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Showing posts from August, 2014

The death of the drug deal is nigh

These type of discoveries in a subtle way describe the long game on why the idea of drug prohibition is as extinct as the dodo. You won't have to traverse dark alley ways to buy impure product trafficked from far away lands. Instead you will sit in your basement bio lab with elemental components and code together the necessary little functionality that you wish to have your host of living beasties produce for you. From heroine to vanilla, oil to alcohol.... when every one can bio synthesize what ever they want from scratch ...what need for outside suppliers? Drug dealing will go extinct  and in it's place will spring up a wide industry where templates for production of all kinds of inebriating or mind dulling agents will emerge....the same way maker 3D files are shared online for use in 3D printers...or modeling files are shared for rendering CGI. As people will be able to clandestinely supply their own drugs the risk of trying to buy them illegally doesn't have t

Automota: Why robot "laws" will never be effective

A new trailer to a new Science Fiction take on the robot future is out and it is called  A utomota . It mixes some tried and true ideas in Science fiction but principle among them is the plot hinge on the idea of two "protocols". These are similar to Issac Azimov's 3 robot rules for those that recall his classic work on the matter "I,Robot". Automata: 2 protocols: 1) A Robot cannot harm any form of life. 2) A robot cannot alter itself or others. I am going to explain why such ideas are fundamentally flawed, first the idea that it would even be possible to enforce setting anything like rules of behavior as abstract as the protocol 1, in the film would require a great deal of semantic disambiguation. I posit it will require enough that the ability to understand the sentence and take action to enforce it necessitates a sense of self as well as a sense of other in order to build an intrinsic understanding of what "harm" is. That last par