of nightmares and downfalls, but each and every one of them is a guarantee -- all eight.
Imagine the year 2150. Distant to any human life, not at all distant to government, mediocre to construction (some city construction projects take 70 years), and eons to technology.
In your 2150, can we spot genetic defects before birth? Of course. Can we select babies for the life that we want? As in can I choose the embryo with athletic skills over the embryo with mathematic skils? I'd sure hope so. It sounds dangerous today, but it's only dangerous in advance, like everything. By the time it's ubiquitous, it's just another form of choosing your child's academic goals. It just starts even earlier.
Same goes for the other six in your 2150. I'd sure as hell hope that we can read minds to some extent by then. But just like the polygraph didn't destroy interrogations, and the mouse didn't destroy the keyboard, and television didn't kill radio, and the plane didn't kill the car, it won't be the only form of communication.
As for police states reading minds, that's the ethical equivalent of humane execution. It's already a police state, it's already killing people, I'm not worried about the mind reading.
Geoengineering is absolutely required in order to live anywhere but terrestrial land. Period. So it's guaranteed to happen. And it'll happen quite suddenly the day before it's required. And by the time it can be used to "undermind the political will to fight it" it'll be so easy to do that it'll be a part of normal construction.
Nuclear weapons don't kill people. People's mistakes kill people. But people don't kill asteroids. Nuclear weapons kill asteroids. That's another period, by the way.
I like how bird flu wasn't one of the top four, having inspired the thing in the first place. But that's the same concept. Of course we're going to have a major outbreak of something. We've had it before. Everyone's so worried that this time, with common means of global transportation, it'll be much worse. I think that they forget one thing. In probably under an hour, every airport and every border can instantly have screeners for whatever the current outbreak is. We have TSA and border and customs security everywhere nowadays. It'd be easy to suddenly, and globally, halt anyone displaying symptoms, or quickly test everyone as a part of transportation procedures.
My point is that, as a civilization, we can't not have those things. Being scared of the research in advance is stupid. Focus on being scared of the initially flawed execution of that research. Work on that while the research is underway. We have M.A.D. for nuclear weapons. That's already worked a few times. It's dumb, but it worked. I'm stunned, but it worked. That's the sort of thing that we need for the rest of them. A Nash equillibrium for each one.
Yes, the idea of creating anencephalics for that purpose has been thought of.
However it has complications. For many parts of the body to develop normally they have to be used. A digestive tract that has never processed food or muscles that have never moved are not going to be normal. You would have to have enough brain function to run those processes during growth. Or, alternatively, you would have to be able to interface a control system to the brain stem to take over that function.
The Evil Overlord way to do it is just raise the kid normally, let them play and grow and then kill them for the organs or whole body. Much simpler that way, but your neighbors may say bad things about you.
There would be ethical and humanitarian applications for it, but mere death and pain would be hard pressed to compete with the potential damage of perfect propaganda. If some combination of psychology, hypnosis, drugs in the water, drugs in the drugs, or whatnot made it possible to get people to believe anything you said, that could be the end of all freedom forever.
The technological device that probably killed more people than anyone else in WWI was General Haig's telephone.
Is that like turning junk mortgages into gold?
If people start studying how the planets move, it could lead to heresy yet also make sense, thereby undermining people's respect for authority.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Koran flammability
Corporate misdeeds
Police brutality
Oh, you didn't mean dangerous to the researcher?
Maybe not. First thing to pop into my head.
46 & 2
Is it Godwinning to point out that the Nazis produced very useful data related to the survival of ditched aircrews in the North Sea by destructively testing some of their prisoners in icy cold water to determine how long they really survive? Interestingly, the results were that even in the starved condition that they were in, the subjects survived much longer than were expected.
Mengele's experimentation was crap, but most was very good, if you ignore that the subjects were human. I understand that the Japanese also did very good work, using British and Australian PoWs as their subjects. The Stanford experiment lasted just a few days, and did not even determine the LD1 levels.
Next we'll be wondering "Which are the most dangerous books to write?", or "What are the most dangerous sentences to say?". I reject the premise.
If I were to pick at all, almost none of that would be on the list. Only things that had the potential to create society ending things that are not stoppable by individual action. Diseases, for example, fall into that category. But I find even that highly suspect.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Don't let systems get to smart and don't hook them up to nukes.
To be fair, sex causes death. If sex could be prevented we could wipe out the spectre of death forever.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Eugenics is widely practiced, even if we happen to call it "genetic screening", "genetic therapy" or "designer babies". You still end up deciding certain genetic lines should not exist. Forced sterilization is also practiced in many countries (including highly civilized ones).
So the taboo is really only in discussing the ethics of such practices and where the lines should be drawn. It is extremely arguable that allowing a child to be born with a genetic disease that will likely be terminal in a relatively short space of time is unethical, but ANY action to prevent such an event (including changing the genetics involved) is apriori selection of what genetic lines are permitted and which ones are not. That is eugenics, no matter what you call it.
An extremely delicate balance will, some day, need to be drawn between the ethical prevention of genuinely functionless suffering and the unethical prevention of individuals who can utilize some aspect of themselves that others would regard as a handicap or suffering. That cannot happen until the taboo on discussion is removed.
Indeed, if we look at other areas of science in which there is a grey area (be it the creation of viruses, or whatever), the underlying issues tend to revolve around poor communication, poor levels of awareness, poor understanding (by scientists and public alike), poor standards of education leading to incorrect analysis, poorly moderated debates, etc.
This is why I often talk about the need for a balanced society, one where the arts, politics and society have evolved as fast as the sciences. When these are all keeping pace with each other, then and only then informed and intelligent discussions become possible, along with informed and intelligent action based on those discussions. As things stand, science and technology outpace the ability to sanity-check it. Since there is no value in slowing science and technology down, everything else must be sped up.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Clearly you've never been to Western Australia, where the black swan is more common than the white!
They're only black on one side. Always facing potential enemies with their black side is a strong survival trait, and why modern Australian swans are almost never killed by drop bears.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2133201/Dr-Richard-Holmes-Suicide-riddle-weapons-expert-worked-David-Kelly.html
If your in the UK and working on chem, bio "protection" try not to get too stressed.
It seems "suicide" is catching.....
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Free societies have always worked in part because when stupid laws are inevitably enacted, a lot of people ignore them with impunity. There has been freedom in anonymity. But face recognition technology is improving, surveillance cameras are proliferating, and other things like cell phones and debit cards make it trivially easy to see where people are and what they're doing. The only real safeguard of a free society, the inability of corporations and governments to deal with the vast sea of data, is coming to an end. And never mind actual laws. Kids who demonstrated against oil drilling in national parks when they were 13 will find themselves explaining to a job interviewer why they hate capitalism when they graduate from college.
So my vote for major danger...at least to a free society...would be quantum computing as it affects D-base management.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Carl Sagan mentioned this in one of his books. The same technology that could be used to detect asteroids then reach them and divert their orbits away from the Earth could also be used to divert them towards the Earth.
is advertising. Perfect persuasion trumps everything else.
[-- Trust the Monkey --]
it's also possible that geoengineering doesn't fix the problem the way the problem happens to be.
Adding aerosols (the only reasonably feasible geoengineering project) doesn't counteract the specific problems of excess greenhouse very well.
More aerosols is a whole lot like lowering the incoming solar flux. Problem is that it will make more of a difference in the tropics and in daytime, but the greenhouse effect is making more of a difference in the polar regions and at night.
And that's because the physics of the geoengineering is pretty different from the physics of the problem.
So to be effective you have to add a new climate change of roughly similar magnitude as the existing one from greenhouse gases, but it doesn't really offset the actual climate change, it's just a new, and large perturbation. Getting some statistical number to go down doesn't help, because nobody lives in a globally space and time averaged place.
Successfully making a tasp or droud would probably lead to the end of humanity in a generation or so. At least the end of any non-stone-age parts.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Much more dangerous, and this seems less than functional.
Except it's disturbing instead of erotic due to her chicken skin hallucinations.
Yes, but it's Natalie Portman in a leotard. And did I mention a lesbian sex scene?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it