Jesse

Bill Joy, the chief scientist at Sun Microsystems, had an article in Wired Magazine a little while ago making a similar proposal to limit research in potentially "dangerous" fields like nanotechnology, genetic engineering, and artificial intelligence. The Foresight Institute (a nanotech thinktank of sorts) has a bunch of links to articles criticizing this idea here:

http://www.foresight.org/hotnews/#anchor1465777

Some other good articles on this subject are Forward to the Future: Nanotechnology and Regulatory Policy by Glenn Reynolds, http://www.slofi.com/Don't_Count.htm by the authors of The Social Life of Information, and The Future Needs Us! by physicist Freeman Dyson (this article starts out as a review of Michael Crichton's Prey, so you have to scroll down a bit). The Center for Responsible Nanotechnology is another good site on nanotech regulation.

Answerer

Yeah, why not, since from I had seen, most politicians don't even understand science, itself.

BioBeing

The US govt is already doing this. Severly limiting stem cell research for example. Stem cells hold a great hope for many types of new research. We need their noses out of what we do, not in it further. Let the politicians etc worry about the ethical issues as they come up, but do not stop basic research.

fando

It never ceases to amaze me how many of us are preoccupied with doomsday scenarios. Along the same lines as Bill Joy's falling sky scenarios for nanotechnology is the so-called Technological Singularity that might arise if we were to pursue Artificial Intelligence. You can feel the general fear of these speculative futures in popular culture, in movies like The Matrix, and in legislative attempts to rein in the progress of science.

mongrel

Now the only requirement is ethical politicians...:banghead:

keyser_soze

They make those?

Marduk

not any more

keyser_soze

Had me going they did!

Godot

A couple of weeks back in the Sydney Morning Herald, I recall reading a snippet where this guy (sorry for the vagueness) was suggesting that, at present, there is no need for scientific ethics. His rationale was that the philosophers are still debating the concept of ethics, so how can we apply limits on action that are based on a moving definition?
Extend that to having politicians with an inverted concept of ethics and no knowledge of science being the ones making the rules.... not promising.

Jesse

Except the "technological singularity" isn't necessarily a doomsday scenario, it's often viewed as a positive thing by those who see it as likely. If Moore's law continues for another few decades I think there's a pretty good chance something like this will happen...see this article by Ray Kurzweil, for example:

The Law of Accelerating Returns