> they did not create a new living artifact from scratch
that is where this is headed, that is where they want to go, that is not what they've done... till they do it. That is the dark side. Humans in a competition with one another are not capable in a broad sense of reining in every worst impulse, as we saw with recent "gain of function" experiments.
Not sure why the parent thinks so, but my only concern is with new lifeforms.
We constantly mess up the ecosystem, merely by introducing existing species into environments which cannot handle them.
Soon we will be able to engineer exotic forms of life, yet we cannot currently control, reign in, or manage current, naturly evolved forms of life.
For example, we have to spray deadly chemicals on crops, to kill fungus, bacteria, etc. Of we have a pest problem, we have to entice them to eat poison, or trick them into traps.
Our control of existing orgamisims is essentially non-existent. The above methods just reduce population, often very ineffectively.
This means that almost certainly, when things we create end up free, we will be incapable of removing them from the ecosystem.
We could literally destroy the biosphere more readily than nukes, or global warming ever could.
aside from bad actors, i think that safe guards could prove effective.
synthetic organisms would have no natural predators, but the would also have no natural defenses. we could make them without an immune system or make it depend on a molecule that does not exist in the wild. so they would quickly die out.
Yet if wrong, what then? What if it is a mold or fungus which eats crops, yet was designed to be resilient? And cannot be killed without killing the plant?
Now you have a year or two, as it spreads, until starvarion causes total societal collapes, wars, dead, destruction.
And meanwhile all grasses around the world die, photosynthesis drops, animals, insects, and plants are dying off.
The problem is, any solution which hopes to contain, can mutate out. Cross-species genetic transfer is a thing. Mutation is a thing.
Expecting what you make, as a biological organism, to work as you wish is... not sensible.
Compared to programming languages, biological processes allow for change. Yet we can barely make secure code, and are endlessly surprised at our own lack fo security, and bugs, and issues in code due to unforeseen circumstances.
If you came to me and said you can make perfect code, make it secure, and bug free, I'd laugh and laugh until I wondered if I should fire you for incompetence.
And working with genetics, and with entirely new orgamisims, is more complex that the largest of codebases.
And at release, into the wild, there aee no issue trackers, no patches, no fixes.
It's shipped and gone.
To me, your comment highlights how unready we are.
Selective breeding/reproduction/engineering combined with evolutionary pressure in order to guide a genetic lineage in a particular direction. In the example of disease, say you wanted to make a human virus be able to infect mice.
You keep releasing a human rhinovirus into a cage with "humanized mice" (mice genetically altered to have specific receptors in common with humans). There is strong evolutionary pressure in this environment for the virus to evolve to infect these mice. A viral variant eventually catches on and begins infecting the humanized mice. Then you take that viral strain and start exposing normal mice. Now there is an evolutionary pressure for the virus to be able to infect those mice. This virus will have essentially "gained that function."
to the initiated I wish there was a dark side!
> they did not create a new living artifact from scratch
that is where this is headed, that is where they want to go, that is not what they've done... till they do it. That is the dark side. Humans in a competition with one another are not capable in a broad sense of reining in every worst impulse, as we saw with recent "gain of function" experiments.