From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sat Jan 06 2001 - 00:13:03 MST
The problem of not accidentally releasing a natural-environment-capable
replicator can be solved very easily by never designing a
natural-environment-capable replicator, and, of course, making very very
sure that replicators don't have the capability to mutate. Build
replicators that incorporate yttrium and boron and can only reproduce in
high vacuum at eighty degrees Kelvin using broadcast power and broadcast
information, and an accidental spill won't make a difference. Encrypting
the reproduction information - if you have it on-board, which is itself a
mistake - is also easy; what you'd have to watch out for would be prions,
structural deformations that result in similar structural deformations in
offspring.
It's nanotechnological warfare, not the sheer stupidity required for an
accidental error, that imposes the time limit on us AIfolk.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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