Bibliographic record
Abstract
The paper opens with the question raised by Grundmann and Stehr, as to whether "knowledge policy" may include "the aim of limiting, directing into certain paths, or forbidding the application and further development of knowledge". It then explores this theme with reference to contemporary developments in biotechnology and nanotechnology, where the objective of knowledge is to enable us to create and modify at will biological entities (including humans and combined species known as "chimeras"), as well as self-assembling mechanical entities, ab initio through recombinant DNA techniques. I argue that a new category of risks is created by the promised technological applications of these forms of knowledge, called "moral risks", which threatens the ethical basis of human civilization; these are also "catastrophic risks", in that their negative and evil aspects are virtually unlimited. The paper asks whether our institutional structures, including international conventions, are robust enough to be able to contain such risks within acceptable limits; or alternatively whether these risks themselves should be regarded as unacceptable, a position which would impel us to seek to forbid individuals and nations from acquiring and disseminating the knowledge upon which those technologies are based.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".