I just published a post on Drexler’s MSEP software that is relevant to whether people should donate to his project.
PeterMcCluskey
Karma: 3,896
Drexler’s Nanotech Software
two more organizations that seem worthy of consideration
Investing in Eon Systems looks much more promising than donating to Carbon Copies.
I see maybe a 3% chance that they’ll succeed at WBE soon enough to provide help with AI x-risk.
The Invention of Lying provides a mostly accurate portrayal of a world where everyone is honest. It feels fairly Hansonian.
No, I don’t recall any ethical concerns. Just basic concerns such as the difficulty of finding a boss that I’m comfortable with, having control over my hours, etc.
Oura also has heart rate and VO2 max tracking. Does anyone know of problems with Oura’s data?
The primary motive for funding NASA was definitely related to competing with the USSR, but I doubt that it was heavily focused on military applications. It was more along the lines of demonstrating the general superiority of the US system, in order to get neutral countries to side with us because we were on track to win the cold war.
AI Prejudices: Practical Implications
Manifold estimates an 81% chance of ASI by 2036, using a definition that looks fairly weak and subjective to me.
I’ve bid the brain emulation market back up a bit.
Brain emulation looks closer than your summary table indicates.
Manifold estimates a 48% chance by 2039.
Eon Systems is hiring for work on brain emulation.
Peak Human Capital
We can only value lives at $10 million when we have limited opportunities to make that trade, or we’d go bankrupt.
I’m suspicious of the implication that we have many such opportunities. But a quick check suggests says it’s very dependent on guesses as to how many lives are saved be treatments.
I did a crude check for lives saved by cancer treatments. Optimistic estimates suggest that lives are being saved at less than $1 million per life. Robin Hanson’s writings have implied that the average medical treatments is orders of magnitude less effective than that.
Book review: On the Edge
Could last year’s revamping of OpenAI’s board have been influenced by government pressure to accept some government-approved board members? Nakasone’s appointment is looking more interesting after reading this post.
Soaking seeds overnight seems to be a good way to reduce phytic acid.
oral probiotics in general might just all be temporary.
The solution to concerns about it being temporary is to take them daily. I take Seed Daily Synbiotic. My gut is probably better as a result, but I don’t have evidence that is at all rigorous.
The beginning of this comment is how Lintern expands on that claim. But it sounds like you have an objection that isn’t well addressed there.
If cancer merely involved one bad feature, I could imagine software analogies that involved a large variety of mistakes producing that one bad feature.
The hallmarks of cancer indicate that all cancers have a number of bad features in common that look sufficiently unrelated to each other that it seems hard to imagine large sets of unrelated mutations all producing those same hallmarks. Lintern lists many other features that could be considered additional hallmarks.
When I try to imagine software problems that seem analogous to cancer, I come up with problems such as spam where there’s an optimizer that’s generating the problems.
I’m unclear whether you’re imagining software problems that I haven’t thought of, or whether you’re modeling cancer differently from me.
Maybe? It doesn’t seem very common for infectious diseases to remain in one area. It depends a lot on how they are transmitted. It’s also not unusual for a non-infectious disease to have significant geographical patterns. There are cancers which are concentrated in particular areas, but there seem to be guesses for those patterns that don’t depend on fungal infections.
Thanks. You’ve convinced me that Lintern overstates the evidence of mutation-free cancer cells.
My guess is that ASI will be faster to adapt to novel weapons and military strategies. Nanotech is likely to speed up the rate at which new weapons are designed and fabricated.
Imagine a world in which a rogue AI can replicate a billion drones, of a somewhat novel design, in a week or so. Existing human institutions aren’t likely to adapt fast enough to react competently to that.