While this is right on some level... the incentives aren't the main driver. Finding good targets in biotech is just a harder problem to solve. Like way harder. Disease biology is complex as hell. At the other end, figuring the interplay between one target protein and a potential molecule to act as a therapy is much easier (it's still complex, and there is a little more to it than that, but not anything like finding a good target).
Intelligence Is Not the Main Bottleneck
51–60 of 120 posts
Re: Intelligence Is Not the Main Bottleneck
#52Thats just not true and we see this in medicine and research. An expert in physics still needs to write code in python to do their math and analysis. Its an intelligence issue. That person needs to learn a tool. In medicin you have the modern labs which automate a lot and you have the old labs. These 'neolabs' are better because of intelligence. A doctor doing a diagnosis can say 'no clue' or can give you a proper an…
You sort of side stepped the author's point, though. > In medicine you have the modern labs which automate a lot and you have the old labs. These 'neolabs' are better because of intelligence. The author is not denying that a lab can be more effective with intelligence, they're arguing that this entire phase of the process of improving health is not the bottleneck.
And that, furthermore, the new labs and the old labs still both remain incentivized by the regulatory environment to chase the wrong targets. The new lab might just iterate towards the wrong targets faster.
Re: Intelligence Is Not the Main Bottleneck
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just wanting to cure cancer doesn't mean it would be accomplished - vote or not.
I could build a house. With zero experience you can find a job in house building as they will pay you to learn on the job (depending on the economy you might or might not be able to find such a job today, in good years they will hire anyone who isn't disabled - but there are bad years). Many people who have never had a construction job build their own house (only a tiny %, but that is still a lot of people) I suppose…
Not sure how easy it is to create a connection to the main power grid without the required credentials.
Re: Intelligence Is Not the Main Bottleneck
#54Indeed. Humans and not other apes reached the moon by our great proclivity to long distance running, through our exceptional sweat glands... ah, wait.
How is it possible to live in the world around us and not see, apparent and transparent, that intelligence is the lever on which everything rests? Humans are surprisingly weird animals, but it's not our hairlessness or our fairly average propensity to violence that did this. We don't have more houses than chimpanzees because we're _strong_. We haven't defeated the tolls of disease because we're atypically devoid of restraint. We don't have more effective governance than termites because we're more communal.
Of course intelligence is the main bottleneck. The arguments here are so confused. What do you think regulation is made of? What do you think money buys? What do you think determines how well you can gather data, or how efficiently you can consume it? But of course, as the genre, after spending the first third waxing about how its opposition could be so foolish, the last third is spent finding a pretty insult and wallowing in it, so as to not to leave enough space for the brief argument in the middle to consider such things as why someone might disagree.
Re: Intelligence Is Not the Main Bottleneck
#55I frankly think this writer is missing an even larger point. These are just bottlenecks to making progress in biotech, but rapid innovation in biotech or medical technology is not a goal in and of itself, except for stakeholders in biotech companies. The goal is improved human health, and all the medical technology in the world does not seem to be noticeably improving health outcomes. It certainly has over longer timespans if you compare outcomes of today to pre-antibiotics or pre-indoor plumbing, but improvement has slowed or even regressed in the 21st century.
At least I think so. My health is fine, but as an uninformed non-expert going by popular sentiment, it sures seems like people more generally are fatter than ever, mental health is in the tank, suicide rates are up, 20 year-olds are getting cancer, everyone is autistic and has no attention span, we're all full of plastics and forever chemicals, nobody has sex hormones any more. I'm sure a lot of that is hyperbole and alarmism, but it sure doesn't feel like we're living in a world where medical technology is solving all of our health problems.
Re: Intelligence Is Not the Main Bottleneck
#56I think the guy is right on point at least when it comes to therapies. But he is also missing one major angle: we are no longer in control; our systems are. If we were to vote on the issue, I suspect that a narrow majority would prefer cheaper housing, and a total majority would prefer cancer to be cured. But there's no direct mechanism of any kind to exercise that vote. Not in USA, not in Europe, not in China. When/…
> the guy
> he
Your gender biases are showing!
Re: Intelligence Is Not the Main Bottleneck
#57"He looked at me incredulously. Surely, a smart person like me should know that AI, or better said, AGI will be hyperpersuasive soon – already on a bunch of benchmarks it exceeds professional debaters at persuasion." I'm always tickled by this tic of this kind of person, that human traits are something that we can maximize to infinity. That if we trained a robot to tell jokes, it would eventually tell jokes so funny…
This has been a core belief of the EA/LessWrong/Rationalist people for many years - that above a certain level of intelligence you effectively get hypnotic powers, and people will obey AIs no matter what. So they said you can't keep a superpowered AI airgapped as merely offering a chat interface will immediately take control of the next person to interact with it and they will deliberately compromise the airgapping.
Well, we knew since the "Roko's Basilisk" debacle that they're prone to magical thinking.
Re: Intelligence Is Not the Main Bottleneck
#58Climate change is another big problem that frontier AI labs have handwaved away as being "solvable" by AGI. The premise that a pure superintelligence could hand us a plan to beat climate change that's so good and airtight that A) it would definitely work and B) people would execute it.
But there have been entire books written about the fact that right now we have the technology to drastically curtail climate change and yet they're under utilized because of a complicated and murky set of political, social, and systemic reasons. There are a huge numbers of problems for which very good solution plans have been detailed yet the gap is in execution.
The AGI-pilled must think one of two things; either there's an as-yet-undiscovered plan that's both world-changing yet trivial to implement or we'll all worship at the altar of the machine god with such fervor that even if it spits out a relatively obvious and iterative climate change plan the world will eagerly follow it. Both premises seem laughably unlikely to me.
Re: Intelligence Is Not the Main Bottleneck
#59I think the idea that "regulation is the bottleneck" is at least as pernicious as the idea that "intelligence is the bottle".
US health care is well known to be an ongoing disaster for US health care end-users however many new health care products US companies produce. The overall situation is that final good health outcomes currently and in the near future require humans involved and moreover, caring human attention involved - among other things because human health involves many, many "outliers" and many, many connections between social, biological, psychological and individual factors.
The US both an entrepreneurial "try things out" approach and a vast spider web of regulations. Why? Because if it didn't have that people would be dying at a faster rate, in droves. Occasionally, even with this, really bad stuff comes through (see opioid epidemic etc).
There currently isn't a way out of this since the entrepreneurial needs to cheapen humans and get humans out of the loop. Again, that produces mediocre factory health care for maybe cheaper if you're lucky and careful. And again, f-- kills people if no one looks (Theorno etc).
The think is, it's more plausible that some level of intelligence could get a handle on the multifaceted needs that are actually involved in actual human health care. The problem is that it seems likely that experiments using inadequate tools are likely to harm many people before that happens.
Re: Intelligence Is Not the Main Bottleneck
#60In my work, I have always found that the main "blocker" (I hesitate to use the term "bottleneck"), is human nature. If we design stuff to be used by humans (what I generally do), then it's imperative to take basic human nature into account, and that can be incredibly annoying. Annoying, or not, human nature is a major factor, and won't go away, no matter how many times we tap our heels together. I think it was Philip…
I would go further and say that the human should be the bottleneck/blocker. If not designed for and to serve humans, which means to have human in the position of power and control and take in account all the various human oddities, why are we building all of this?
> why are we building all of this?
To remove humans from power in all cases where our biases and animalistic nature would cause unnecessary suffering to others. As a species we are quickly approaching some very hard problems that no individual, or even small group, is capable of handling in a consistently rational manner. On our current trajectory of resource constraints and habitability constrictions, ethics by the numbers is inevitable.
We are either going to leave it to the powerful to sacrifice those they consider undesirable, as we have throughout history, or replace them with something not afflicted by the flawed elements of human nature to make the most compassionate decision possible amidst the horror.