Precautionary principle

I don't know that I can say for sure what that number would be.

I think from my perspective, and this is something that I advocate for very strongly, whenever we're dealing with an exposure that's unknown, whether it's COVID-19, whether it's the World Trade Center disaster, whether it's what Ben Shabbat referenced earlier, the chemical explosion that occurred in East Palestine, Ohio, a couple of years ago, Whenever you don't know what an exposure is, what the components are, or what the health effects might be, I very strongly advocate for something called the precautionary principle.

And the precautionary principle essentially just states if there's an exposure that is associated with the biologic plausibility of illness, Is it possible that there are carcinogens in this exposure? Is it possible that the exposure is irritating and could physically damage our airways or our GI tract? It makes sense to prevent exposure or at least use personal protective equipment and optimize your use of personal protective equipment as much as possible.

And so certainly I think that's something that could have and should have been emphasized after 9-11.

I know that a lot of professionals and civilians or survivors that were exposed, you know, were not encouraged to protect themselves in that way, either by reducing their presence in the disaster area after 9-11 or, you optimizing their use of personal protective equipment.

There wasn't a lot of guidance that was given in terms of how civilians should clean their air ducts and their furniture and their homes.

You know, using wet mops, things like that to physically remove and neutralize the dust would have been something that would have been wonderful guidance for people to know, and that's a lesson that we learned from 9-11 that we still use today.

You know, eventually we were able to get some information from our scientific groups that actually study the dust, but there's a delay, and that's why the precautionary principle is so valuable.

But if we wait until AI shows clear signs of going rogue, it's probably going to be way too late to stop it.

That's why, when it comes to AI, it's important to follow the precautionary principle.

The precautionary principle says that when something might cause catastrophic harm, we shouldn't wait for absolute proof that it will before we do something about it.

And it's one of the best ways we humans have thought up to guard ourselves against potentially dangerous but uncertain futures.

Lots of people, including leading experts in the field, believe that powerful AI might cause catastrophic harm.

So according to the precautionary principle, we should work to make sure that doesn't happen, even if we're not certain it would in the first place.

Because left unchecked, even good bots like Clean Power could end up doing some really dirty work.

And if we want to get out ahead of it, we should probably start like right now.

Yeah, you're touching on a great point there, Chris.

Part of the way that I like to think about this is through the lens of the precautionary principle.

So rather than putting the burden of proof for every new chemical or compound or exposure to us for the scientific community to prove that there is an issue before it's removed from our environment, I like to think about placing the burden of proof on the scientific community to demonstrate safety.

So in the example of PFAS, yes, it's absolutely true that we don't know the specifics of the dose and the response and how problematic for human health over a long-term time horizon specific quantities of PFAS in water are going to be.

There's magnetic fields, and then there's AC electrical fields.

Both of those come from power infrastructure, wiring in your walls, devices broadly.

The evidence is still emerging on EMFs, so going back to the precautionary principle that I talked about earlier, my approach is since there's a plausible mechanism for a biological effect and a lot of the interventions to reduce your exposure to these things are actually fairly straightforward, it's worth doing them.

There's a great blog post that we can link to in the show notes that is a rational, skeptical, curious person's guide to EMFs that goes a little bit more in depth into what the evidence is, how I think about EMFs, I'm very aligned with that blog post's general stance, and why I think it's worth taking 80/20 precautions to reduce your exposure.

I recommend people Google that and just take a read.

He was involved with aircraft maintenance in the Air Force, and the title of that article is Aircraft Parts and the Precautionary Principle, Impossible to Prove a Falsehood.

Would you just give us the author again real slow?

George Nelson, Colonel George Nelson.