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by koeng
895 days ago
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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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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'