I'm having phun playing off Kevin Kelly's technium posts. He's dealing with interesting subjects, and while I find lots of fault with his views he still gets good marks for choosing such subjects and giving them a whirl. This is the case with the post Dealing With Rogue Technologies.

The common element among the techniques of GRIN [geno-, robo-, info-, nano -] - and the reason they are worrisome – is that they are all self-reproducing. . . The threat of self-duplicating technology is new.

No, it's not new. Humans have been tinkering up new organisms for eons. We tend to overlook the creations of those ancient bio-engineers because we largely approve of their efforts and have come to think of them as being "natural", a word that usually means no more than that we are used to it. It wasn't just breeding - though that can accomplish great change over time - it also involved chemical and mechanical genetic alteration, albeit without explicit control. Forced mutation with radiation (solar and nuclear) as well as caustic and acidic chemicals resulted in random change that could only be evaluated by observation of the resulting organisms.

We’ve long had ad hoc societal mechanisms for vetting new inventions. You see how your neighbors use the new fangled thing. Maybe you try it yourself. If you don’t like the results, you stop using it. If enough users give it up, the technology goes obsolete. But this may not work with GRIN. GRIN technologies may derail the normal try-out period is one of two ways. In order to really “try” a GRIN invention you may need to develop it to the point where it can reproduce in order to enjoy its full benefits. If you change your mind at that point, the cascade might too late to undo.

We have never had societal mechanisms for vetting new inventions. That's an impossible idea. It assumes that "we" are only ever good and cooperative, when it is more nearly true to say just the opposite. Besides, it has always been true that inventions had to be developed to the point of no return before an informed decision about whether return was desirable could be made. It is always too late.

These are not new issues, and claiming that they are reveals a deeper problem with general erudition about the human condition. We are too often in thrall to myths and fairy tales that conceal our natures and our true histories.

The more complex a system is the less its behavior can be deduced from the behavior of its parts, and the more its behavior will only emerge when the entire whole is running. Natural ecologies, and organic bodies are like this. Complex software programs exhibit the same kind of irreducibility. The only way to check and verify them is to run them. Mathematically, there are no short cuts but to turn it on. Mathematically, there are no short cuts to finding out what the consequences of the GRIN-ologies will be but to construct them first.

This is the opposite of a moratorium. It’s more like a tryatorium. The result would be a conversation, a deliberate engagement with the emerging technology. It is released with our arms around it. We bend it this way and that. Let’s put more money here, let’s test this faster, let’s try to find a better home for these. A better metaphor would be: the technology is trained. As in the best animal and child training, positive aspects are reinforced with resources, and negative aspects are ignored until they diminish. Troublesome and high-risk technology should be treated like rogue states. What you don’t want to do is banish and isolate them. You want to work with the bully and problem child. High-risk technologies need more chances for us to discover their true strengths. They need more of our investment, and more opportunities to be tried. Prohibiting them only drives them to the underground, where their worst traits are emphasized.

Like child rearing huh? Gosh, we're really good at that. Kelly makes a common error here. You can train some of the children, but not all of them. Sometimes the training doesn't work, and there's no way to even attempt to train them all. Even when the training does work, it may well result in bad outcomes. It isn't as if the trainers are whole and rational after all. Often they merely communicate their neuroses. The lesson learned has no necessary connection to the lesson taught.

Like raising our children the real question – and disagreement – lies in what values do we want to transmit over generations? This is worth discussing, and I suspect, that as in real life we won’t all agree on the answers.

See above. This is part two of the fantasy. Even if we could actually do training, we couldn't all agree on any training program. The whole idea of "we" in this context is illusory.

Technological change is growing faster and more powerful. When we consider what gunpowder did to the world when that technology first spread, or even what the horse stirrup did before that, the change that will result from our newer technologies approaches singularity. We have no idea what is on the other side. Bring gunpowder to a society skilled in high quality casting of large bronze objects (church bells) and you unexpectedly get cannons, which make castles obsolete. To predict outcomes would require comprehensive knowledge approaching omnipotence. As Kelly puts it: "Mathematically, there are no short cuts to finding out what the consequences of the GRIN-ologies will be but to construct them first."

The prohibitionist agenda doesn't work. When you think clearly you can see that it can't work. It's a fantasy. We have all of history to illustrate this truth, yet the myth persists. Histories are even air-brushed in the attempt to conceal truths. No matter how sterile your world, you will still catch diseases. No matter how good your medicines, diseases will find ways to thrive anyway. With sufficient effort you can defeat most any disease, but not every disease. Risk exists.

The more mature view that GRIN (also referred to as NBIC) technologies are here and becoming more pervasive implies that we must adapt. I'm sure we will, and also sure that my descendants will think of them as "natural".

Update: The Proactionary Principle [via Econlog]

People's freedom to innovate technologically is highly valuable, even critical, to humanity. This implies a range of responsibilities for those considering whether and how to develop, deploy, or restrict new technologies. Assess risks and opportunities using an objective, open, and comprehensive, yet simple decision process based on science rather than collective emotional reactions. Account for the costs of restrictions and lost opportunities as fully as direct effects. Favor measures that are proportionate to the probability and magnitude of impacts, and that have the highest payoff relative to their costs. Give a high priority to people's freedom to learn, innovate, and advance. . .

The Proactionary Principle emerged out of a critical discussion of the widely used "precautionary principle" during Extropy Institute?s Vital Progress Summit I in 2004. The precautionary principle has been used as a means of deciding whether to allow an activity (typically involving corporate activity and technological innovation) that might have undesirable side-effects on human health or the environment. In practice, that principle is strongly biased against the technological progress so vital to the continued survival and well-being of humanity.

Understanding that we need to develop and deploy new technologies to feed billions more people over the coming decades, to counter natural threats from pathogens to environmental changes, and to alleviate human suffering from disease, damage, and the ravages of aging, those involved in the VP Summit recognized two things: The importance of critically analyzing the precautionary principle, and the formation of an alternative, more sophisticated principle that incorporates more extensive and accurate assessment of options while protecting our fundamental responsibility and liberty to experiment and innovate.

Update: keep on hacking

He divides environmentalists into romantics and scientists, the two cultures he’s been straddling and blending since the 1960s. . .

He thinks the fears of genetically engineered bugs causing disaster are as overstated as the counterculture’s fears of computers turning into Big Brother. “Starting in the 1960s, hackers turned computers from organizational control machines into individual freedom machines,” he told Conservation magazine last year. “Where are the green biotech hackers?”.

He’s also looking for green nuclear engineers, and says he feels guilty that he and his fellow environmentalists created so much fear of nuclear power. Alternative energy and conservation are fine steps to reduce carbon emissions, he says, but now nuclear power is a proven technology working on a scale to make a serious difference. . .

“Any time that people are forced to acknowledge publicly that they’re wrong, it’s really good for the commonweal. I love to be busted for apocalyptic proclamations that turned out to be 180 degrees wrong. In 1973 I thought the energy crisis was so intolerable that we’d have police on the streets by Christmas. The times I’ve been wrong is when I assume there’s a brittleness in a complex system that turns out to be way more resilient than I thought.”

He now looks at the rapidly growing megacities of the third world not as a crisis but as good news: as villagers move to town, they find new opportunities and leave behind farms that can revert to forests and nature preserves. Instead of worrying about population growth, he’s afraid birth rates are declining too quickly, leaving future societies with a shortage of young people.

Old-fashioned rural simplicity still has great appeal for romantic environmentalists. But when the romantics who disdain frankenfoods choose locally grown heirloom plants and livestock, they’re benefiting from technological advances made by past plant and animal breeders. Are the risks of genetically engineered breeds of wheat or cloned animals so great, or do they just ruin the romance?

Mr. Brand would rather take a few risks.

“I get bored easily — on purpose,” he said, recalling advice from the co-discoverer of DNA’s double helix. “Jim Watson said he looks for young scientists with low thresholds of boredom, because otherwise you get researchers who just keep on gilding their own lilies. You have to keep on trying new things.”

As noted in the article, Brand has been spectacularly wrong in his futurism in the past, usually while under the influence of some whacko Stanford academic. But it the apocalyptic proclamations that get him in trouble, and he seems less prone to making them now. It's a pity that it takes 60 years or so for some to outgrow the apocalypse shtick, and even more pitiful that others take far longer.