From DNA Ali’a, science has been self-regulating for 50 years

Being able genetically change bacteria by transforming them into drug factories, such as insulin, but also the risk of obtaining potentially microganisms dangerous: these were the great opportunities and the unknowns that the February 24, 1975 they pushed the pioneers research onGenetic engineering to meet in California, ad Asylomarto give yourself rules who put black on white and who have been since then become a point of reference around the world every time in the research they open New frontiers and you enter unexplored territories. It happened with the synthetic biologywith the nanotechnology And it is happening with theartificial intelligence. “What biologists did then is a good model to look at“, said one of the pioneers of research on artificial intelligence, the Nobel Prize Geoffey Hinton.

As today it happens by thinking about the possible developments of the AI ​​in many sectors of the company, too In the early seventies technologies for manipulate the DNA they had opened Unexpected possibilities. Being able to move a fragment of DNA from one body to another to study the function “allowed anyone to do anything“, The pioneer of that technique said, the Nobel Paul Berg.
The same concern had been expressed in 1973 in a letter signed by numerous researchers and published in the Science magazine. So in 1974 Berg and the other pioneers of DNA searches invited colleagues to one pause for reflectionone moratorium of their experiments “Until the potential risks of these recombinant DNA molecules or until adequate methods had been developed to prevent their diffusion were better evaluated.” They therefore invited them to confront Asilomar in 1975.

They arrived in 150 between researchers, representatives of government institutions and companies and 16 journalists and for three days they confronted animated discussions that led to drawn up Safety rules which are still a model all over the world today. Since then ‘Asylomar‘It is the symbol from the ability of the scientific community to self -regulate Without the involvement of politicians and the model for many other border sectors, such as synthetic biology, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence.

Dates back to January 5, 2017for example, the ‘Conference of Asilomar on the beneficial‘organized by the Future of Life Institute. Also in that case, many researchers involved in different disciplines, such as economics, ethics and philosophy, participated even if, unlike what happened in 1975, many of the participants worked for private companies.

The Asilomar conference has also influenced the Open letter of 22 March 2023 In which more than 30 thousand people, including Elon Musk, have expressed concern for IA systems “which can represent deep risks for society and humanity”.
In the May 2024 It was the turn of a new appeal in this direction.

The Fudan University Research Group also questioned their research on the impact of their research at the beginning of this year, which has developed a artificial intelligence system capable of self-replicating. “We hope – the researchers wrote – that our discovery serves as alert for society, to concentrate more efforts aimed at understanding and evaluating possible risks also internationally”.

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