That's an excellent question. Another of my faves is "what are the worst consequences and how do we reduce the risk of a negative outcome? Is it possible to entirely eliminate issues responsibly?"

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.

I like the motto “safety is our number three priority” but I also think that people sharing info about their danger-spraying project should take a moment to say a line or two about how they think about the issues. Instead of just ignoring them.

Kind of an uncharitable quote, considering I have essays and presentations going back 8 years (and more recently) where I question potential harmfulness to the environment. I also previously worked for 3yr at a nonprofit specifically aimed at improving the world/society with biotech, where we considered these questions carefully and deeply.

In any case, blatant sarcasm is also out of the spirit of hackernew’s “ Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation”

Responding to the first part of your comment, I’m glad to hear that!

“Possibly” is the crux of that question, as it requires knowledge and expertise to answer in any kind of real way.

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.

> “Possibly” is the crux of that question, as it requires knowledge and expertise to answer in any kind of real way.

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.

What's your point? The technology already exists and is being used.

Your name, password, and the names and addresses and phone numbers and emails of all your family members already exist and are being used. So, by your logic, you have no reason to share them to everyone?

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.

No, actually your first sentence's logic doesn't hold up as it isn't a fair comparison at all. You can already order custom oligos and synthesized genes for relatively cheap. The chip idea would just reduce the cost more.

Digging into personal information on people can be done for relatively cheap. I’m not sure it’s a good thing to make it cheaper.

But, in the concrete case in question (gene synthesising technology), what are those potencial dangers?

This is silly. Unix already existed, what's the point of linux?

I think you didn't understand what I was referring too. Read again.