[Hplusroadmap] Fwd: (from offlist) Open Biohacking Project & transhumanism roadmap feedback

[Bryan Bishop]

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: Re: Open Biohacking Project & transhumanism roadmap feedback
Date: Friday 01 February 2008
From: Bryan Bishop <kanzure at gmail.com>
To: "Matt McGuirl" <matt at mcguirl.net>

On Friday 01 February 2008, Matt McGuirl wrote:
> There's no need for a debate. I've lived long enough to know that

I must be out of it. These past days have consisted of some rather long 
hours for me. First, I just want to note that when I asked for a 
debate, I meant it benignly - I am somewhat of a philosopher and engage 
in such discussion frequently. I find it pleasing, meaningful and 
useful, but I think I came off too harsh. I am coming off that way with 
you overall, it seems. (On a second read of your email, the only 
problem might have been my choice of the word 'debate' because you 
started what I suggested anyway).

> wishing and hoping are pathetic strategies for dealing with anything.

Although it's interesting that some backlash is probably going to take 
place on my end because of some people wishing these problems to go 
away. I have received some rather snobby emails from a few fellows, 
saying I am some silly cult high school kid etc etc and I still don't 
see how that helps solve the problems. It doesn't. I am here to solve 
problems, not defend my status as a high school student (take that up 
with my parents, I say!-- please).

> Dealing with existential risks is just about the most serious
> business I can imagine. Serious work requires well concieved and well
> executed plans.

On this note, it seems that any plan to deal with those risks are more 
of a personal nature. I don't mean that we shouldn't work together on 
the problems, but that the solutions seem to always involve doing 
something personal rather than something within a community. You can 
try to educate all of the members of a community, but that just doesn't 
work (it helps, yes). You can try to disarm an entire population. You 
can try to breed fear and thoughtpolice. But ultimately, pathogenic 
bacteria still exist, ultimately software is still poorly coded and 
hackers can still make their own tools to connect to any system no 
matter how 'secure' you declare it (security is an illusion - see laws 
of thermodynamics). The solutions that I see include making sure that 
we can find furtile grounds for us to live on, no matter how far we 
have to travel, even if it is beyond the planet that we must go. What 
more, other solutions involving insuring that we can automatically 
replicate ourselves in the case of an emergency; these too are 
important strategies for coping with 'risk'. Maintaining intentionality 
and directed growth and the rates of change towards more confidence in 
our ability to overcome faults and problems is the key. I like to use 
Google as an example for this- they have been able to strictly codify 
their routines for creating data centers that seem to self-replicate 
out of thin air, maintaining a specific rate of growth at all data 
centers, accounting for a specific rate of death, and then accounting 
for the web storms of hungry users that they must feed ...

> Of course there will be huge problems (i.e. deaths in huge numbers)
> caused by the misuse of the same transformative technologies that
> hold some much promise for improving all our lives. I'm just trying
> to ensure that we avoid as many of them as we can - and save
> countless lives in the process - by bringing these new technologies
> into the world in as smart a way as we can.

Allow me to go out on a limb here; the problem is data loss. It is not 
so much the lives that I am specifically worried about, but instead the 
personalities, the people, their contexts and their entire lives. Every 
single thing about their life can theoretically be stored so that, 
should they happen to die, they will not truly die - not as long as we 
can maintain data integrity and replication across the galaxy to seed 
redundancy. However, acquiring this sort of data is ridiculously 
complicated. This is one of the projects that I have been working on. 
Supposedly, through the Innerspace Foundation and the BioBrick 
Foundation, as well as with brain-computer interface technology (of 
which I am avid reader and beginner designer), we can begin to 
construct diagnostics to start recording data in our individuals and to 
help preserve their world-state. It is a terrible, terrible tragedy 
when a person dies, or when a friend leaves and is lost forever, and it 
does not have to be that way. I don't want to lose anybody else either. 
But waiting to start these projects, waiting to give people the power 
to start making these diagnostic neurons and programs, this does not 
sound like the way. Inaction is not the solution. But on the other 
hand, as you argue, creating effective "technology entrance" strategies 
is also important. In this sense, yes, I have failed. But I think we 
can recover and -- along the way we have grown an extensive readerbase, 
according to my mailing list and web server statistics ...

> Some group of terrorists with a hatred of some ethnic group (pick any
> one you want) develops a bioweapon that they think that they designed
> in such a way that they think will only target members of the
> intended ethnic group because those group members all have some
> legitimately unique genetic trait. But because he's only 1 guy in a
> small group of anti-whomever terrorists he doesn't have much
> opportunity for the sort of rigorous quality control testing that
> such weapons deserve. So he does the best that his little group can
> do. Their beta testing indicated that it was perfectly effective on
> the 25 members of the target ethnic group. However, without a proper
> test program the terrorists can't know that the weapon has
> accidentally been very slightly misdesigned. It is 100% lethal
> against their intended targets but it also has a 23% mortality rate
> for people with the gene for red hair.

Yes, I agree with you on how dangerous this situation would be. I 
imagine that there will be the progressive development of numerous 
solutions to this problem. There will be new types of chemical 
membranes to screen for deadly pathogens, think stuff like jumpsuits 
and masks and maybe even social events tiered by how pure of an 
environment you come from (I know- socially stiffling, this is 
terrible, but you *know* somebody will do this) there will be genome 
analysis kits that will scan for incoming biohazards, think Star Wars 
except microscopic. But the practicality of all this will be near zilch 
if there's no public involvement in building the infrastructure to take 
responsibility for our livelihood. And the more widely distributed all 
of this technology and information, the more widely distributed are the 
researchers and the scientists (even if they are "Just" high school 
students) to peer over the problems and find solutions ... or if they 
can't find a solution, transmit their collected information over the 
internet to hope that somebody else can, before they die too.

> It's the "oh shit, it wasn't supposed to do that" scenarios that are
> so typical of the open source software community that make me very
> worried when people working to open source the sorts of genetics and
> biotech that you're talking about.

Hm. What about sandboxes?

> Now on to why Eric Klein said something that amounts to "to release
> it if you want." Your assumptions about Eric's position are correct.

Good. I feel much better.

> Eric is the president and founder of the Lifeboat Foundation. To say
> that he's got some influence is a huge understatement. It's his
> foundation. On policy matters he's got the biggest bat to swing.

Huh, so is it more of a dictatorship?

> Eric's also a very good friend of mine and I think I know him quite
> well.  I imagine that he assessed the threat posed by your zip file
> to be rather small because of your background and because of the
> nature of the material in the zip file. If it came from a major name
> in the biotech community and were more distilled, more easily applied
> in a lab, I'd bet you a very large sum of money that he'd not have
> had such a cavalier attitude. It's not fair that society discounts
> the work done by young people but that's how it is.

No, that's alright. I am pretty sure that I am of the right mind to take 
control of the situation anyway - even though I don't necessarily work 
under the name of Lifeboat. :)

> I'd have asked you to hold off publishing your stuff until after the
> relevant members of our SAB had their chance to be heard.

BTW: I think this can all be attributed to a lack of communication. Has 
Lifeboat given any consideration to better "rapid response" measures?

> But the toothpaste is already out of the tube. Now all w can do is
> try to prevent any disasters that might stem from your zip file.

See my above thoughts. 

-------------------------------------------------------
________________________________________
Bryan Bishop
http://heybryan.org/