From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Thu Sep 27 2001 - 00:51:37 MDT
Spike Jones wrote:
>
> Reason I am asking: I thought of a most dreadful thing the
> terrorists could do with very little money and make an enormous
> psychological and financial impact on our society. They could
> easily destroy a billion dollars of value for each thousand
> they spent, and might not even need to die. If I post
> the idea, do I run the risk of giving the terrorists a notion
> that they hadn't already discovered? Or would I help
> protect against such a fate by alerting the good guys?
> Would the feds come visit me? spike
You run very little risk of being visited by the feds, and also very
little risk of giving the terrorists a notion they haven't discovered, but
I still say don't do it. I still regret the time that I posted an easy
way for red goo to construct fusion weapons for no better reason than to
win an argument, but I doubt it had any effect on the course of history.
My advice is to find someone who has a realistic chance of forwarding it
to the right people if you really did think of something new - a friend in
the military-industrial complex, that is - and forward on your suggestion
to him, and only him. Unless it's something that we as individuals should
be taking precautions against, in which case by all means post it.
(Anything that you can avoid by fleeing a major city counts as something
we should be taking precautions against.)
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 08:11:00 MST