LESSWRONG
LW

All of nitinkhanna's Comments + Replies

Some thoughts on Animals
nitinkhanna10

Dagon, thank you for the reply! You’ve actually pointed out a lot of things which I didn’t think about. You’re right that I was only considering animals that have displayed some level of intelligence - dogs, dolphins, and the like. I did not consider animals that display colonial intelligence. I do hope such species are also considered which future humans make lists of non-human creatures to being along!

Your point about moral patients is interesting. I didn’t know that phrase, but it seems that all life on earth is a moral patient of humanity.

Climate Chang... (read more)

Reply
2Dagon
Aggregation is weird, when talking about morality.  I don't know what you mean by "all life on earth" or "of humanity" in this context.  Which humans have what duty to exactly what?  Are you concerned with biodiversity, biomass, variety or quantity of mammalian brains, or something else? I expect that climate change will be an extinction event for many plant and animal species, and climate change or not, all individuals will die eventually.  However, it won't overall destroy all life on earth - we'll engineer mitigations for large numbers of humans, and that will carry along with it large numbers of species and individual animals.  It'll be painful and expensive, but not permanent destruction of life. Unless the rioting and civilizational fragility keeps us from mitigating it, and we nuke ourselves in the process.  That could set things back a few tens of millions of years.  
Some thoughts on Animals
nitinkhanna30

Excellent point Shminux. The answer is Yes and No. For every situation, no matter how evolved you are, the answer would be some level of “Me First”, unless it’s trained out of you militaristically. So in this case, I would expect future humans to say that we care about the survival of Earth animals above the survival of exoplanet animals. That said, there would be a faction on earth and in space who would regard both earth animals and exoplanet animals to be equally important and worth saving.

The question is whether future humans will even bother trying to... (read more)

Reply
2Sabiola
>The question is whether future humans will even bother trying to carry Earth animals with them or not? Of course we will bring our pets! I don't know about other animals though. If it's up to me, mosquitoes will get left behind, for one.
Security analysis of 'cloud chemistry labs'?
Answer by nitinkhanna20

First time poster, so forgive me if I don’t sound LessWrongy…

But I wonder, what exactly is worrying you about Cloud Chem Labs? Is it a security worry, that someone may be able to create a chemical that’s “not good”? In that case, just like normal Cloud Infrastructure, they probably have extensive logs for orders and also some mechanisms for detecting what compounds are being created and to prevent or block creation of bad stuff.

Also, since it’s not a General Availability thing, just like OpenAI is not exactly GA, the applications are probably controlled an... (read more)

Reply
1Kenny
You "sound" perfectly LessWrongy to me! (We don't have a 'style guide' or anything :)) I was hoping more for 'brainstorm' type responses I guess. (A somewhat comprehensive answer would be wonderful of course.) I'm not actually worried about this. I don't expect any particular 'immediate' tragedy to result. I'm thinking of this as more of 'security puzzle' than anything else, e.g. a 'call to action'. This isn't a political campaign, or activism, or me attempting to pull any kind of 'alarm' about this being an impending catastrophe! I'm really just curious. Your details about likely defenses is interesting – pretty obvious, but good to point out anyways. I was curious in particular about "detecting what compounds are being created and to prevent or block creation of bad stuff" – both the concrete practical specifics of how this would or could work, as well as, e.g. hard limits even in principle about what could be done. Maybe the lab will only perform 'verified' reactions? Or maybe they have some protocol for handling 'novel reactions' too? I would expect the latter (or, rather hope they had a (good) protocol because it seems like part of the point of these labs being enabling chemistry experiments, i.e. potentially novel chemical reactions. How well do those kinds of protections work generally? (I don't know myself.) I was thinking more that the more likely vulnerability is a 'vetted' customer's account being hacked. I'd expect that to, sadly, be ridiculously easy to do (for a determined and resourceful attacker). The site/backend-system itself being hacked also seems like an inevitability. What are the security risks when that happens? What's the risk analysis for labs like this in the case of an attack 'on the order of' something like Stuxnet?