Scientists: Artificial life likely in 3 to 10 years

[Prrkitty]

http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science....ap/index.html

I was reading the article and was fairly ok with it's concept until the very last comment in the article:

"When these things are created, they're going to be so weak, it'll be a huge achievement if you can keep them alive for an hour in the lab," he said. "But them getting out and taking over, never in our imagination could this happen."


That last comment very much makes me leary about what they are attempting to do. I can kinda see where this technology would/could have some ways of helping us in our lives.

But I can also see this going exactly like that very last comment says...

[DarkDragoonX]

All I know is that any scientist who works in the field of artificial intelligence and/or artificial life and makes a comment such as "what could go wrong?" needs to be taken to a bookstore, pointed towards the science fiction section and given a good smack upside the head.

[The_Amaster]

Dude, as soon as those come out, I need to get something approaching blueprints! Cellular and molecular biology have always been huge interests of mine, so has artificial life. Put the two together, and well....

I kinda can't think of a good adjective for this. Well, you get the idea.

[Beldaran]

Gray goo!

Grey goo refers to a hypothetical end-of-the-world scenario involving molecular nanotechnology in which out-of-control self-replicating robots consume all living matter on Earth while building more of themselves (a scenario known as ecophagy). [Wikipedia]

[AtmaWeapon]

"Never in our imagination could this happen" is a pretty common pretext to several scary sci-fi novels... tee hee.

Personally I don't give a crap I say they should give it a go. If they make some kind of artificial life hooray for them, I'm curious what kinds of insight into the development of life on this planet it could give us. If it manages to develop faster than we planned and kill us all, then I suppose I'll finally win my long battle with life.

[DarkDragon]

I'm not too worried.
What they plan on doing in the short-term is creating an (inferior) replica of life as it looked like on earth 2 billion years ago. I'm fully aware of the sometimes remarkable emergent behavior effect, but 99% of the sci-fi doomsday scenarios are just not possible given organisms this primitive.

[Prrkitty]

So Darky if I understand you right what they're going to make is really really primitive and in all probability wouldn't be able to do anything 'drastic' ... for lack of a better word?

If that's the case then I hope they succeed. :)

[biggiy05]

So Darky if I understand you right what they're going to make is really really primitive and in all probability wouldn't be able to do anything 'drastic' ... for lack of a better word?

If that's the case then I hope they succeed. :)

It can scratch it's butt and that's about it from the sound of it.

[AtmaWeapon]

If they could develop sentient life then I am pretty sure a lot of AI researchers would like to have a stern talk with them about why they haven't released their research sooner.

*edit* The kind of stern talk that involves a lot of violence

[Masamune]

It can scratch it's butt and that's about it from the sound of it.

Sounds like it can't even do that. Any organism would need a survival mechanism. And from I've gathered from the article, such a mechanism would have to be engineered by scientists.