alt Hacker NewsYeah i'm wondering how much of a role that plays in this as well.
On the one hand I could believe it's something more benign, or the usual misunderstood fear mongering making it to some political level (well make sure those users can't get online anonymously! being our current craze).
That said, chemistry and to some level physics have been the major domain of limited knowledge (chemistry because the average person could cause some damage, physics is more of a nation state issue generally).
However I do wonder if there's some legit data on "oh uh...looks like this thing you can make with easy to get and hard to regulate tools is dangerous" in the bio field. I know about the lab rats who want to just screw around in the garage, and it seems like that should be easy to hit at a supply level (much like how certain chemical compounds are just not available for civilians), but maybe there's something legit to limiting the data.
Not that this is a remotely good implementation of that. The hamfisted method does reek of some politician/bureaucrat just saying "No it can't ever return bio questions because RAR!" situation.
Replies
The thing is the data isn’t limited, and supply side constraints already solve this problem. I come from a BSc Chemistry background, and they don’t hide how organic chemistry and illegal drug synthesis are intertwined, it’s open information
But where I live the glassware and precursors will get you a very angry knock on the door.
Nobody has tried to limit knowledge of chemistry or physics unless it was directly about doing something illegal, to the point of basically being a detailed recipe. Usually not even then. And when they have tried they've had basically zero success.
The ability for a handful of companies, simultaneously very powerful and easily susceptible to pressure from other powerful actors, to do the same sort of thing with the next generation of core learning and engineering tools, is freaking terrifying.