Wait, what? I know Aldous Huxley is famous for writing a scifi novel in 1931 titled "Don't Build A Method For Simulating Ovary Tissue Outside The Body To Harvest Eggs And Grow Clone Workers On Demand In Jars" but I thought that his warning had been taken very very seriously.
Are you telling me that science has stopped refusing to do this, and there is now a protocol published somewhere outlining "A Method For Simulating Ovary Tissue Outside The Body To Harvest Eggs"???
Wait what? This feels "important if true" but I don't think it is true. I can think of several major technical barriers to the feasibility of this. To pick one... How do you feed video data into a brain? The traditional method would have involved stimulating neurons with the pixels captured electronically, but the clumsy stimulation process to transduce the signal into the brain itself would harm the stimulated neurons and not be very dense, so the brain would have low res vision, until the stimulated neurons die in less than a few months. Or at least, that was the model I've had for the last... uh... 10 years? Were major advances made when I wasn't looking?
I was interested in that! Those look amazing. I want to know the price now.
Fascinating. You caused me to google around and realize "bioshelter" was a sort of an academic trademark for specific people's research proposals from the 1900s.
It doesn't appear to be a closed system, like biosphere2 aspired to be from 1987 to 1991.
The hard part, from my perspective, isn't "growing food with few inputs and little effort through clever designs" (which seems to be what the bioshelter thing is focued on?) but rather "thoroughly avoiding contamination by whatever bioweapons an evil AGI can cook up and try to spread into your safe zone".
It strikes me that a semi-solid way to survive that scenario would be: (1) go deep into a polar region where it is too dry for mold and relatively easy to set up a quarantine perimeter, (2) huddle near geothermal for energy, then (3) greenhouse/mushrooms for food?
Roko's ice islands could also work. Or put a fission reactor in a colony in Antarctica?
The problem is that we're running out of time. Industrial innovation to create "lifeboats" (that are broadly resistant to a large list of disasters) is slow when done by merely-humanly-intelligent people with very limited budgets compared to the speed of just training bigger models for longer.
That makes sense as a "reasonable take", but having thought about this for a long time from an "evolutionary systems" perspective, I think that any memeplex-or-geneplex which is evangelical (not based on parent-to-child transmission) is intrinsically suspicious in the same way that we call genetic material that goes parent-to-child "the genome" and we call genetic material that goes peer-to-peer "a virus".
Among the subtype of "virus that preys on bacteria" (called "bacteriophage" or just "phages") there is a thing called a "prophage" which integrates into a host, and then rides parent-to-child for many generations, and then (usually triggered by stress responses (and radiation is a pretty reliable stressor to induce this in a lab)), the prophage causes descendant bacteria to re-express the "viral form" of the prophage, and explode in a suicidal/evangelical frenzy.
The only hope that most hosts infected by prophages have is for the full genome of the infection to mutate in a small number of generations, so that the "lytic machinery" (that causes suicidal evangelism) breaks before a trigger occurs, so that when the trigger does happen, the host survives, while keeping the symbiotic genes.
(((This is probably THE KEY SOURCE of nearly ALL non-trivial upgrades to large genomes with slow evolutionary cycles. For example, something vaguely similar probably is the source of the "V(D)J Combinatorial Immune System" that has existed in our ancestors all the way back to the common ancestor of "humans and sharks but not lampreys". The VDJ system uses genes with a clear viral provenance to construct antibodies, and so it is reasonable to suppose that (1) some lamprey-like-thing was infected with a virus, (2) the virus integrated with the genome for a few generations and then left over and over, (3) the virus evolved a helpful way of fighting off other parasites (possibly because "having a proto-mouth with a proto-jaw and preying on lots of different species is an intrinsically dirty life strategy"), (4) in some lamprey-and-shark-like-ancestor (keyword "gnathostomata") the viral machinery for the half-symbiotic virus to escape the genome broke, and (5) all subsequent descendants (or from-our-perspective-as-humans all subsequent "post-shark ancestors") have kept this "former symbiotic viral subsystem" as a super badass immune system for remembering entire clades of infectious or harmful things and fighting them off based on remembering "how they smell" via antibodies, that could be tweaked into slightly more useful shapes over the next ~400 million years.)))
In bacteria, Prophages often evolve helpful genes for their hosts for the "laying in wait" period. For example, symbiotic incentives like this probably explain the convergent evolution of whole new ways to "do photosythesis" in the viruses of photosynthetic marine bacteria, but they also are net harmful to the initial host's long term genomic interests, because infection will reliably cause nearly their entire set of descendants to durably/predictably/eventually suicidally explode.
There is some debate about the details, and it is hard to be sure because most sub-varieties of these viruses are never-seen-before because there are probably still millions or billions of unobserved prophage species in the total life system of Earth still...
However, as a general pattern, the "horizontal/vertical incentive difference pattern" is so durable and clean that nearly all prophages internalize it, and express very different genes depending on "which mode" they are in.
Compare and contrast: "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the future itself by not volunteering for holy jihad based on stuff that was in books your great-granddad was tricked into believing in and passing on to his descendants as a family philosophy, for thereby one can meekly avoid being foolishly inspired to join an army and eventually have their genome erased from all of future biology forever when they are Killed In Action."
One of the reasons "the hint(s) provided by the visible badness of evangelism" this is such an interesting and important topic is that it doesn't just help explain the biological evolution of non-trivial microbiological tricks in large animals with very slow reproductive cycles, and it doesn't just provide a feast of analogies to the sociology of religion, it also relates to "inner alignment" in general :-)
...and just to lay some cards on the table, and be "epistemically hygienic" in proximity to possible-infohazards...
There are potentially some situations where "speaking to non-kin" is economically rational and thus in some sense "biologically rational" but almost all of these situations relate to things that are quite naturally expressed in terms of public goods, which could be funded via dominant assurance contracts, with executive management selected via vaguely sane electoral procedures liked Ranked Pairs or Borda.
The reason that "a government-or-religion-or-theocracy" is a natural category is that humans have been using confused metaphysics to defend bad governance protocols for a LONG time... like probably at least 12,000 years? If you look at most of this history, a huge portion of the level-ups in protocol design seem to have come from divesting the protocol justifications from metaphysical claims, and switching to protocol justifications based on basic prudence and math and externalized social reasoning. Thus, if someone proposes some New Idea that might be "a better way to do a government-or-religion-or-theocracy" it very reasonable and "naively-infohazard-protective" to try to translate it into the language of rationalized political-economy, subtract all the specific people from the proposal, and reason about the abstract roles using game theory and prudence and so on.
Note that (1) this proposed "abstraction process for converting governance ideas about individuals into governance ideas about roles" is kinda similar to Kant's proposal for "universalizing maxims under the categorical imperative" and (2) I don't know of a single scary cult that has been based on (or obsessed with) Kant... and this safety property seems pretty safe even though Kant is not my daddy and his ideas don't count as "vertically transmitted" for me or anyone ...since he never got married or had kids).
I've followed this line of thinking a bit. As near as I can tell, the logic of "evolutionary memetics" suggests that parent-to-child belief transmission should face the same selective pressures as parent-to-child gene transmission.
Indeed, if you go hunting around, it turns out that there are a lot of old religions whose doctrines simply include the claim that it is impossible for outsiders to join the religion, and pointless to spread it, since the theology itself suggests that you can only be born into it. This is, plausibly, a way for the memes to make the hosts not waste energy on anything except transmission to progeny.
Quite a few "Hinduisms" work this way, if you squint, although there have often been religious entrepreneurs who were willing to pretend that foreigner/outsiders LARPing as new members of their old religion might perhaps at least get those foreigners the ability to be reincarnated as proper real Hindus. Once communication and resources are flowing, further evangelism and memetic innovation can get pretty weird pretty fast.
Still, for myself, as someone with no coherent familial religious inputs (all four grandparents had wildly different beliefs, as did both parents) I generally up-weight the likelihood that particular doctrines are healthy based on the degree to which their source community rejects evangelism. If two or three non-evangelical religions have convergently evolved the same pragmatic ideas (norms or educational processes or visualization techniques or whatever), then the ideas are plausibly worthy of a second look and some practical experiments <3
I know you're not supposed to laugh at your own jokes, but... I also find this perspective hilarious <3
Oh huh. I was treating the "and make them twins" part as relatively easier, and not worthy of mention... Did no one ever follow up on the Hall-Stillman work from the 1990s? Or did it turn out to be hype, or what? (I just checked, and they don't even seem to be mentioned on the wiki for the zona pellucida.)