[extropy-chat] Re: Recipe for Destruction - Joy/Kurzweil NYTimes Op-Ed

[justin corwin]

On 10/17/05, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky <sentience at pobox.com> wrote:
<snip historical example of private decision not to publish>
> I have to agree with Kurzweil and Joy.  Publishing the genome of the
> 1918 Spanish flu in open-access databases seems, to me, stupid.

It may not have been the best idea. It's not clear to me what threat
it realistically poses.

But that's not really the point under contention. The point is that
Kurzweil didn't say 'you should have decided not to publish the
genome', he and Bill Joy proposed an institutional solution, where the
scientists would not have had the choice.

There is a very large difference between saying that drinking bleach
is a stupid idea, and saying it should be illegal.

--
Justin Corwin
outlawpoet at hell.com
http://outlawpoet.blogspot.com
http://www.adaptiveai.com