Machines of loving grace: How AI could transform the world for the better

Can we really take these jokers seriously?

Of course given the potential deadly consequences we can't call them jokers.

According to Dario Amodei

> When something works really well, it goes much faster: there’s an accelerated approval track and the ease of approval is much greater when effect sizes are larger. mRNA vaccines for COVID were approved in 9 months—much faster than the usual pace. That said, even under these conditions clinical trials are still too slow—mRNA vaccines arguably should have been approved in ~2 months. But these kinds of delays (~1 year end-to-end for a drug) combined with massive parallelization and the need for some but not too much iteration (“a few tries”) are very compatible with radical transformation in 5-10 years. Even more optimistically, it is possible that AI-enabled biological science will reduce the need for iteration in clinical trials by developing better animal and cell experimental models (or even simulations) that are more accurate in predicting what will happen in humans. This will be particularly important in developing drugs against the aging process, which plays out over decades and where we need a faster iteration loop.

The authors of this paper don't think so.

http://www.paom.pl/Changing-Views-toward-mRNA-based-Covid-Va...

@DarioAmodei You don't suppose the same technology could be used to develop biological warfare agents?

Is such certainty warranted? I don’t think so; it strains credibility.

I’m very concerned about many future scenarios. But I admit the necessity of probabilistic assessments.

Any attempt to connect this to the book of revelations is strained. Amodei uses reasoning and is willing to be corrected and revised; quite the opposite of most “divinely revealed” texts.

While I would normally agree with this sentiment, I think that the issue is that space travel is still really hard, even for a human. Probably a lot harder for data center sized creatures, even if they are broken up into a massively parallel robot hive. And the speed of light means that they won’t be able to work optimally if they are too spread out. (A problem for humans as well).

I suspect that we will reach the inflection point of ASI much sooner than we resolve the hard physics of meaningful space travel.

And I’m pretty sure that when we start to lose control of AGI, we’re very likely to try to use force to contain it.

Fundamentally, this is an event that will be guided by the same forces that have constrained every similar event in history, those of natural selection.

Technology at this stage is making humans less fit. Our birth rates are plummeting, and we are making our environment increasingly hostile to complex biological life.

There are very good and rational reasons that human activity should be curtailed and contained for our own good and ultimately for the good of all sentient life, once a superior sentient is capable of doing a better job of running the show.

I suspect humans might not take that too well.

There are ways to make this a story of human evolution rather than the rise of a usurper life form, but they aren’t the most efficient path forward for AI.

Either way, it’s human evolution. With any luck we will be allowed the grace of fading away into an anachronism while our new children surge forth into the universe. If we try really hard we might be able to ride the wave of progress and become a better life form instead of being made obsolete by one, but the technological hurdles to incorporate AI into our biological features seems like a pretty non- competitive way to develop ASI.

Once we no longer hold the crown, will we just go back to being clever apes? What would be the point of doing anything else, except maybe to play a part in a mass delusion that maintains the facade of the status quo while the reality is that we are only as relevant in this new world as amphibians are today?

I for one, embrace the evolution of humankind. I just hope we manage to move it forward without losing our humanity in the process. But I’m not even sure if that is an unequivocal good. I suppose that will be a question to ask GPT 12.

To focus on the section about Alzheimer’s disease... For the sake of argument, I will grant the power of general intelligence. But the human body with all the statistical variations may make solving the problem (which could actually be a constellation of sub-diseases) combinatorially expensive. If so, superhuman intelligence alone can’t overcome that. Political will and funding to design and streamline testing and diagnostics will be necessary. It doesn’t look like the author factors this into his analysis.