From: Ramez Naam (mez@apexnano.com)
Date: Mon Dec 02 2002 - 11:12:24 MST
From: Peter C. McCluskey [mailto:pcm@rahul.net]
> >Goodness. If the kind of control you are aiming for is the
> >degree of control virus authors have over their creations,
> >then we have a very very different idea of what responsible
> >development methodologies for assemblers are.
>
> We probably do. Do you have any argument for your idea of
> responsibility? For instance, what risks would population
> biology help us deal with?
The population biology mention is out of context. I was actually
talking about what poor modeling methods we have in areas where we
attempt to model the action of huge populations of individual
entities. Population biology is an illustration of this.
My problem with only having the degree of control that virus authors
have over their creations is that computer viruses get out of control
all the time. There are numerous cases, starting with the original
internet worm, of viruses that were written as toys and then ended up
getting loose from their authors and causing a large amount of
trouble.
With an assembler - a totally novel and extremely powerful type of
self-replicator - I would want to make very very certain that it would
not escape into the environment before I ever built one. That means
modeling and simulating its behavior. Otherwise how do you know that
the defenses you've built to keep it contained are sufficient?
cheers,
mez
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