“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” —Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jurassic Park).
The logic doesn’t hold up.
You can make the same argument for anything. It makes sense to think about the dangers, not pretend that bad logic is an excuse to do anything you want.
The former tends to stop all progress, while the latter considers that negative outcomes are real, but that we can productively reduce risk.
Kind of like how OpenAI removed racist, sexist, and other troubling images from their AI training pool and then released it in pieces (to a small group of subjects) to remove as many issues as possible. With that said, they definitely still made mistakes.
In any case, blatant sarcasm is also out of the spirit of hackernew’s “ Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation”
It’s very easy to come up with answers to that question if you don’t know what is actually possible. Not very useful answers, though.
That is untrue. If you mean by "...it requires knowledge and expertise to answer" domain knowledge.
It is possible to understand the implications of technology without mastering it.
The experts in the field have huge incentives to say it is safe.
If we are to make decisions about releasing novel self replicating organisms into the environment, we should not task the people who will profit (scientists) to decide if it is a good idea or not.
