Hacking goes squishy
economist.com
economist.com
Obviously, the government has never seen any invention it's not scared of. This goes all the way back to the steam engine.
Before anyone here dredges out the old tired super virus or gray goo.
There's no such thing as gray goo and never will be because you'd have to violate the fundamental laws of thermodynamics to get it.
There are plenty of super viruses and bacteria in nature. Neither HIV nor MRSA came from biohacking. As I have said before, anything we create would be like just one more bullet in a machine gun shootout. Sure it could be the one that gets you, but then again, there's an infinity of stuff out there that can also get you.
As someone who only heard of "grey goo" very recently, care to explain why this is the case?
"grey goo" beyond the natural goo, as often seen in fiction, multiplies and moves so fast as to violate basic laws of physics. For example there's only so much energy stored in stuff that could be eaten.
Answer: No free lunch, every advantage carries a cost. Any "super" bug we come up with will enter a world with vicious competitors who've been with us since long before the dinosaurs.
Or to put it another way, what happened since bacteria have been around? Humans. Humans started out as single celled creatures like bacteria. And if we can get from that to humans, is it not reasonable to assume that bacteria have had the time to figure out how to multiply as fast as possible?
It sounds like you're saying that each supervirus mankind creates marginally increases the chance that a Bad Thing will happen. Isn't marginally increasing the chance that a Bad Thing will happen also Bad?
Also, how close do you think that HIV and MRSA are to the upper bound on supervirus potency?
http://www.amazon.com/Hot-Zone-Terrifying-True-Story/dp/0385...
We got super lucky with HIV because you have to exchange bodily fluids to catch it. If it ever becomes as easy to catch as the common cold, we're screwed.
And while the marginal danger may increase with research, the marginal utility will also increase, in fact it will increase faster. We'll discover more cures then diseases. And yes, regulation is a blunt weapon which stops not only the bad, but also the good.
If some asshole creates a contagious HIV, then discovering cures faster than diseases will hardly save us.
You get diminishing utility from curing diseases anyway. Say you discover cures for half the world's currently incurable diseases at random. My guess is that our life expectancy would increase by less than a decade. People are still going to age.
And I'm not sure the threat of a contagious HIV would ever go away. It'd be hard finding a cure for a disease that wasn't even created yet.
My guess is that there's already too much momentum behind this sort of research for us to halt it. Do you think requiring background checks for purchasers of biotech supplies would make the field more or less attractive to a hypothetical evil mastermind?
But I completely and totally disagree with your implication that more research will only marginal increase life spans, and that we can't find cures for yet undiscovered diseases.
That's like saying in 1989 that in 2009 all the progress in the computer industry both hardware and software would only give us marginally better VisiCalc.
To me at least it is OBVIOUS more biotech research will radicaly change the world not just slightly improve things.
And the asshole most likely to create a more easily transmissible HIV is mother nature.
Unless the research is directed at curing aging, aging will always cause people to get more and more susceptible to disease as they get older.
>and that we can't find cures for yet undiscovered diseases.
What I was saying there was that you can't find a cure for a disease you haven't discovered yet. Do you disagree?
>And the asshole most likely to create a more easily transmissible HIV is mother nature.
There are six billion humans on Earth and the population is growing. All we need for disaster is one person who's intelligent, driven, and wants to destroy the human race. I agree that person would be very atypical. I disagree that we can be confident no one will ever fit that profile.
Absolutely. Many drugs targeting one disease have been found to cure others. The list includes cancer drugs, antibiotics, antiviral compounds, etc. And that's just drugs, what about the research itself, isn't it obvious it has implications well beyond any one single thing. And isn't that the case for every kind of research, not just medical? To me this seems obvious.
All we need for disaster is one person who's intelligent, driven, and wants to destroy the human race.
Again, we already have that, it's called mother nature. HIV, Ebola, 1918 flu, current flu, etc, all natural.
Here's where I see the problem with your argument, it assumes great asymmetry.
Here's what I mean by asymmetry, I think you imply that if we have the technology to create super viruses on demand that does not mean we'll have anywhere near equivalent knowledge and technology to fight them.
I happen to consider that an extraordinary claim. To me the symmetry of knowledge is self evident. Almost as soon as we invent the nuclear bomb, we also invest nuclear power. Almost as soon as we can gene splice, we have gene therapy for humans which has already been successful applied.
If we have the ability to create super viruses on demand, then we also have the ability to create drugs for them, to detect them, to stop transmission, and most obviously to create vaccines for them. If you can manufacture the virus, it would be one hell of a cosmic improbability that you are also NOT able to manufacture a vaccine for it.
Alternatively if we don't have the knowledge to make viruses and vaccines on demand, that won't stop mother nature from her never ending quest to kills us all.
I agree there will be unexpected good benefits associated with biotech research.
>Again, we already have that, it's called mother nature. HIV, Ebola, 1918 flu, current flu, etc, all natural.
None of those were designed to be harmful.
>Almost as soon as we invent the nuclear bomb, we also invest nuclear power.
This is not an example of symmetry. The nuclear bomb gave humanity the power to destroy itself forever. Nuclear power has not given humanity the power to preserve itself forever.
>If we have the ability to create super viruses on demand, then we also have the ability to create drugs for them, to detect them, to stop transmission, and most obviously to create vaccines for them. If you can manufacture the virus, it would be one hell of a cosmic improbability that you are also NOT able to manufacture a vaccine for it.
Are you sure you aren't exaggerating? You call that cosmically improbable? Remember, we are talking about things that haven't even been discovered yet.
Let me put it this way. If you had such extraordinary predictive power about which technologies will be invented in what order, you could make a lot of money in the stock market. And extraordinary predictive power is what you need to rule scenarios that are compatible with all formulations of the laws of physics as being "cosmically improbable". I agree that such predictive power may exist in astronomy. I disagree that such predictive power exists in technology forecasting, or pretty much anything involving humans for that matter.
If you continue to stand by this position, I will decide that you're not worth convincing and unlikely to be convinced and leave the discussion.
>Alternatively if we don't have the knowledge to make viruses and vaccines on demand, that won't stop mother nature from her never ending quest to kills us all.
"Mother nature" has no quest to kill us. All the damage that's been done by naturally-occuring viruses has been by accident. So someone who was consciously optimizing to create a maximally harmful virus might be able to do a lot more.
GM work in industry, think bio manufacturing of industrial compounds, and obviously human health is absolutely worth pursuing.
But if you are insinuating that biohacking is not relevant: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Squishy suggested it may not be programming, but there's no reason why it couldn't be a neologism or brand name in that field.
Although I love the economist, I find they tend to touch upon computer technology less frequently as compared to the natural sciences
The Economist have a good editorial system but they don't choose the title simply to inform. I thought that part of the HN ethos was presenting useful information in a succinct way avoiding cruft and unnecessary marketing tactics. An uninformative title is a marketing tactic designed to get you to see adverts around an article that you wouldn't otherwise have perused - that presumably is why the Economist chose that title (yes also to be mildly entertaining and close enough to the subject to avoid alienating users).
My original point was that the HN title was poor as an indicator of the material in the article. You've just proved my point - if you had never read the Economist could you have guessed the field of the article?
"Hacking goes squishy"
I stand by my assertion that this is a poor title and that no-one could derive the subject matter of the article from the title itself - one might get "biology" from "squishy" but I don't think you could really go any further. It could equally well be use of a new cooling technique to make syrup-and-ice drinks have improved mouth feel.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers_(anthology)#.22Our_Neur...