> Just like cane toads and prickly pear. Happily we're (I'm speaking on behalf of people way smarter than myself) getting much, much better at this. An articl

> Just like cane toads and prickly pear. Happily we're (I'm speaking on behalf of people way smarter than myself) getting much, much better at this. An article on Vox, discussed here 4 months ago, is just one poignant example of the level of introspection and caution being exercised by everyone involved in these trials: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17214676 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17214676 "Kevin Esvelt wants me to know that if I fuck up this article, 25,000 children could end up dead." The whole article is a tremendously compelling read. I'm usually pretty wary of the whole 'we've come a long way since ...', but in this realm we really do appear to have done exactly that. The 1920/1930's attitudes could best be described as incautious (more accurately as brazen, cowboy, insouciant, etc). Cane toads and prickly pear (and tiger pear and heliotrope and rabbits and hudsons pear and ...) are pests whose impact are nearly impossible to describe to people outside the ecosystems impacted by them, but the people dealing with these things are so much better informed than the lab techs of a hundred years ago and know that if they fuck it up, there'll be a wiki page about them that'll last another hundred years.