The positive impact on human aging/lifespan/healthspan is not being talked about enough when it comes to AI+biosciences.
Watch AI materials-science and bioscience abilities closely
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Re: Watch AI materials-science and bioscience abilities closely
#22Has anyone in the rationalist, doomer community actually seriously engaged the real biology/virology of a “virus that wipes out humanity”? Playing Plague Inc doesn’t count. I mean, we’re talking about real physical things, not first principles thought experiments here. Thus, they have limits imposed by physics and biology. Limits on transmission rate, lethality, particle size, evolutionary change rates, and so on. Al…
But a virus's "goal" would not be to wipe out a species, that would be a dead end. Nature has explored flight on an unimaginable scale, yet our machines fly better (at least in most aspects) than birds, some even go to space.
Biology is very messy and very data constrained. We think that human anatomy works one way- but surgery and radiology are hard because every human is very different.
Missing organs, odd tissue performing unclear functions, different, new or missing muscles.
It’s unclear whether a world ending virus is even possible. There might be better luck with prions, or fungi.
Re: Watch AI materials-science and bioscience abilities closely
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hah, well, you must have never encountered LessWrong before. It has been like that for well over a decade, in fact it's probably approaching its second decade... One thing you've got to give them credit for is that they've been talking about AI -- about the present moment, really -- from the beginning. Nick Bostrom, who wrote "Superintelligence" about ten years ago, has always been in their orbit.
He’s right though, this post says nothing non-obvious. It boils down to “AIs that can do some difficult things might be able to do other difficult things. Also: Danger!”. There isn’t enough here for it to be interesting.
is the horsepower behind ai speculation less than, greater than or equal to human speculation? seems they’re recursively related, though human speculation has more torque since it occurs naturally or at least as spontaneously as it takes for an epiphany instance to occur.
and then transposed into an ai chat prompt to get the analytical momentum for some grand scheme that gets published to whatever extent ie a comment, blog post, or whatever textual content that then gets ingested as training data…llm rinse repeat. not sure where this is going. is anyone?
Re: Watch AI materials-science and bioscience abilities closely
#24Not only do we have to live with endless LLM slop now, it seems we also need to accept an endless sequence of 2-cent philosophical blog posts where people describe the "world with AI" based on two minutes of meandering thought.
Hah, well, you must have never encountered LessWrong before. It has been like that for well over a decade, in fact it's probably approaching its second decade... One thing you've got to give them credit for is that they've been talking about AI -- about the present moment, really -- from the beginning. Nick Bostrom, who wrote "Superintelligence" about ten years ago, has always been in their orbit.
It started in 2006, although it didn’t have its own site until 2010-ish.
I’m not sure it will ever be given its dues for its prescience. The whole rationality project was started with the explicit aim of upgrading participants’ reasoning abilities so that when AI came along for real, there would be people capable of thinking it through without making all the usual mistakes humans make when trying to reason about things.
In the discussions I read today, everyone involved from commenters up to CEOs are making all and exactly those mistakes, meaning it is in my opinion perhaps the greatest called shot of all time.
Re: Watch AI materials-science and bioscience abilities closely
#25if you can do the worst “bad” thing possible, you can also do the best “good” thing possible and then what? was the needle move at all?
Suppose it matters what order you do it in.
The best good thing possible for humans who are all suffering from an extremely painful, incurable disease might just be ending that misery.
The worst bad thing possible in a perfect utopia might be a minor inconvenience comparatively.
Re: Watch AI materials-science and bioscience abilities closely
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
But a virus's "goal" would not be to wipe out a species, that would be a dead end. Nature has explored flight on an unimaginable scale, yet our machines fly better (at least in most aspects) than birds, some even go to space.
I doubt our flying machines are anywhere near as energy efficient as birds. Our flying machines combust jet fuel, birds can fly by ATP. Not to mention earth-destructing. And going into space is pointless why would any animal ever develop such a facility :)
> I doubt our flying machines are anywhere near as energy efficient as birds
This kind of nerd sniped me, so I looked into it and turns out no, planes are more efficient than birds!
You have to look at the energy spent for moving a fixed mass over a fixed distance and for the most efficient birds I looked into, that’s about 300g of fat burned for 300g of “dry weight” for a trip of ~11,000km. (bar-tailed godwits)
For a plane that’s roughly 80 tonnes of kerosene for 170 tonnes dry weight on a similar distance (787). Energy density of fat and kerosene are actually pretty close so you can just look at the kg of fuel burned per kg of payload for the trip. For a bird that’s 1kg of fuel per kg transported and for the plane that’s ~0.5kg per kg. So roughly twice as efficient.
So from a pure energy point of view it’d be more efficient to put all the migratory birds in a 787 than letting them fly on their own!
Re: Watch AI materials-science and bioscience abilities closely
#27Is the term "One-shotting" here even appropriate? In the context of AI one-shotting means giving your llm a single prompt and having it return a surprisingly good result (usually code related) without requiring further input, but the llm (probably) still iterates heavily before showing the results. When Codex "one-shots" something it depends a ton on the fact that code is easily testable.
Re: Watch AI materials-science and bioscience abilities closely
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
I doubt our flying machines are anywhere near as energy efficient as birds. Our flying machines combust jet fuel, birds can fly by ATP. Not to mention earth-destructing. And going into space is pointless why would any animal ever develop such a facility :)
> I doubt our flying machines are anywhere near as energy efficient as birds This kind of nerd sniped me, so I looked into it and turns out no, planes are more efficient than birds! You have to look at the energy spent for moving a fixed mass over a fixed distance and for the most efficient birds I looked into, that’s about 300g of fat burned for 300g of “dry weight” for a trip of ~11,000km. (bar-tailed godwits) For…
Fascinating! Though how much of that would be due to a birds baseline metabolism? Wouldn’t be a fair comparison if that includes the birds basic energy costs of living.
Re: Watch AI materials-science and bioscience abilities closely
#29Has anyone in the rationalist, doomer community actually seriously engaged the real biology/virology of a “virus that wipes out humanity”? Playing Plague Inc doesn’t count. I mean, we’re talking about real physical things, not first principles thought experiments here. Thus, they have limits imposed by physics and biology. Limits on transmission rate, lethality, particle size, evolutionary change rates, and so on. Al…
An AI doesn't need to kill even nearly 100% of humanity in order to render us a non-threat.
Also there are plenty of doomer scenarios along the lines of e.g. some ethnosupremacist cult making a virus that kills everyone outside of their group.
Re: Watch AI materials-science and bioscience abilities closely
#30You can use AI to brute-force different crystal configurations, run some MD/DFT and identify candidates. I'd be (not completely, but) shocked if there wasn't a research group doing this already. To rapidly iterate with physical samples is still beyond our capabilities AFAIK.