[extropy-chat] Recipe for Destruction - just another "box".

[Lifespan Pharma Inc.]

Humans are an embarassment to themselves.

The sequestering and filtering  of knowledge is the very process that 
might derail the acceleration towards
a singularity.

This is much like the cold war where knowledge was held secret by each 
side from the other
and a world of spies worked up a good business dealing in information.
In the end all the secrets could not be hidden.

Technology was the looser as knowledge was sequestered in a highly 
regulated market rather than a free market for a decade or 2.

Since biology could well be  one of the highest levels of computation, 
how is one to know which  pieces of knowledge should be forbidden to know. 
Who is not to say that the same biology that is a part of biological 
Weapons of Mass Destruction might not also
be the basis for some dramatic new life-extension  technology like using 
viral nano-materials to re-write living DNA  like a laser writes a CD.

I find it silly that we should consider ourselves so wise as to know 
what is and is not useful knowledge.

When in fact one or more AI are created, perhaps our legacy will be that 
they will hide their technology from us
because they see us as unfit to know the"dangerous knowlege" they 
possess, and simply tell us what they feel we
need to know to do spontaneously whatever the AI feels we should be doing.

Oh I supppose some weird holy luddite with wacks of cash and a death 
wish for 50 virgins in an afterlife
might also have a PHD in biomolecular engineering,  a world class R&D 
program  and a vision  to kill all 6 billion with a killer plague...but 
reallllly?

However history shows that what is expected is not so much to be feared 
as some new paradigm that
no one ever expected to be dangerous.  Who'd have expected planes flown 
into buildings in 1998 ... we were all waiting
for a suitcase  nuke.   Who foresaw AIDS in 1982?  

I'd more be expecting a terrorist to work on an innocuous  vector with a 
prion creation capacity.... So that one day after
several years of careful spread , an innocuous yogurt culture might lay 
waste to every yogurt eater in the civilized world
and our wierd holy man might dance around his campfire secure in the 
knowledge that no one in his little impoverished
country ever partook in such a thing, and that  like an AIDS scenario  
the disease would have spread into billions of hosts
long before anyone ever suspected it to be harmful.

I simply think transparency to be safer in the long run than secrecy.
In a nudist colony there is now where to hide an automatic rifle.
In a traditional convent, any nun can pack a 45.

I live in a field where the same cannabis that much feared drug is one 
of the same class of chemistry  as the latest HU210 which perhaps can 
regenerate damaged brains. 

Maybe I'm not taking this seriously, because  like in a horror flick the 
boogeyman can be literally anywhere.