All things considered, the cool factor or curiosity shouldn't be enough to move forward with de-extinction technology while so much of life desperately needs help in order not to go extinct (including us).
IS INFLATION AN ENDANGERED SPECIES, DESTINED FOR extinction by technology that continues to push productivity ahead in giant strides?
"This says that we can let species go to the very brink of extinction and modern technology can bring them back," Stuart Pimm, a conservation biologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, told the journal Nature.
In discussing the extinction potential of technology, Khatchadourian mentions Bostrom's relative dismissal of natural threats, writing, "NASA spends forty million dollars each year to determine if there are significant comets or asteroids headed for Earth.
The concentration of each antibody fraction was subsequently determined with a Nanodrop ND1000 spectrophotometer using the IgG molar extinction coefficient (Nanodrop Technologies, Wilmington, DE) and stored at −20°C until use.
"It is hard to cause human extinction with seventeenth-century technology," Bostrom told me.
This lesson of technology-inspired extinction can be retold in many other domains of life: the way phonographs nearly disappeared when the music CD was invented; the rejection of bicycles in the middle of the 20th century; the shuttering of Polaroid factories with the advent of digital cameras.
How will technology "hedge" against extinction?
Either Homo sapiens persecuted his cousins into extinction or, with his superior technology, he outhunted, outgathered and outbred them.
THE luxury goods industry, struggling through a recession that has threatened some well-known names with extinction, is trying to use technology to its advantage.
"No, no, no, I mean, way before that!" (I think he's joking, although in 2011 his colleague Shane Legg did say: "I think human extinction will probably occur, and technology will likely play a part in this").
