[extropy-chat] Depressing thought of the day

[Eugen Leitl]

On Wed, Nov 05, 2003 at 03:42:18AM -0700, Samantha Atkins wrote:

> > And yet we still can't get rid of spam.

Eliezer is mentioning another major human factor: the response is sluggish and 
unfocused. Effective tools exist, but are not deployed. There's no problem
awareness, and where there is the responses are reflexive and mindless.

There's every reason to suspect response to a military molecular
self-replicator would be similiarly confused and ineffective, even though a
countermeasure is available (I don't think there's a countermeasure which can
protect ecology effectively -- there's a lot of activity at the physical
layer which will destroy biology by side effect).

> >
> > Active shields against grey goo?  Yeah, right.
> 
> Actually, handling spam is not an implausible warm-up exercise. 

The problem domain is different. It's more like a wormvirus running rampant in
physical space. Except that the sysadmins are unavailable, no one can pull
the plug on physical layer nor fragment the network, there's physical
locality, the countermeasure shares the physical layer, needs to adaptively autoamplify
(or rapidly transported from a local prestocked cache) while protecting the biosphere.

In other words, it's a lot like wormvirus control, except it's entirely
different.

No one who goes on two legs can currently provide an analysis worth the dead
tree it's printed on. It doesn't look good, though. The best protection is
that there's typically a slow advance in capabilities of both the agent and
the countermeasure, and that ability and malice rarely occur in the same
group.

-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144 http://www.leitl.org
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