Techdirt. Stories filed under "extinction" Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us Techdirt. Stories filed under "extinction"http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Wed, 10 Apr 2013 17:00:00 PDT DailyDirt: Making Extinction Extinct Michael Ho http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101230/15315412473/dailydirt-making-extinction-extinct.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101230/15315412473/dailydirt-making-extinction-extinct.shtml
  • There are several TED talks on de-extinction, discussing cloning and various animals that could potentially be revived. We could learn a lot from figuring out how to take somewhat arbitrary DNA instructions and produce viable organisms. [url]
  • Dolly the sheep was born in 1996, and in 2003, an extinct wild goat (Capra pyrenaica pyrenaica) was cloned, but it died with some major genetic defects. Since then, cloning techniques have gotten better, but re-creating an extinct animal is one thing. Raising a healthy animal that was once extinct is a completely different challenge. [url]
  • At the Central Veterinary Research Laboratory in Dubai, scientists have reportedly engineered a male duck to produce chicken sperm that fathered a chicken. The process of introducing chicken DNA into the reproductive organs of a male duck embryo could presumably be used in other birds (especially for other birds that may be endangered). [url]
  • An extinct Australian frog species has been brought back to life (almost). Scientists cloned an extinct frog (Rheobatrachus silus) by injecting its dead cell nucleus into a fresh egg of distantly-related frog, (Mixophyes fasciolatus), and observed the embryo grow -- but it didn't survive beyond a few days. [url]
    • If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

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    ]]>     urls-we-dig-up http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20101230/15315412473     Fri, 30 Nov 2012 00:07:00 PST Cambridge Proposes New Centre To Study Ways Technology May Make Humans Extinct Timothy Geigner http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121126/10403721148/cambridge-proposes-new-centre-to-study-ways-technology-may-make-humans-extinct.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121126/10403721148/cambridge-proposes-new-centre-to-study-ways-technology-may-make-humans-extinct.shtml deserve rights, for instance. On the flip side of the benevolence coin, I also had the distinct pleasure of discussing one sports journalist's opinion that we had to outlaw American football as we know it today for the obvious reason that the machines are preparing to take over and s#@% is about to get real.

    Hyperbole aside, one group is proposing a more reasonable, nuanced platform to study possible pitfalls regarding technology and mankind's dominance over it.
    A philosopher, a scientist and a software engineer have come together to propose a new centre at Cambridge, the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER), to address these cases – from developments in bio and nanotechnology to extreme climate change and even artificial intelligence – in which technology might pose "extinction-level" risks to our species.
    Now, it would be quite easy to simply have a laugh at this proposal while writing off concerns about extinction-level technological disasters as being the thing of science fiction movies, and to some extent I wouldn't disagree with that notion, but this group certainly does appear to be keeping a level head about the subject. There doesn't seem to be a great deal of fear-mongering coming out of group, unlike what we see in cybersecurity debates, and the founding members of the group aren't exactly luddites. That said, even some of the group's members seem to realize how far-fetched this all sounds, such as Huw Price, the Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy and one of the group's founding members.
    "Nature didn't anticipate us, and we in our turn shouldn't take AGI for granted. We need to take seriously the possibility that there might be a "Pandora's box" moment with AGI that, if missed, could be disastrous. I don't mean that we can predict this with certainty, no one is presently in a position to do that, but that's the point! With so much at stake, we need to do a better job of understanding the risks of potentially catastrophic technologies."
    Unfortunately, the reasonable nature of Price's wish to simply study the potential of a problem does indeed lead to what seems to be laughable worries. For example, Price goes on to worry that an explosion in computing power and the possibility of software writing new software will relegate humanity to the back burner in competition with machines for global resources. My issue is that these researchers appear to equate intelligence with consciousness. Or, at the very least, they assume that a machine as intelligent as or even more intelligent than a human being will also have a human's motivation for dominance, expansion, or procreation (as in writing new software or creating more machines). Following the story logically, and having written a fictional novel discussing exactly that subject matter, I'm just not sure how the researchers got from point A to point B without a little science fiction magic worked into the mix.

    So, while it would seem to be unreasonable to decry studying the subject, I would hope this or any other group looking at the possible negative impact of expanding technology would try to keep their sights on the most likely scenarios and stay away from the more fantastical, albeit entertaining, possibilities.

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    ]]>     but-will-skynet-let-it-happen? http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20121126/10403721148     Tue, 8 Feb 2011 05:56:23 PST Do Tools Ever Die Off? Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110207/00383912983/do-tools-ever-die-off.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110207/00383912983/do-tools-ever-die-off.shtml makes quite a claim:
    "I say there is no species of technology that have ever gone globally extinct on this planet."
    Further in the debate, Kelly expanded and even bet Krulwich that he couldn't find any tool, no matter how far back in the past it was from, that wasn't still being made today (and made new) somewhere in the world. Krulwich brings up a few suggestions, each of which gets shot down, including "paleolithic hammers." Turns out they're still being made (mostly by hobbyists). He then went through a bunch of pages of an 1895 Montgomery Ward catalog... and found that every one is still being made. So Krulwich asked people to chime in with suggestions, and they've come up with a few, such as radium suppositories, a Roman corvus (a ship boarding tool) and the ferrite core of a Seeburg Jukebox. Kelly's job is to try to find if all of these are still being made.

    Of course, some of this depends on how you view the initial premise. The initial claim from Kelly was that no species of technology has ever gone extinct -- and in that case, you should be able to include more updated technologies that are better/safer/more efficient. But, in the interview, Kelly does seem to take it a step further in claiming that no tool itself was no longer being made new. So, I'm curious if anyone can actually find "new" versions of the things listed above.

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    ]]>     species-extinction http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20110207/00383912983