from the playing-with-things-we-don't-understand dept.
Technology is advancing at an exponential rate, but we have very little ability to control it if something goes horribly wrong. Many experts are warning that some of the new technologies that are being developed right now represent very serious existential threats to humanity. In other words, they believe that we could literally be creating technology that could wipe us out someday. Unfortunately, the scientific community is not showing any restraint at all. If something is possible, they want to try to do it. All over the globe, hordes of mad scientists are feverishly rushing into the unknown, and it is quite likely that the consequences will be horrific. The following are 5 super creepy new technologies that should chill all of us to the core:
#1 Scientists in China have been able to get AI models to create "functioning replicas of themselves"...
[...] #2 Do you remember Operation Warp Speed? That was a public-private partnership that was initiated during the first Trump administration, and we all know how that turned out.
Now another public-private partnership that has been dubbed "Stargate" is supposed to greatly accelerate the development of AI in the United States...
[...] #3 Does creating an "artificial sun" sound like a good idea? Unfortunately, the Chinese have actually created such a thing, and they just set a new record by running it for 1,066 seconds...
[...] #4 Anyone that has watched Jurassic Park knows that bringing back ancient species that have gone extinct is a really bad idea. But now a company called Colossal BioSciences plans to do exactly that...
[...] #5 A whistleblower has told Joe Rogan that the U.S. military has mastered anti-gravity propulsion that is based on recovered alien technology...
(Score: 5, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 29, @04:21AM (1 child)
"recovered alien technology" ???
(Score: 2) by Revek on Wednesday January 29, @04:42AM
Old Joe bogan has the secret.
This page was generated by a Swarm of Roaming Elephants
(Score: 5, Insightful) by khallow on Wednesday January 29, @04:44AM (12 children)
1) Scientists can already just copy the AI directlly and full automate the process so that there's no human control at all.
2) Trump was a disaster for covid, sure, but Operation Warp Speed did work.
3) Creating an artificial sun sounds like a great idea. It's called "fusion" and this stuff has gone on for decades. Someone (not me!) will probably need to bring the author up to speed so that he's no longer frightened and confused.
4) Colossal BioSciences is allegedly planning to bring back the mammoth. That's an animal that humans are probably solely responsible for making extinct. Do we not have a responsibility to reverse extinctions caused by us?
5) There's a kook on the internet. Please hide under the desk until he goes away!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 29, @05:10AM (7 children)
There are ethical concerns about bringing back extinct species like the woolly mammoth [livescience.com].
However, the summary and story are not a serious attempt to address those ethics. Instead, they make it harder to have intelligent ethical discussions by poisoning the discourse and making it harder to distinguish people with legitimate concerns from kooks.
We should debate whether we should bring back extinct species, and if our efforts would be better spent on conservation to prevent future extinctions. There might be unintended consequences of reviving extinct species such as that species potentially becoming invasive.
There are worthwhile ethical concerns to debate. This article ain't it, and we are worse off for the bullshit.
(Score: 4, Touché) by HiThere on Wednesday January 29, @02:09PM (1 child)
The real problem is "where would they live?". (That's if the recreation were to be successful, as it might be for the Thylacine. The "mammoth" they recreate, if they are successful, will actually be more of a modified elephant, as we don't have a complete enough genome for it to be anything else.)
That said, if a place can be found for it to live, it seems a worthy project. Yeah, less worthy than keeping existing species from going extinct, but the funding sources aren't the same. (And arguing based on "Jurassic Park" is just plain silly.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 30, @12:58AM
Yes, it's true that "mammoth steppe" was once the most common biome on the planet during parts of the later Pleistocene epoch, and is nearly gone today. It covered a massive region during the last glacial maximum, but there's little left of the mammoth steppe now.
There's actually an intriguing argument that the de-extinction of the woolly mammoth might be useful in trying to mitigate climate change [smithsonianmag.com]. Would this actually be helpful? I don't feel qualified to answer that question, but this is another worthwhile point in the discussion about whether we should bring back woolly mammoths from extinction.
There are also legitimate questions about how a baby mammoth would be raised [princeton.edu], as in the social interactions with other animals as well as how to properly establish the gut microbes of a mammoth (see page 13).
To be clear, I'm not opposed to the de-extinction of the woolly mammoth. I actually think it's a fascinating idea, and my initial reaction is to strongly support the idea. My point was that there are legitimate ethical and practical questions that merit discussion, but comparing this project to Jurassic Park isn't one of those legitimate questions, and it dumbs down the discourse about this topic. It also gets harder to have serious discussions about topics like the points I've raised when the discourse gets polluted by bullshit from kooks.
I have no problem with SN running articles about a range of topics. It makes the site more interesting to read, and I've definitely submitted my share of articles that fall outside of the mainstream of topics on this site. Diversity in topics is good, but pure bullshit like this story does a disservice to this site and its readers. A lot of the recent stories have been very interesting, but this story falls way short of the standard that has been set on this site.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by theluggage on Wednesday January 29, @02:30PM
Humanity has many failings but it has proven itself to be really, really good at hunting large mammals to near-extinction.
I don't think a re-created woolly mammoth is going to turn out to be a problematic invasive species!
As long as they don't accidentally bring back the various parasites and diseases which inevitably co-existed with mammoths but would make short work of a modern elephant (or human)... or some "Jurassic" rat analogue that was kept in check by being the favourite snack of the velociraptor population. "Jurassic Park XVIII - Return of the Dinosaur Ticks" wouldn't make such a good movie, but might be a more serious real world problem.
(Score: 2) by Revek on Thursday January 30, @12:57AM (2 children)
We killed them off once. We can do it again.
This page was generated by a Swarm of Roaming Elephants
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday January 30, @04:51PM (1 child)
It depends on how big they are and how fast they reproduce.
A big animal is easy to track and doesn't reproduce so fast that we can't keep up with it. Hopefully. Since we start from ones produced in a lab. Yet we can't keep the dog and kitty population under control.
Micro organisms cannot be individually tracked. Nor can aunt colonies. And they reproduce very fast.
The Centauri traded Earth jump gate technology in exchange for our superior hair mousse formulas.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 31, @07:51AM
So don't make the mammoths really small? Got it.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday January 30, @04:30AM
Where were the ethical concerns at the link. Consider these statements:
[...]
There are perhaps one or two half-decent arguments in there, but most of it is garbage: for example, the arguments from ignorance fallacies (the hubris over our control of technology, it could have a "negative impact on climate change"), false statements ("What's gone is gone" ignores that due to the cloning technology these species aren't truly gone! "you have to put them everywhere" - would we need to put dodos everywhere?), and even an argument from envy ("pet project of billionaires").
(Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Wednesday January 29, @02:55PM (3 children)
Every single year since I was in high school fusion has been only 20-30 years away, and it still is.
The Centauri traded Earth jump gate technology in exchange for our superior hair mousse formulas.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ElizabethGreene on Wednesday January 29, @04:51PM (2 children)
The goalposts have moved quite a bit on Fusion. The original goalposts were "Fusing Hydrogen to Helium". You can do that on your kitchen table now. Then there was "Fuse Hydrogen to Helium with a useful release of energy". Then there was "Fuse Hydrogen to Helium with a useful release of energy not inside a bomb." We worked on that one for a while, and have done it plenty of times in the National Ignition Facility. Now we're at "Fuse Hydrogen to Helium continuously with a useful release of energy that can boil water at scales suitable to generate power commercially."
That project is taking FOREVER, in no small part due to its international nature. ITER is the mother of all group projects. China said "fuck it" and just did it themselves instead. Either way, it's a net win for humanity. ... Not that the "China doesn't invent; They just copy stuff." crowd will ever give them credit for it. :( That's a problem. Some people haven't noticed it's not the 80s anymore.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 31, @08:16AM (1 child)
Useful release of energy "not inside a bomb"? AFAIK that's more useful for bomb research. From the perspective of energy, those were about as useful and practical as burning extremely expensive Rolex watches for energy if not less so.
Go look up what they actually do: https://lasers.llnl.gov/about/how-nif-works [llnl.gov]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hohlraum#Inertial_confinement_fusion [wikipedia.org]
The hohlraum and capsule are precision stuff that are expensive to make.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Saturday February 01, @04:35PM
The NIF did net energy fusion with excess energy that wasn't a rounding error and didn't incinerate everything within several city blocks. That's the definition I was going for there. Running a net power reactor continuously for minutes is impressive tech, and China gets a big W for it, IMHO.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 29, @04:51AM (2 children)
Yeah, we know how that turned out. Among other things, OWS resulted in the development of mRNA vaccines to mitigate a deadly pandemic, encouraging the use of mRNA technology for other medical applications. This article insinuates that OWS was somehow a really bad thing, but no actual criticisms have been included in the summary. Bullshit.
Yeah, because science fiction thriller movies accurately depict technology and its risks. There are ethical concerns about splicing Asian elephant genes to create pseudo-mammoths, but that certainly doesn't mean it would result in a scenario like Jurassic Park. Michael Crichton was a great author, but that doesn't make him an authority on science. Crichton wrote bullshit about global warming [wikipedia.org], so why should we trust him on cloning? if anything, Jurassic Park isn't an argument against cloning but against allowing wealthy people to skirt around ethics and safety concerns.
The summary makes that argument:
and then doesn't substantiate that scientists are doing this allegedly dangerous research without regard for ethics. There are genuine ethical concerns about bringing species like the woolly mammoth back from extinction [livescience.com]. But the concerns are more along the lines of if mammoths could survive in the present day and, if so, whether they would become an invasive species. This is a far cry from Jurassic Park. There are valid ethical concerns, but scaremongering bullshit like this is completely unhelpful and contributes to the dumbing down of society.
Good work.
(Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Wednesday January 29, @02:12PM (1 child)
Actually, "Operation Warpspeed" wasn't used by the company that brought RNA based covid vaccines first to market. They said the paperwork would have slowed them down. Others used it successfully, though.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 29, @11:24PM
Moderna received OWS funding. Pfizer did not. Both developed mRNA vaccines for COVID that were used early in the mass vaccination programs in the US. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines generally produced fewer side effects and were more effective at preventing infection than the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which did not use mRNA. Having two safe and highly effective mRNA vaccines, one of which was developed with OWS funding, were very helpful in demonstrating that mRNA vaccines worked very well. The success of mRNA-based COVID vaccines certainly was helpful in spurring on the development of new mRNA-based medicines.
This article is leaning hard into the scaremongering about COVID vaccines. It's bullshit, just like the rest of the article.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Barenflimski on Wednesday January 29, @05:03AM
I'm psyched about the news we may have anti-gravity drive. I wonder what this does for wrinkles?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Samantha Wright on Wednesday January 29, @05:15AM (8 children)
Holy shit. Please delete this story. I really, really do not want this garbage on SN.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 29, @05:59AM
Soylent news has been feeling very slashdoty lately, or worse. I wonder what gives..
THESE LIST of 5 THINGS SHOULD TERRIFY YOU!!!
really?
1/2 - AI stupidity has been ongoing and will continue until peak stupidity has been achieved
3 - Fusion has been being worked on for 50+ years I believe.. Tokamak reactor designs are quite old. Progress is a good thing.
4 - Collosal has been working to bring back the mammoth for years now. Any news on it is actually interesting, despite ethical concerns.
5 - People have been yammering about alien tech for decades. Peak interest in that sort of thing was in the 90's with the X-Files (tv series). It was literally a cultural phenomna of the times: hardly anything to be terrified about. Whether it's true or not: unlikely, but not impossible.
About the only thing that is remotely close to scary is all the AI stupidity...
...and next to that how bad Joe Rogan seems to have sold out and swung a hard-right recently..
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 29, @11:50AM
> I really, really do not want this garbage on SN.
I would mod up, but you are already at +5.
The orange one and his minions may be driving the general level of discussion down, but we don't have to follow.
(Score: 5, Touché) by ElizabethGreene on Wednesday January 29, @04:54PM (5 children)
The best way to get better stories on SN is to submit good ones [soylentnews.org].
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Samantha Wright on Wednesday January 29, @05:03PM (4 children)
You're not wrong, but that doesn't mean the gap should be filled with blatant disinformation from an apocalyptic conspiracy theorist. Editors should reject obviously bad stories!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 30, @01:13AM (3 children)
I agree.
I hope that submitting better stories to the queue will result in bad stories like this being rejected. I'm a bit concerned because there are two more stories in the queue that spread misinformation about vaccines: Bill Gates Confident the Public Will Exonerate Him of Genocide Charges [soylentnews.org] and Vaccination and Neurodevelopmental Disorders: A Study of Nine-Year-Old Children Enrolled in Medicaid [soylentnews.org]. Both are complete bullshit. The latter gives the illusion of legitimacy by citing a "peer-reviewed journal". Of course, slapping the title of journal on a Wordpress blog [wikipedia.org] and appointing three more anti-vaxxers to create an editorial board doesn't create a legitimate scientific journal. This story also implies that vaccines are harmful, as I've noted in one of my prior comments [soylentnews.org].
I emailed admin@soylentnews.org to voice my displeasure with this story. Since you disapprove of bullshit stories like this, I encourage you to also send the staff an email and let them know that this is below the editorial standards of this site. For anyone who chooses to email the staff, I suggest also mentioning a recent story or two that you thought was very good. Tell them what types of stories you'd like to see, in addition to pointing out that bullshit like this story is far beneath the standards of SN.
And before anyone asks, I do have a story of my own that's pending in the queue, though I didn't put my user name on it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by janrinok on Thursday January 30, @12:46PM (2 children)
Thank you for your feedback.
Complaining about what is in the submissions queue is a bit misdirected. The community provide the submissions, and there is nothing to suggest that any particular submission will be accepted or subsequently published. You do not have visibility of the editorial discussions that take place regarding selection of submissions. Some are rejected with, hopefully, helpful advice to the submitter is we know who it is. To be rejected they are usually kept until several different editors have given their opinion. Other submissions are obviously completely unrelated to our site, or they are flamebait / spam, and are deleted.
We too would like the quality of submissions to improve but that is not directly a problem that we can solve.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 30, @01:19PM
This is a fair point.
To be clear, my intent is to 1) encourage people to contact admin@soylentnews.org if they're got concerns and 2) to submit stories that they consider to be of a higher quality. I share their concerns and their frustration, but I think it's probably best discussed by email or in the journals instead of posting more objections in this story. I'm putting my money where my mouth is since I've got a story in the submissions queue, and I've sent also sent couple of emails. Just to emphasize in case any users misunderstand my intent, I'm saying to 1) email admin@soylentnews.org if they've got concerns, and 2) submit stories to the queue that they think are better.
And as I said in my email this morning, I want to listen and hear what the staff have to say before jumping to conclusions and posting publicly. You're correct that there are discussions that I don't see as an ordinary user, so perhaps there are things I'm not aware of. That's why I wrote an email instead of posting a journal.
Be well, Jan. I hope you and your family are doing well.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 30, @02:20PM
As a follow-up, the concern I raised this morning was quickly addressed by the staff. They are responsive to concerns raised by email, which is why I've encouraged people to address matters that way.
I appreciate the staff quickly addressing the concern. Thank you.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Mojibake Tengu on Wednesday January 29, @06:19AM (1 child)
#5: Negative. If Americans had agrav, it would be already used in iPhones just for hovering the device above table marketing feature.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Freeman on Wednesday January 29, @02:50PM
It worked too good so the idea had to be scrapped:
https://generated-images.perchance.org/image/b04a10ded9e09fae6d20d28c8c44d8b66853b6e2537f3f57e32d275a1d7cba83.jpeg [perchance.org]
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 5, Funny) by kazzie on Wednesday January 29, @07:24AM
That won't go down well...
(Score: 5, Touché) by kolie on Wednesday January 29, @12:06PM
This article is bad lol
(Score: 5, Informative) by stevegee58 on Wednesday January 29, @12:10PM (2 children)
I hesitated commenting on this but here goes.
The author of this article is a well-known Christian fundamentalist author named Michael Snyder. Literally everything he posts is pseudoscience viewed through the lens of the Book of Revelations. What makes Snyder so particularly dangerous is how skilled he is in covering his fundamentalist tracks and sounding objective and reasonable. Under the surface of his writing is his core belief that the universe is 5000 years old and evolution is false "because the Bible says so".
This article is way beneath the usual quality of articles posted here on Soylent News.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
(Score: 1) by Opyros on Wednesday January 29, @05:38PM
So this person is serious? I’d thought at first that this was a successful troll, along the lines of “Is Your Son a Computer Hacker?”, but I guess not.
(Score: 1, Troll) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 29, @07:07PM
Never underestimate the power of a good presenter at convincing a naive audience:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scopes_trial [wikipedia.org]
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by srobert on Wednesday January 29, @05:12PM (1 child)
Actually, the inclusion of #3 here has me concerned. Fusion as an energy source has been the elusive holy grail over my lifetime. Just think, cutting energy costs by an order of magnitude, eliminating environmental concerns of fossil fuels, the radioactive wastes of fission, etc. But even if the technical problems are solved, could its implementation be hampered by the scientific illiteracy of the general population? Is that problem more prevalent in the U.S.A than the rest of the world?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 29, @07:11PM
>even if the technical problems are solved, could its implementation be hampered by the scientific illiteracy of the general population?
Always. Most often the entrenched interests which will be rendered eventually obsolete by the next great thing are behind the branding of the next great thing as "unacceptably risky and dangerous."
>Is that problem more prevalent in the U.S.A than the rest of the world?
Lately it seems so, but Germany is ahead of us on that front with shutting their fission power plants, increasing the strip mining of their domestic coal. If anyone in this world can run nuclear power plants safely, it's the Germans. Meanwhile the French sit next door with 57 active reactors, all close enough to dose Germany heavily if they ever screw up, and no intentions of giving them up, or stopping drinking their wine.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by donkeyhotay on Wednesday January 29, @11:40PM
I think this is the third article in as many days which is not really up to proper SN fare. WTF is going on?