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by justthrooo 897 days ago
Not one of their projects, but published by their magazine.

If AWS had an industry magazine that proposed data centers could be run by well-trained dogs, I'd definitely sell my shares.

Synthetic biology safety needs to be taken more seriously than anything our society has ever invented. Removing synthetic organisms from of a lab can have such dire, irreversible consequences we can't even begin to predict them. Jurassic Park mixed Ice-9 from Vonnegut's 'Cats Cradle' is a near approximation of the possibility.
1 comments
koeng 897 days ago
Eh. Most people I see who are super concerned about synthetic biology safety aren't the people actually working on it (in contrast to things like AI, or even more innocuous technology like social media). That includes me. I've worked in synbio for >10yr and consistently the danger is overhyped by people who don't get it.

> dire, irreversible consequences we can't even begin to predict them

No, they're dire consequences that you can't predict, probably because you don't work in the field. There are lots of ways to predict what could happen.

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justthrooo 897 days ago
> I've worked in synbio for >10yr > consequences that _you_ can't predict, probably because you don't work in the field

This ad-hominem gatekeeping is disrespectful. It doesn't really matter as I've spent plenty of time in this field.

> Eh. Most people I see who are super concerned about synthetic biology safety aren't the people actually working on it

This is precisely the problem I'm pointing out.

> danger is overhyped by people who don't get it

I would argue the danger is under-appreciated because the technology hasn't shown its promise yet.

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koeng 897 days ago
Fair on the gatekeeping, but on the other side, keep your mind too open and your brain will fall out.

> This is precisely the problem I’m pointing out.

This is, ironically, also the problem I’m pointing out. Why would I trust someone who doesn’t work in or on computers in computer security?

Arguing that once the promise is shown it’ll become super dangerous is essentially unfalsifiable. The same argument can be made for literally any new technology. I’d like to see reasonable chains of logic.

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justthrooo 897 days ago
> Why would I trust someone who doesn’t work in or on computers in computer security?

I think you misunderstood my comment. I'm deeply familiar with this field. I know very much what I'm talking about.

> The same argument can be made for literally any new technology

Asimov pointed this out a long time ago. This is the first time our technology has had the ability to replicate and modify itself for its own benefit before we started engineering it. As somebody who's engineered viruses, I know how easily something like COVID could have been a lab leak without any malicious intent.

Let's say we engineer a better nitrogen fixation pathway and give it to a microbe to help crops. What happens when that microbe washes into a nearby stream, river, watershed and then discovers its better off without our crop. What's to stop it from giving the nitrogen to the water around it, causing algal blooms, oxygen starvation, and dieoff? Preventing its spread would be impossible and could lead to the destruction of freshwater ecosystems. This is just a mildly-plausibly hypothetical, but I also know there are active experiments like this in the United States right now, in outdoor test plots, and the safety in place is just people like you and me who are 'policing ourselves'

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