turchin comments on Discussion: weighting inside view versus outside view on extinction events - Less Wrong

3 Post author: Ilverin 25 February 2016 05:18AM

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Comment author: turchin 25 February 2016 08:15:14PM 1 point [-]

In fact this is the way safety evaluation of new drugs is done by FDA.

Your example is clearly ad hoc. But what if your friend will create a new virus which will kill all mosquitos in his neiborhood? It is plausible in next 5 years. Should he proceed uncontrolled?

In case of many similar projects where may be established a law, like do not release self-replicating units into the wild, or do not create AI projects which are going to change its source code.

Comment author: HungryHobo 29 February 2016 01:51:44PM 0 points [-]

Feeding biologically active compounds to large numbers of humans has a long track record of being dangerous in a reasonably large portion of cases.

The FDA was created once there was a realistic, significant risk.

Similarly, if you want to release pathogens or modified animals there's already a history of adverse events and a reasonable chance of non-zero risk. Even without GM we've had killer bees from normal crossbreeding. There's an established pattern of realistic, significant risk.

There are already lots of ~zero risk AI projects which change their own source code. Any law which bans Tierra or Avida are, likewise, poorly thought out laws.