In fact this is the way safety evaluation of new drugs is done by FDA.
Your example is clearly ad hoc. But what if your friend will create a new virus which will kill all mosquitos in his neiborhood? It is plausible in next 5 years. Should he proceed uncontrolled?
In case of many similar projects where may be established a law, like do not release self-replicating units into the wild, or do not create AI projects which are going to change its source code.
Feeding biologically active compounds to large numbers of humans has a long track record of being dangerous in a reasonably large portion of cases.
The FDA was created once there was a realistic, significant risk.
Similarly, if you want to release pathogens or modified animals there’s already a history of adverse events and a reasonable chance of non-zero risk. Even without GM we’ve had killer bees from normal crossbreeding. There’s an established pattern of realistic, significant risk.
There are already lots of ~zero risk AI projects which change their own source code.
Any law which bans Tierra or Avida are, likewise, poorly thought out laws.
In fact this is the way safety evaluation of new drugs is done by FDA.
Your example is clearly ad hoc. But what if your friend will create a new virus which will kill all mosquitos in his neiborhood? It is plausible in next 5 years. Should he proceed uncontrolled?
In case of many similar projects where may be established a law, like do not release self-replicating units into the wild, or do not create AI projects which are going to change its source code.
Feeding biologically active compounds to large numbers of humans has a long track record of being dangerous in a reasonably large portion of cases.
The FDA was created once there was a realistic, significant risk.
Similarly, if you want to release pathogens or modified animals there’s already a history of adverse events and a reasonable chance of non-zero risk. Even without GM we’ve had killer bees from normal crossbreeding. There’s an established pattern of realistic, significant risk.
There are already lots of ~zero risk AI projects which change their own source code. Any law which bans Tierra or Avida are, likewise, poorly thought out laws.