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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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe not. First thing to pop into my head.
46 & 2
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
To be fair, sex causes death. If sex could be prevented we could wipe out the spectre of death forever.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
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.
is advertising. Perfect persuasion trumps everything else.
[-- Trust the Monkey --]
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