That’s a lot of Substack reading! Substack is definitely my favorite online forum of all time — except for the Extropy email list in the 1990s.

Highlights

☕ I read the most in the morning

💌 I subscribed to 14 new Substacks

📽️ I watched 7 minutes of video

❤️ I liked 234 posts

💬 I left 175 comments on posts

📜 I scrolled 5 meters in Notes

🕵️ I discovered 4 new posts via Notes

Top Substacks

The Honest Broker by

Making sense of science, policy and politics

Top post this summer: Climate Science is About to Make a Huge Mistake

Faster, Please! by

Discovering, creating, and inventing a better world through technological innovation, economic growth, and pro-progress culture.

Top post this summer: ✨⚡ A thermodynamic miracle: Compute and energy are key to humanity's continued evolution

Doomberg by

Energy, finance, and the economy at-large | Enter your email address below to receive free previews of new articles | Click through to our About page for pricing and FAQ.

Top post this summer: No, Solar Isn’t Cheap

Share your own Summer Recap

You can see your own summer recap in the Substack app. I’d love to see what you’ve been reading.

Get my Recap

Photo by Maxime VALCARCE on Unsplash

Instead of a really long compilation post on several topics, I’m going to try more succinct compilations on specific topics. This one is on AI. If you’re read my previous posts, you know that I’m concerned about bad regulation of AI. Let’s not kill AI as we’ve killed or seriously maimed nuclear power, supersonic flight, and genetic engineering.

Rise of the AI Doomsday Cult

Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the AI

Daniel reinforces the point I emphasize – and that forms part of the Proactionary Principle – that we cannot iron out all the kinks in new technologies or productive processes before using them. We have to fix flaws as they develop. If you’re short on time, you can skip to the section, “Fixing Problems Outside of Fantasy Land and Finding Uses Too”.

Daniel refers to the following piece by Dan Shipper, which is the result of many hours of studying the writing and speaking of Eliezer Yudkowsky:

AI Doomsday For People Who Don’t (Yet) Wear Fedoras

The Taxman Will Eventually Come for AI, Too

Tyler Cowen: Autonomous AI agents do not enjoy leisure as humans do, so should we tax their labor at a higher rate?

One interesting question about the development of AI is whether we should tax it, or tax the corporations that create it. In this piece, economist Tyler Cowen starts off with the assumption that we tax AI labor and explores some of the issues that arise. These include the issue of “tax arbitrage” which Cowen says becomes more difficult the more closely AI is aligned with human objectives.

Rapid AI takeoff and secret sauce

Andy McKenzie shares my view that it is not at all obvious that as soon as we can build artificial general intelligence (AGI) it will rapidly become superhumanly intelligent.

In the absence of some sort of "secret sauce", which seems necessary for sharp left turns and other such scenarios, I view AI capabilities growth as likely to follow the same trends as other historical growth trends. In the case of a hypothetical AI at a human intelligence level, it would face constraints on its resources allowing it to improve, such as bandwidth, capital, skills, private knowledge, energy, space, robotic manipulation capabilities, material inputs, cooling requirements, legal and regulatory barriers, social acceptance, cybersecurity concerns, competition with humans and other AIs, and of course value maintenance concerns (i.e. it would have its own alignment problem to solve). 

FOOM liability

“Foom” is shorthand for AI that rapidly improves itself, acquires agency, and causes humans havoc. Roan Hanson says: “We want policies that will give big benefits if foom risk is high, but impose low costs if foom risk is low. In that spirit, let me suggest as a compromise a particular apparently-robust policy for dealing with AI foom risk.”

Do we need a World Congress to govern AI?

Sounds like an idea for when you have no ideas

James Pethokoukis responds to a Wall Street Journal article in which Peggy Noonan “ breezily promoted the following idea for AI-ML global governance.”

Some Glimpse AGI in ChatGPT. Others Call It a Mirage

Will Knight asks: “Are LLMs an early form of AGI? Not unless you seriously weaken the definition of term.”

We Need To Talk About Deep Delving

A clever and amusing dialogue about that definitely, absolutely has nothing to do with ChatGPT and its cousins.

Attention is all you need to understand

Jon Evans is “setting myself the task of explaining transformer “attention” in plain English … with no math, no code ... and no diagrams at all. Just words.”

More problems for the pause/regulate AI people who dismiss the “what about China?” point (and this was in 2018):

Last July, China unveiled plans to become the world’s dominant power in all aspects of artificial intelligence, military and otherwise, by 2030. The U.S. now finds itself in an escalating AI arms race. Over the past two years, China has announced AI achievements that some U.S. officials fear could eclipse their own progress, at least in some military applications. “This is our Sputnik moment,” said Robert Work, the former deputy secretary of defense who oversaw the Pentagon’s move into the new field.

But the Chinese military has moved to copy the Pentagon’s model. Two years ago, the PLA elevated and reorganized its science and technology branch, aiming to turn it into a “Darpa with Chinese characteristics,” according to Tai Ming Cheung, an expert on the Chinese military at the University of California, San Diego. The Chinese government is also building national laboratories in the mold of America’s famed Los Alamos, and because of its deep involvement in industry at every level, Beijing can achieve more integration between military and civilian AI investments.

AND:

Why China has an Edge on Artificial Intelligence

The economic promise of ChatGPT and GenAI as a general purpose technology

From James Pethokoukis:

“We now have several early, early studies suggesting a significant productivity impact of large language models on worker productivity:

• In an experiment with ChatGPT, it took grant writers, data analysts, and human-resource professionals 10 minutes less — a 40 percent time savings — to churn out news releases, short reports, and emails. And the quality was higher, according to MIT economists.

• Another AI tool is Copilot, which helps developers solve coding problems in natural language. GitHub tested 95 developers with and without Copilot on a coding task. The ones who used Copilot completed the task faster (71 minutes vs. 161 minutes) and more accurately (78 percent vs. 70 percent). These results show how AI tools can improve worker productivity.

• In the just posted NBER working paper “Generative AI at Work,” researchers Erik Brynjolfsson, Danielle Li, and Lindsey R. Raymond looked at the impact of an LLM-based chat assistant — built on an OpenAI used by 5,000 customers service agents working for a Fortune 500 software company that provides business process software. What’s super interesting here is that this study looks at the productivity impact of generative AI deployed in a real-world workplace. Here’s the headline finding:

AI assistance increases worker productivity, resulting in a 13.8 percent increase in the number of chats that an agent can successfully resolve per hour. This increase reflects shifts in three components of productivity: a decline in the time it takes for an agent to handle an individual chat, an increase in the number of chats that an agent can handle per hour (agents may handle multiple calls at once), and a small increase in the share of chats that are successfully resolved.”

Just Running ChatGPT is Costing OpenAI a Staggering Sum Every Day

Expect more charges for using it.

CEO of OpenAI Says Making Models Bigger is Already Played Out

OpenAI has not told us GPT-4’s exact size and we don’t know if it has more or fewer parameters than the 175 billion of the previous version. OpenAI in a technical report says that increases in the number of parameters may be yielding diminishing returns. LLM progress may slow way down, possibly even stop. A different approach will become prominent but who knows when.

Of the focus on the parameter count, OpenAI’s CEO says: “This reminds me a lot of the gigahertz race in chips in the 1990s and 2000s, where everybody was trying to point to a big number.” He added: “What we want to deliver to the world is the most capable and useful and safe models. We are not here to jerk ourselves off about parameter count.”

AI developers must ‘learn to dance with shackles on’ as China makes new rules in a post-ChatGPT world

AI aligned with Chinese socialist values? Yikes.

Growing Biostasis

The first posting from The Biostasis Standard, by Biostasis Technologies.

My first column on the blog for my job. I delve into the resistance in our culture to cryonics and how we might better communicate the idea.

Getting Better

Mortality in the past: every second child died

The chances that a newborn survives childhood have increased from 50% to 96% globally.

For all of recorded history until recently, child mortality was around 50%. This started to change rapidly in some places in the 19^th century. France 1816-1900: 44%. Poland 1875: 55%. In 1950, the global mortality rate was down to 27%. In 2020, the global child mortality rate was 4.2%. (Somalia was the highest at 14%. Iceland, Finland, Japan, and Slovenia the lowest at 0.3%.) Progress did not happen on its own. After failing to improve the situations for millennia, our economy shifted to capitalism and finally made massive progress.

America is great, but it can be better

Faster, Please!

↗ America is great, but it can be better

“We are a better society with a lot of room to go — but we are a better society.”- Warren Buffett in 2020 The Essay ↗ America is great, but it can be better Look, America is no utopia, but even during the worst of the pandemic or during the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol, hyperbolic claims that the United States was a “failed state” were utterly absurd. They remind me of somewhat less outrageous, yet still incorrect, arguments that American living standards have gone nowhere for a half century. There’s a lot of truth in this brief…

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3 years ago · 9 likes · James Pethokoukis

James Pethokoukis examines a recent feature in The Economist which shows that, contrary to the impression often conveyed, the USA has continued to outperform the world economically. It’s remarkable that, based on exchange rates,, America’s $25.5 trillion in GDP last year represented 25% of the world’s total—about the same share as it had in 1990.

“More astonishing, and less appreciated, than its ability to hold its place in the world as a whole is the extent to which America has extended its dominance over its developed peers. In 1990 America accounted for 40% of the nominal GDP of the G7. Today it accounts for 58%.”

“Income per person in America was 24% higher than in western Europe in 1990 in PPP terms; today it is about 30% higher. It was 17% higher than in Japan in 1990; today it is 54% higher. Median wages have grown almost as much as mean wages. A trucker in Oklahoma can earn more than a doctor in Portugal. The consumption gap is even starker. Britons, some of Europe’s best-off inhabitants, spent 80% as much as Americans in 1990. By 2021 that was down to 69%.”

In my view, although the USA continues to do well relative to the world, we could be growing much faster (as could other countries) if only we greatly reduces the massive, stifling weight of central government – taxes, regulations, and bureaucracy. This dead weight drags down economic activity and opportunity. It has accumulated year-by-year so that, like the proverbial slow-boiling frog, most of aren’t even aware of the burden.

After 96 Years, TV Abundance Continues to Flourish

Gale Winds

After 96 Years, TV Abundance Continues to Flourish

The first successful transmission of an all electronic television signal occurred on September 7, 1927 in the laboratory of Philo T. Farnsworth in San Francisco, California. The idea came to him at 14 when he was plowing fields with horses. As Phil Savenick…

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3 years ago · 1 like · 3 comments · Gale Pooley

The time price (hours worked for a TV) has come down 97% since the first few thousand were sold in 1939-41.

AI risk & benefits

ChatGPT’s ‘iPhone Moment’ Poses a New Threat to Google

“In a nutshell, it is going from merely generating text to taking action on the web, turning it into the type of powerful virtual assistant that Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Apple Inc. have been trying to build for years… ChatGPT’s plugins allow businesses to essentially plug the tool into their own systems so that it can do things like search proprietary datasets or even carry out tasks like booking a restaurant, or writing and executing code.”

“One of the reasons for the rush is that as more people use ChatGTP and come up against errors about specific issues, organizations can prevent the tool from “hallucinating” about their work by plugging the tool into their own data.

Some have described ChatGPT’s plugins as the tool’s “iPhone moment,” i.e., the milestone when Apple first allowed third-party app developers to build for the iPhone, sparking the device’s explosive popularity.”

Introducing BloombergGPT, Bloomberg’s 50-billion parameter large language model, purpose-built from scratch for finance

BloombergGPT outperforms similarly-sized open models on financial NLP tasks by significant margins — without sacrificing performance on general LLM benchmarks

AGI Doomerism - the idea that a superintelligence might annihilate humans - is wrong.

Aaron Stupple writes: “However, there is a devastating critique of the AGI Doomer position, and it derives from epistemology–from understanding how knowledge and intelligence work–not from bare predictions about the future. Even if the AGI Doomers’ worst nightmare comes to pass and we find ourselves in the presence of a genuine superintelligence, it won’t be a death knell for humans. Here’s a brief survey of why.” Stupple makes a highly important point, pithily put as: “Something can’t be both super smart and super dumb.”

Why I am Not An AI Doomer

Sarah Constantin disputes the premise that “Current progress in machine learning performance indicates substantial steps towards the kind of “intelligence” that drastically reshapes the world in pursuit of goals (and is therefore an existential threat.)” She believes “that the kind of AGI that would be an existential threat is very hard to create (though possible-in-principle).”

On AutoGPT

To what extent does GPT act as an agent?

Chuck Schumer's Hasty Plan To Regulate Artificial Intelligence Is a Really Bad Idea

From Ron Bailey’s article:

"Is new AI-specific regulation necessary?" asks UCLA electrical engineer John Villasenor. Not so fast. He points out that “many of the potentially problematic outcomes from AI systems are already addressed by existing frameworks.” The Fair Housing Act would apply to an A.I. algorithm that yields racially discriminatory loan decisions. Product liability law would cover driverless car A.I. software. In addition, regulations adopted at the early stage of a technology's development will quickly be outdated and very hard to update later, e.g., agricultural biotech regulation. And new regulations always come with unintended consequences, notes Villasenor, who points to how regulations supposedly aimed at sex trafficking ended up endangering sex workers.

Improved Intelligence yields Improved Morality

In this concise piece from a few years ago, my good friend Peter Voss argues: “What I want to explore here is why better intelligence is likely to foster more moral behavior.”

The Most Dangerous, Surprising, and Downright Annoying Ways AI Is Hurting Us

“We asked specialists in the field how it might all go horribly wrong—from AI takeovers of autonomous weapons to unscrupulous chatbots.” I can hear the editors: “Okay, reporters. Let’s continue to distort people’s perception of the world in a negative direction by asking experts to tell us only their speculations on AI risks. Whatever you do, don’t ask about benefits. We have to scare people to keep readers!”

What self-driving cars should teach us about generative AI

Much scary AI writing is based on the assumption that AI will advance incredibly quickly, at a rate beyond our ability to adapt. These projections – at their most extreme in Singularity scenarios – typically ignore real world constraints, such as cultural momentum, organizational capital, time required to adapt to new technologies, regulations, and so on. Another issue often glossed over is the difficulty in getting from “pretty good” to “good enough to deploy”. Self-driving cars are a good example. Automation is graded from Level 0 to Level 5 (full driving automation). Tesla says its system is Level 2. Level 2 to Level 5 is a long distance. When we require a technology to be of a high level of safety and reliability, getting an impressive system to a reliably practically perfect system can be extremely difficult. In 2016, Lyft CEO John Zimmer predicted self-driving would “all but end” car ownership by 2025. It’s not even clear that autonomous vehicles higher than Level 3 are worth the effort, technologically and in terms of profitability. We often overestimate what technology can do in the short term while underestimating what it can do in the long term.

Climate and energy

The 97% consensus lie

David Friedman’s Substack

A Climate Falsehood You Can Check for Yourself

Most of the information relevant to arguments about climate, as about many other things, is obtained at second, third, or fourth hand, with the result that what you believe depends largely on what sources of information you trust. People on either side of an argument can honestly believe that the evidence strongly supports their view since they trust di…

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3 years ago · 16 likes · 14 comments · David Friedman

For years, I’ve been frustrated by the endless refrain about a supposed 97% consensus among climate scientists to the effect that humans are causing most of the modest warming we have seen over the past decades. Having read other critical examinations of the paper by Cook – one of the two papers responsible for the lie – I didn’t learn anything new from David Friedman’s article. But he explains the problems with the study very clearly and shows how anyone can check the details themselves.

There is quite likely majority (but not overwhelming) agreement that (1) warming has been taking place; (2) humans are causing some of it. But there is no demonstrated consensus that (3) humans are the primary or only cause. People often go even far beyond this, claiming as consensus (4) global warming is accelerating; (5) warming will cause massive problems; and (6) we must completely change our energy systems, ways of living, and forms of governance to “save the planet”. Friedman’s piece beautifully demonstrates the falsity of the parroted claims about consensus.

Life after Climate Change

Bjorn Lomborg shows that it’s “better than you think.” He writes: “Some 60 percent of people living in the rich world think it is likely to bring an end to humanity. This is not only untrue; it is also harmful, because fear makes people embrace bad policies and ignore many other urgent challenges facing the world…” He provides eight charts “that I think more people should see, to understand that the climate-change data are very different from what we hear in the commonplace narrative.” The charts look at hurricanes: not getting stronger, heat and cold, polar bears, fire, not what matters for nutrition, fewer deaths from climate, renewables since 1800: Not going net-zero, cost of going net-zero.

More than enough federal agencies

“When people say the U.S. government lacks enough “state capacity” to address important things, I send them this list of 434 federal agencies and ask them to tell me what’s not already covered before we add still more to our $31 TRILLION debt.”

Study: Shutting down nuclear power could increase air pollution

50 million dollar hairline crack

Jack Devanney has an excellent blog on nuclear power. He examines the technical and economic issues, points out the errors in communication by many proponents, and shows how the cost of nuclear is several times as high as it should be. In this entry, he adds to the latter point by looking at how the NRC reacted to a harmless hairline crack in one power station by shutting down 23 nuclear power plants (where no cracks were found). This type of excessive regulation of nuclear is standard and has held back this power source.

Fossil Future: The Time for Optimism is Now - EP 42 - Alex Epstein & Peter Thiel

On April 16, 2022, to celebrate the launch of Fossil Future, Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus VR and Anduril, hosted Alex Epstein and Peter Thiel for a wide-ranging discussion about the future of energy. Chris Williamson, host of the Modern Wisdom podcast, moderated, and Palmer and Alex had a follow-up discussion after the event focused on energy and national security

Testing IPCC Projections Against What Happened

David Friedman’s Substack

Testing IPCC Projections Against What Happened

Arguments for or against doing things to slow climate change depend on what will happen if we don’t, a question the IPCC reports try to answer. That makes it important to know how reliable their predictions are. The scientific section of the latest report (IPCC AR6 WGI) runs to almost four thousand pages, largely of detailed analysis, depending on multi…

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3 years ago · 12 likes · 7 comments · David Friedman

How accurate are the IPCC’s predictions? “The solution is to test the model against data that not used in creating it.” “When I did the calculations in 2014 I found that the IPCC had predicted high four times out of four, twice by enough so that actual warming was below the bottom of the predicted range. That looked like evidence that we should not put much weight on their predictions of future temperature.” What’s going on here? How is good climate news getting translated into bad climate news? Roger Pielke investigates. One point that stands out is that “the NGFS went from using a median estimate of losses to an extreme estimate.”

Questionable Climate Scenarios for Central Bankers

The Honest Broker by Roger Pielke Jr.

Questionable Climate Scenarios for Central Bankers

The Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS) might just be the most important global finance institution that most people have never heard of. The NGFS is an organization comprised of the world’s leading central, representing most of the world’s GDP. The NGFS states that its aim is to…

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4 years ago · 20 likes · 8 comments · Roger Pielke Jr.

The Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS) provides climate scenarios for use by central banks and others to evaluate the risks that they face from climate change and also the risks (and benefits) associated with policy responses to climate change. They have revised down the projected carbon emissions to stay in alignment with reduced IPCC expectations (in their business as usual scenario), but projected damages have been revised drastically upward. “The result is that as our view of our collective climate future has become more optimistic, based on more realistic and scientifically grounded scenarios of the future, the picture painted of that future by the NGFS has become increasingly bleak.”

A Climate Science Textbook

David Friedman looks at Introduction to Modern Climate Change by Andrew Dessler and finds vastly exaggerated claims about the impact of sea level rise. He shows that the claim is unsupportable (you can follow his analysis) and asks why it is that a widely used textbook has never been corrected in the ten years since the first edition. Dessler also gets temperature-related deaths wrong claiming, contrary to all other studies, that heat is killing more people than cold in the USA. Furthermore, “Chapter 9 of Dessler’s book, which deals with consequences of climate change, does not mention a single positive consequence.”

When You Cannot Trust the Experts

How does one explore a complicated issue – like Covid, population concerns, or climate – when you believe that many of the experts are biased and you do not know which are not? 

Climate Change Causes Home Runs

What we can learn from making everything about climate

Health, Resources, Environment

WHO announces drop in malaria infections, deaths after vaccine rollout

Cases of children hospitalization and deaths due to malaria have reduced significantly over the past three years in Kenya, thanks to the rollout of the world’s first malaria RTS,S vaccine

First cheetah cubs born in India since extinction 70 years ago

India has welcomed the birth of four cheetah cubs - more than 70 years after the animals were declared officially extinct there.

New nanoparticles can perform gene editing in the lungs

Using these RNA-delivery particles, researchers hope to develop new treatments for cystic fibrosis and other lung diseases.

The ‘King Kong’ of Weight-Loss Drugs Is Coming

How AI startups are fully automating drug discovery

The average time taken to develop a drug is over 12 years and often far longer, and costs over $1bn. Nine out of ten drugs developed fail to win regulatory approval — and many drug candidates never move from “bench to bedside”, with only around 500 of the thousands of diseases in existence having an approved treatment.

Six Future Technologies That Will Change Your Health

Do-it-yourself ultrasounds. Devices to help you sleep. Medical experts weigh in on advances they see coming for health and wellness.

Sugar-powered implant produces insulin as needed

It could revolutionize diabetes management.

Space

Space could be a trillion dollar industry by 2040

Other enlightening pieces (knowledge/progress/change)

Science is a strong-link problem

Experimental History

Science is a strong-link problem

There are two kinds of problems in the world: strong-link problems and weak-link problems. Weak-link problems are problems where the overall quality depends on how good the worst stuff is. You fix weak-link problems by making the weakest links stronger, or by eliminating them entirely…

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3 years ago · 209 likes · 35 comments · Adam Mastroianni

The difference between weak link problems and strong link problems. Science is a strong link problem but people treat it as a weak link problem.

Additional thoughts:

A Model of Quality Control in Strong Link Science

Maxwell Tabarrok applies the weak/strong link distinction to look at the problems with peer review.

Do we get better or worse at adapting to change?

Over at The Roots of Progress, Jason Crawford argues that we get better at adapting to change and that adaptation is not a fixed pace.

News

Study: Around the World, Internet Use Linked to Greater Well-Being

Research links internet use to global well-being. In a new paper, researchers from Tilburg University and the University of Oxford look at how internet access and use are linked to well-being in countries around the world. Overall, their results showed that across eight well-being outcomes, "individuals who had access to, or actively used the internet reported meaningfully greater well-being than those who did not," the authors wrote.

The amazing effects of deregulating American beer

Enjoying experimenting with the vast number of craft beers? Thank deregulation.

Harvard geneticists create an organism that is immune to all viruses

Researchers at George Chuch’s Harvard lab have genetically engineered a bacteria, E. coli, to be totally immune to viruses.

“Unprecedented” coral disease relief

Notes on Progress: Artificial flavoring

Virginia Postrel asks: “Artificial” didn’t scare Americans in the 19th century. Why does it scare us now?

Prolific blogger Zvi Mowshowitz says:

Max More comes out against both the FHI Letter and the EY proposal, employing “relatively sensible and lengthy versions of many independent anti-doom arguments and we-can’t-do-anything-about-it-anyway arguments - nothing I haven’t seen elsewhere, but well said.” His post contains (another) long commentary on AI risk.

2023 AI Index Report

Measuring Trends in Artificial Intelligence

Top takeaways:

• Industry races ahead of academia.

• Performance saturation on traditional benchmarks.

• AI is both helping and harming the environment.

• The world’s best new scientist… AI?

• The number of incidents concerning the misuse of AI is rapidly rising.

• The demand for AI-related professional skills is increasing across virtually every American industrial sector.

• For the first time in the last decade, year-over-year private investment in AI decreased.

• While the proportion of companies adopting AI has plateaued, the companies that have adopted AI continue to pull ahead.

• Policymaker interest in AI is on the rise.

• Chinese citizens are among those who feel the most positively about AI products and services. Americans … not so much.

I’m especially interested in chapter 2 on technical performance, and the ninth section on AI for science. This looks at accelerating fusion science through learned plasma control; discovering novel algorithms for matrix manipulation with alpha tensor; designing arithmetic circuits with deep reinforcement learning; and unlocking de nova antibody design with generative AI.

Artificial intelligence has advanced despite having few resources dedicated to its development – now investments have increased substantially

https://ourworldindata.org/ai-investments

See charts showing the growth in AI investment and the supply of AI research and researchers.

An Equilibrium Perspective on AI

People always respond. Take that seriously.

Normal responses vs. bombing data centers.

It’s not uncommon to come across the assertion that only AI experts should have an opinion about the future of AI and the safety issues surrounding it. That’s a foolish idea that ignores all the ways in which AI is and will be used and integrated into our economies. Brian Albrecht says that when considering the impact of AI on humanity's future, it's important to take equilibrium and feedback seriously.

AI doesn’t just happen. People and policy respond, creating dampening feedback mechanisms to counter the escalating feedback. We hear a lot about the escalating factors and much less about the dampening factors such as companies responding to concerns to protect their reputation and market capitalization. The environmental doomsayers of the 1960s and 1970s were wrong because they ignored feedback mechanisms. Much of this echoes what I argued with Ray Kurzweil at Extro-5 in 2001 and in our online debate about the Singularity.

Debate: Artificial Intelligence Should Be Regulated

Is an A.I. "foom" even possible?

Ronald Bailey and Robin Hanson

https://reason.com/2023/04/02/proposition-artificial-intelligence-should-be-regulated

Describing this as a debate is misleading. Ronald and Robin are talking about two different things. Ronald warns us not to trust governments with A.I. facial recognition Technology while Robin presents four arguments that suggest we don't have good reasons to regulate A.I.s more now than similar human beings.

AI getting cheaper and more accessible

Many arguments in favor of regulating AI explicitly assume that there will be only a few parties to regulate because of the tremendous expense and difficulty of building and training large language models like ChatGPT. This assumes that all future AI systems will be LLMs. But the scarcity assumption is already looking implausible, as shown in these two pieces:

Let’s BLOOM with BigScience’s New AI Model | by Heiko Hotz | Towards Data Science

With these Int8 weights we can run large models that previously wouldn’t fit into our GPUs.

ChatGPT on your PC? Meta unveils new AI model that can run on a single GPU

The only way out of the AI dilemma

I’m happy to see eminent SF writer David Brin disputing the AI doomers and putting matters in perspective. As he sensibly writes, we tackle the AI challenge the same general way we have successfully tackled other challenges of power: “...by breaking up power into reciprocally competing units and inciting that competition to be positive sum.”

The risk of slowing down AI progress

James Pethokoukis  on the enormous opportunity costs of slowing down AI. I recommend his blog, Faster, Please! to who wants to support the continuation of progress in the face of the forces of stagnation.

No to the AI pause

Another good piece by James Pethokoukis who wonders “how the past three years might’ve gone differently if in the late 2010s there had been on “pause” on research into a radical new vaccine technology called mRNA? Or how a 1930s pause of atomic weapons research might have meant the War in the Pacific continuing into 1946?”

James feels the same way I do. The call for a research pause comes just as AI is showing real signs of being able to accelerate technological progress and boost economic growth, making us healthier, wealthier, and more resilient.

Even on its own terms, however, I have problems with the Pause — whether or not such a delay is workable across companies and countries, including China. I fear that embedded within the Pause is the better-safe-than-sorry Precautionary Principle that will one day push for a permanent pause with humanity well short of artificial general intelligence. That, whether for concerns economic or existential, would deprive humanity of a potentially powerful tool for human flourishing.

Another fellow accelerationist:

Let’s Speed Up AI

Calls to Slow Down AI are Deeply Misguided. We Can Only Solve Problems in the Real World and to Make AI Truly Safe We've Got to Expose It to the Infinite Creativity of Humans.

Daniel Jeffries agrees that to fix the real problems with AI we have to let it develop. Only by putting it out into the real world can we fix the real problems. (We can tackle the imaginary problems if they show signs of being more than fevered fantasies.) Absurd imaginary scenarios grab all the attention instead of real AI dangers like Lethal Autonomous Weapons.

Counterarguments to the basic AI x-risk case

Although Katja Grace seems to be inclining toward signing the pointless and dangerous pause petition, she nevertheless finds many flaws in the argument for existential risk from superhuman AI systems in this piece from August 2022.

My Objections to “We’re All Going to Die with Eliezer Yudkowsky”

Eliezer Yudkowsky has a long list of reasons and arguments for his view that the odds of AI destroying the human race is close to 100%. Some of us disagree with premises that underlie many of those arguments. Also, most of us simply don’t have the time to write detailed rebuttals of every argument given. However, Quintin Pope went to the trouble of rebutting quite of few of them.

Existential risk, AI, and the inevitable turn in human history

Economist Tyler Cowen calls for a bit of humility in our projections of the AI-transformed future. Too many people seem far too sure about outcomes in a situation where radical uncertainty exist. He also notes that, combined with new international uncertainties about the role of America, and AI revolution may bring back “moving history”, something most of us are not used to.

Extremely popular and prolific blogger Scott Alexander jumps on Cowen and accuses him of the “safe uncertainty fallacy”. He characterizes this as: The situation is completely uncertain. We can’t predict anything about it. We have literally no idea how it could go. Therefore, it’ll be fine. This seems to me a bad and straw-manned misrepresentation of Cowen’s piece. But judge for yourself.

Is AI Fear this Century’s Overpopulation Scare?

Pessimists Archive Newsletter

Is AI Fear this Century’s Overpopulation Scare?

“Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come.” Reading this in 2023, you could be forgiven for thinking these words came from an artificial intelligence (AI) alarmist like Eliezer Yudkowsky. Yudkowsky is a self-taught researcher whose predictions about intelligent machines veer into the apocalyptic. “The most likely result of building a superhuman…

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3 years ago · 8 likes · 4 comments · Archie McKenzie

Archie McKenzie asks: “Is Yudkowsky the False Prophet Ehrlich was?” He points out the destructive response to overpopulation doomerism and warns against making a similar mistake with AI.

The GPT-x Revolution in Medicine

Eric Topol reviews a book on how AI can transform healthcare. The authors of the book had 6 months to assess GPT-4 for medical applications. “How well does the AI perform clinically? And my answer is, I’m stunned to say: Better than many doctors I’ve observed.”—Isaac Kohane MD

Kohane is also the co-author of the forthcoming book, The AI Revolution in Medicine: GPT-4 and Beyond.

Multimodal biomedical AI

We explore opportunities in personalized medicine, digital clinical trials, remote monitoring and care, pandemic surveillance, digital twin technology and virtual health assistants. Further, we survey the data, modeling and privacy challenges that must be overcome to realize the full potential of multimodal artificial intelligence in health.

The AI Will See You Now

Leroy Hood and Nathan Price

As medical research produces ever more data on health and disease, doctors are turning to artificial intelligence to help them make the best decisions for patients.

An AI program called MedAware, for example, helps doctors avoid accidentally prescribing the wrong medication. 

Clinical decision support systems also help make test results more personalized,

A study showed that urinary bladder tumor analysis could be performed with AI at an accuracy rate of 93%.

ChatGPT-4 gets an A

Economist Bryan Caplan gave GPT-4 his economics midterm exam for Economics 309: Economic Problems and Public Policies. The AI earned a grade A. This was a massive and surprising improvement from Caplan’s Fall 2022 test on which ChatGPT got a D.

An important day for AI is in your future

Everyone is discussing the economic effects of AI. Some of these are major and could take a lot of work to adapt to. Others are significant only to a few entrepreneurs. It today’s Wall Street Journal, we learn that Mr. Chan, the 53-year-old co-owner of the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory in San Francisco, says computers writing cookie fortunes “is a sign that society is moving too fast.” Other fortune cookie creator are optimistic about working with AI to improve their out.

Paul Krugman, wrong again

Economist Paul Krugman just said LLMs will have negligible effect on the economy over the next decade. This is essentially the same thing he said about the internet:

“Large language models in their current form shouldn’t affect economic projections for next year and probably shouldn’t have a large effect on economic projections for the next decade.”

A comic take on what’s left to humans after AI.

Jason Crawford on how we better at adapting

Climate and energy

Trends in the Proportion of Major Hurricanes

The data behind a major blunder by the IPCC

Roger Pielke, a leader in the climate field, finds serious problems in the IPCC’s latest report on major hurricanes. The IPCC writers surely know that you can show the trend you want by picking specific start years. Pielke says:

Well, here is a cherry picker’s guide to proportion of major hurricanes:

• Want to show an increase? Start your analysis in 1980

• Want to show no trends? Start your analysis in 1950

• Want to show a decrease? Start your analysis in 2002

The Case For Nukes, by Robert Zubrin

Robert Zubrin’s new book argues in favor of nuclear power. See also a good interview with him here.

interview here:

Rapidly declining cost of cultivated meat

Will global warming make temperature less deadly?

“Both heat and cold can kill. But cold is far more deadly. For every death linked to heat, nine are tied to cold.” The simple story that global warming will cause more deaths from heat ignores the rather crucial point that it will also reduce the deaths from cold. And there are far more of these. Harry Stevens writes about a recently published report on the topic. Note that the study uses the 4.5 scenario, which isn’t as crazy as the media-favorite 8.5 but is still likely too high. The full paper is here.

For 800 Years Wheat Has Been Growing More Abundant As Population Increased

Malthus had it backwards. More people make food much more abundant.

Italy needs life extension!

Unless Italy reduces its net outward migration, the population will shrink, leading to fewer working age Italians supporting more retirees. Today’s report from Istat, Italy’s Bureau of Statistics, says that just 393,000 babies were born in 2022, down some 1.8 percent from the 400,249 born in 2021. This the first time births have been below 400,000 since the unification of Italy in 1861. The average age of the population has again increased, from 45.7 years. Other European countries face similar demographic challenges, although Italy’s is the most severe.

I wish more “liberals” were like Mike Hind:

It's hard to be an enthusiastic 21st century liberal

WSJ, March 27, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/more-water-found-on-moon-locked-in-tiny-glass-beads-334c5fde

The moon’s surface contains a new source of water found embedded in microscopic glass beads, which might one day help future astronauts produce drinking water, breathable air and even rocket fuel, scientists say.

The findings come from a Chinese rover that spent two weeks on the moon in 2020. The Chang’e 5 rover drilled several feet into the lunar surface and returned 3.7 pounds of material, among which were the glass beads from an impact crater, according to a paper published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience.

The end of the Long Stagnation might finally be at hand

Faster, Please!

🤖 Why Goldman Sachs thinks generative AI could have a huge impact on economic growth and productivity

“In the limit, if capital can replace labor entirely, growth rates could explode, with incomes becoming infinite in finite time.” - “The Future of U.S. Economic Growth” by John G. Fernald and Charles I. Jones, January 2014 The Essay 🤖 Why Goldman Sachs thinks generative AI could have a huge impact on economic growth and productivity…

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3 years ago · 10 likes · 2 comments · James Pethokoukis

Radical NASA Propulsion Concept Could Reach Interstellar Space in Under 5 Years - Fiona MacDonald, ScienceAlert | A newly proposed propulsion system could theoretically beam a heavy spacecraft to outside the confines of our Solar System in less than 5 years – a feat that took the historic Voyager 1 probe 35 years to achieve. The concept, known as 'pellet-beam' propulsion, was awarded an early-stage US$175,000 NASA grant for further development earlier this year. … The pellet-beam concept was partly inspired by the Breakthrough Starshot initiative, which is working on a 'light-sail' propulsion system. With the help of millions of lasers, a tiny probe would theoretically be able to sail to neighboring Proxima Centauri in just 20 years.

The Definitive Guide to SpaceX’s Starship Megarocket

George Dvorsky, Gizmodo

Would building a Dyson sphere be worth it? We ran the numbers.

Paul Sutter, Ars Technica

Nuclear power enlightenment

Paul Devanney has an excellent blog where he discusses misconceptions about nuclear (fission) power. If you’re not convinced that nuclear is a great idea, please read. If you are convinced but want to be better at enlightening others, please read it!

The Two Lies that Killed Nuclear Power

Nuclear power is too slow

One common and plausible argument against nuclear power is that it is too slow. The evidence offered is recent interminable builds in the US and Europe, Table 1. But is this inherent in the technology? [Spoiler alert: No, it is not.]

Talking to People about Nuclear Power, Stage 1

Safety concerns. Nuclear waste. Meltdown and release.

Stage 2: Nuclear Power's Economics Suck

Why nuclear fission costs four times as much as it needs to.

Stage 3: Nuclear Power and Weapons Proliferation

Nuclear Power is Too Safe

The price of AI falls 99.987%

Gale Winds

GPT AI Price Falls Another 99.987 Percent In 41 Days

Brian Roemmele is a recognized world authority on technology. He’s also quite good at coding and hacking hardware. He recently announced that he’d build a GPT for $530. OpenAI had spent some $4 million to do the same thing…

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3 years ago · 1 like · Gale Pooley

Brian Roemmele is a recognized world authority on technology. He’s also quite good at coding and hacking hardware. He recently announced that he’d build a GPT for $530. OpenAI had spent some $4 million to do the same thing.

New CRISPR tool reversed blindness in mice — permanently

Sterilizing children

Self-transformation is good when practiced sensibly but deeply problematic when it’s the result of social contagion. Seeking to change your gender when you are a mature person who has thought about it carefully is one thing, encouraging troubled adolescent girls to make dramatic physical changes is quite another. See:

Public

Why Are We Sterilizing Children?

By Mia Ashton In the 1990s, Dr. Robert Smith, a surgeon at Falkirk and District Royal Infirmary in Scotland, performed leg amputations on two men. Both men were perfectly healthy but suffering from “apotemnophilia,” a rare psychiatric condition involving the desire to amputate healthy limbs. Apotemnophiles claim not to feel complete with four limbs and obsess over the idea of having unwanted body parts chopped off…

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3 years ago · 288 likes · 72 comments · Mia Ashton