Compilation Post #3
Life extension, AI, progress, space, health, climate, energy
Life extension
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 19th 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
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
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
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
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 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
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?