Talk:Biosecurity
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From the article:
- [artificial life forms]?, [predatory robots]?
I'm not sure this is encyclopedia material.
Carnivorous robots at [1] (http://www.howstuffworks.com/news-item107.htm)
Earlier versions of this article contained what appeared to be part of a manifesto by the author of the stuff about "ecoregional democracy" and "ecoregional constituencies".
Justification: Neither of these phrases can be found by Google, showing that they are idiosyncratic concepts. "Ecoregional democracy" appears to be a personal project. I have deleted the rest of the tract, as it was all of a piece.
This has been since restored. The author just above appears to have a personal agenda of his own. Ecoregional democracy is well known under the name Bioregional Democracy where it appears now - the name seems to be changing to reflect a shift from an old to a new term in ecology.
artificial life forms include a wide variety of organisms from artificial viral phages to genetically altered bacteria - some would argue transgenic plants are also such life forms.
The term is deliberately broad to include self-replicating molecules or robots - which present special but common problems to altered natural forms.
Predatory robots already exist in at least two forms - the "gastrobots" at one university in florida eat grasses and are thus predatory on plant life.
More ominously, a University in the UK has produced a slug-eating robot - a move which some theorists consider insane. The robot literally eats flesh to provide its own motive power.
One could also reasonably argue that military robot planes and probes kill people to earn their electricity and are thus predatory as well - technicality.
24, please add cites as to who espouses biosecurity, where they define the terms, etc. as per other articles, to bring things into NPOV.
- Look up "flesh eating robots" or "slug eating robots" - it's all out there.
At this point, our realities begin to diverge sharply. "earn their electricity" -- are you ascribing agency to robot planes? What about slug-eating bottles full of beer -- do they menace the Earth?
What do you mean by "insane", anyway? Do you mean "morally wrong", "disgusting", or are you implying mental illness, or legal insanity?
OK, those are terms I would not put in the article. But it's fair to say that anything that moves under its own power "earns its electricity" in some way, in the sense that it must pay back the investment humans make in it. The degree of agency assigned to the moving entity is not relevant - motion is because motion is 'work' in the physical sense. 'work' is what 'earns'... at least in the imitative wage paradigm. But anyway that's a semantic issue of whta you mean by "earn" and "work" and how broadly they can be understood and allowed to overlap with what robots do.
If the robot plane or smart bomb is actually smarter than the Commander in Chief, we have a different issue, but anyway, that's a whole 'nother matter.
- -)
Slug-eating bottles full of beer only eat slugs that crawl in themselves - no more or less agency than any other passive trap.
What differentiates them from the slug-eating robots is that the latter hunt down their prey actively - by moving.
Our issue with each other is whether mere motion implies some kind of agency.
I submit that it does, albeit of a minimal kind, as soon as a sentient being is not choosing every single move.
But this is exactly why "biosecurity" is so difficult to define - where does a given threat become autonomous or express agency? Many people thought they could predict or control gene flow - current research says not. Many organisms don't move on their own more than a few millimeters at a time, and still present big dangers.
As to "insane", well, I suppose that word is just an extreme form of "unwise" or "unsound" or "self-endangering" or "suicidal", and the psychiatric and legal categories are irrelevant to most wise people, unless and until they are actually confined.
But it wasn't me that described the slug-eating robots this way, so I can't really say.
Messy. This subject is messy. It's what we used to take for granted, and can't really take for granted any more. It's when preventative measures won't work, and states aren't structured correctly to respond effectively, and people take up their own civil defense measures, and various "biodefense" measures are proposed that simply aren't broad or deep or long lasting enough.
Messy.
But narrower definitions all fail for one reason or another.
Carnivorous robots at [2] (http://www.howstuffworks.com/news-item107.htm)
--- Nasty, eh?
OK, that's what I have to prove I guess: that this 'biosecurity' concept is accepted as sufficiently well-defined or constrained that it really can't be defined more loosely or narrowly than I've outlined. That "security" versus "safety" is active process versus passive stated policy goal.
I think at this point there are ten or twelve descriptions of what makes biosecurity and biosafety (all three or four kinds) and biodefense different concepts entirely...
A few things seem to be clearly consensed... like the idea that biosafety is long-range preventative while biosecurity is a more active and socially-dispersed monitoring or prevention of a very broad range of threats, and biodefense is spot protections or responses to well -known risks by experts.
I'll have to get to this tomorrow as I have a deadline later tonight.
From the article:
- These expenses may be minimized by political measures such as Ecoregional Democracy which forces political borders to conform to natural ecologies.
Who says this? What are their arguments? What is their evidence?
That's in "Bioregional Democracy" right now - evidence is mostly things like the Great Lakes Commission or Arctic Ocean protective body around the North Pole. Both of which fall short of full ecoregional democracy.
Green Parties are big on bioregions as teh means of organizing - I didn't want to get into this in "biosecurity" because it's already controversial as a field...
I don't know of anyone who contests the assertion that you must put measures into place at ecoregional borders. I think use of the term "forces political borders" makes the counter-argument - that it leads to conflict to change borders - clera enough. I'll add a line to this effective if you want. But review the whole new definition with citations and see how you feel about it.
OK, this is very complete now - could use some style editing here and there.
What's quite difficult is to get past the political issue that the U.S. ideals seem to conflict with the idea of any unintentional man-made threat that is as scary as a deliberate one... the exact opposite of what seems to prevail in NZ where it seems they are most afraid of unintended consequences.
I am not sure I want to add such a cultural comment to the entry, but it does seem very stark from the evidence: U.S. wants to define biosecurity in two different ways, one for humans (against "bioterror") and one for animals being raised for food. NZ, without the fear of active military opponents using biotech or biowarfare, is concerned mostly with preserving its biome.
The UNU/IAS definition emphasizes "biotechnology" without seeming to say much about proteins, new molecules, or robots... which are impossible to distinguish these days in any consistent way as the robots are microscopic too... it's out of date.
But it raises the right issues. And now I think that the article does, too.
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This article is poorly organised and too long. If it were cut down by half, it could still say all the same things, but without the linguistic hand-waving that it currently perpetrates.
I don't necessarily disagree, in principle, I think I can cut it to 2/3 the length, add subheadings, and say all the same things.
However, doing so runs so risk of offending people who think their point of view on this extremely complex and controversial topic is underrepresented.
A re-org of this article would have to focus on the way that the biodiversity debate and bioterrorism measures relate to each other. It would get pretty Green - and might offend people who don't like to think of themselves as animals.
Give me some guidance on this, and I'll take a good stab at it tomorrow. For now I want to think about it.
Also, I think I should quote Bill Joy about "relenquishing nanotechnology" which is an example of an extreme biosecurity measure.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/biosecurity also has a lot of discussion about this, especially biosafety vs. biosecurity which seems to be well ahead of the UNU/IAS definition and include Joy's stuff.
I'll dig through it all and come back with someone better written, 2/3 the length, making clearer the relation to biodiversity debate, nanotechnology and new molecules, and put in a link to the artificial intelligence debate (but not talk about it, because there is absolutely no consensus as to whether this threatens or improves biosecurity for the human or animal species)
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I went through the article in detail, making edits mostly for style. Mostly, I changed biased sentences (there were a lot) to neutral ones. More often than not, I changed word order. Where I have deleted things, I have done so because they seemed to be trying to predict the future, which may be valid for a website or a newspaper article, but is hardly a good idea in an encyclopedia. Also, it should be noted that articles here are not intended to be styled so as to offend the fewest people, but rather so as the report without passing judgement (either explicit or implicit). You will almost certainly find some of the changes I have made are too great, but please be very wary of undoing any of them until you understand why I made the change - this edit took me 2 hours.
--- I like the article as you wrote it. However, the post-biotechnology concerns are real and showing up relatively often in forums devoted to biosecurity... and all the dicussions related to biosecurity-protocol. You're probably right that it's premature to have a discussion about the latter. Political measures like homeland security and bioregional organizations taking charge of a commons are pretty currently, obviously, but you're also right to avoid predicting the future.
I don't want to undo what you've done, I'd perhaps add headings and a few lines here and there. What's important is that people understand how seriously controversial this is among professions and nations, why there might be many different definitions for a long time (the "biosafety" def'n does a good job of highlighting this), and the need for an honest broker. So, ending on that is probably the best move.
As it stands, the only good reference I know for the full spectrum of concerns is the biosecurity mailing list. I asked the moderator of that list to recruit some help on the definition to see if there's a consensus on the post-biotech and biowar issues. If there is, I'll try to moderate an update.
I really think you did a good job, it's a question of framing the controversy in its full depth, without taking a position to favor say a military or ecology or food security agenda.
Changes will be minor from here I think.