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Note: there is an AI audio version of this text over here: https://askwhocastsai.substack.com/p/eliezer-yudkowsky-tweet-jul-21-2024
I find the AI narrations offered by askwho generally ok, worse than what a skilled narrator (or team) could do but much better than what I could accomplish.
[...] somehow humanity's 100-fold productivity increase (since the days of agriculture) didn't eliminate poverty.
That feels to me about as convincing as saying: "Chemical fertilizers have not eliminated hunger, just the other weekend I was stuck on a campus with a broken vending machine."
I mean, sure, both the broken vending machine and actual starvation can be called hunger, just as both working 60h/week to make ends meet or sending your surviving kids into the mines or prostituting them could be called poverty, but the implication that either scourge of humankind has not lost most of its terror seems clearly false.
Sure, being poor in the US sucks, but I would rather spend a year living the life of someone in the bottom 10% income bracket in the 2024 US than spending a month living the life of a poor person during the English industrial revolution.
I am also not convinced that 60h/week is what it actually takes to survive in the US. I can totally believe that this amount of unskilled labor might be required to rent accommodations in cities, though.
1Critically, the gene editing of the red blood cells can be done in the lab; trying to devise an injectable or oral substance that would actually transport the gene-editing machinery to an arbitrary part of the body is much harder.
I am totally confused by this. Mature red blood cells don't contain a nucleus, and hence no DNA. There is nothing to edit. Injecting blood cells produced by gene-edited bone marrow in vitro might work, but would only be a therapy, not a cure: it would have to be repeated regularly. The cure would be to replace the bone marrow.
So I resorted to reading through the linked FDA article. Relevant section:
The modified blood stem cells are transplanted back into the patient where they engraft (attach and multiply) within the bone marrow and increase the production of fetal hemoglobin (HbF), a type of hemoglobin that facilitates oxygen delivery.
Blood stem cells seems to be FDA jargon for ematopoietic stem cells. From the context, I would guess they are harvested from the bone marrow of the patients, then CRISPRed, and then injected back in the blood stream where they will find back to the bone marrow.
I still don't understand how they would outcompete the non-GMO bone marrow which produces the faulty red blood cells, though.
I would also take the opportunity to point out that the list of FDA-approved gene therapies tells us a lot about the FDA and very little about the state of the art. This is the agency which banned life-saving baby nutrition for two years, after all. Anchoring what is technologically possible to what the FDA approves would be like anchoring what is possible in mobile phone tech to what is accepted by the Amish.
Also, I think that editing of multi-cellular organisms is not required for designer babies at all.
- Start with a fertilized egg, which is just a single cell. Wait for the cell to split. After it has split, separate the cells into two cells. Repeat until you have a number of single-cell candidates.
- Apply CRISPR to these cells individually. allow them to split again. Do a genome analysis on one of the two daughter cell. Select a cell line where you did only the desired change in the genome. Go back to step one and apply the next edit.
Crucially, the costs would only scale linearly with the number of edits. I am unsure how easy is that "turn one two-cell embryo into two one-cell embryos", though.
Of course, it would be neater to synthesize the DNA of the baby from the scratch, but while prices per base pair synthesis have been dropped a lot, they are clearly still to high to pay for building a baby (and there are likely other tech limitations).
I thought this first too. I checked on Wikipedia:
Adult stem cells are found in a few select locations in the body, known as niches, such as those in the bone marrow or gonads. They exist to replenish rapidly lost cell types and are multipotent or unipotent, meaning they only differentiate into a few cell types or one type of cell. In mammals, they include, among others, hematopoietic stem cells, which replenish blood and immune cells, basal cells, which maintain the skin epithelium [...].
I am pretty sure that the thing a skin cell makes per default when it splits is more skin cells, so you are likely correct.
See here. Of course, that article is a bit light on information on detection thresholds, false-positive rates and so on as compared to dogs, mass spectrometry or chemical detection methods.
I will also note that humans have 10-20M olfactory receptor neurons, while bees have 1M neurons in total. Probably bees are under more evolutionary pressure to make optimal use of their olcfactory neurons, though.
Dear Review Bot,
please avoid double-posting.
On the other hand, I don't think voting you to -6 is fair, so I upvoted you.
My take on sniffer dogs is that frequently, what they are best at is picking up is unconscious tells from their handler. In so far as they do, they are merely science!-washing the (possibly meritful) biases of the police officier.
Packaging something really air-tight without outside contamination is indeed far from trivial. For example, the swipe tests taken at airports are useful because while it is certainly possible to pack a briefcase full of explosives without any residue on the outside is certainly possible, most of the people who could manage to build a bomb would not manage to do that.
Of course, there are also no profit margins in blowing up airplanes, so stopping the amateurs is already 95% of the job.
There are significant profit margins in drug trafficking. After you intercept a few shipments and arrest a few mules, the cleverer drug lords will wisen up.
A multi-method approach might work for a while, glass vials are probably more visible on that CT scan than some organic substance.
My first question is about the title picture. I have some priors on how a computer tomography machine for vehicles would look like. Basically, you want to take x-ray images from many different directions. The medical setup where you have a ring which contains the x-ray source on one side and the detectors on the other side, and rotate that ring to take images from multiple directions before moving the patient perpendicular to the ring to record the next slice exists for a reason: high resolution x-ray detectors are expensive. If we scaled this up to a car size, we might have a ring of four meters in diameter. A bridge of some low-Z material (perhaps beams of wood) would go through that ring. Park on the bridge, get out of the car, and watch as the rotating ring moves over the bridge.
The thing in the picture looks does not look like it has big moving parts. I can kind of see it taking a sideways x-ray image of the car but I am puzzled by the big grey boxes visible over the car. Having an x-ray source or detector above the car would only make sense if you had the other device below the car, in the road. Of course, if there is anything in the road, one would imagine that that piece of road was some low-Z material material designed not to block half of your x-rays. Instead, the road material below the car looks exactly like the road outside the detector, concrete probably.
In Europe, we kind of dislike being exposed to ionizing radiation (even though Germany is rather silly about it). I get that the US is a bit more relaxed about it, but a computer tomography device capable of scanning a car with a good resolution would likely emit to a lot of scattered x-rays to anyone nearby. The position in which that boarder guard stands would likely not be a safe position to stand a significant fraction of your work-life.
At the very least, I would expect that black and yellow trefoil sign warning of ionizing radiation, with a visual indicator if the x-ray is on, and a line marking the minimum safe distance. More realistically, you might have something like a garage door before and behind the car.
Just from the vibes, I get that the pictured non-intrusive fentanyl inspection machine might run on the operation principle of the famous ADE 651, which is to say it does nothing whatsoever.
While detecting dry fentanyl through high resolution CT scans seems to be possible in principle at least, once the smugglers go through the additional trouble of dissolving it all bets are off. Wikipedia is light on solubility data, but from the looks of it fentanyl should dissolve well in organic solvents.
You can check the gas tank of every car if you want, but what are you going to do if an eight-wheeler full of one- gallon-bottles of cooking oil crosses the border? If your scan is good, it would perhaps detect if one bottle in the middle of the stack has been filled with powder instead. There is no way in hell it will detect if one such bottle has ten grams (perhaps 10k doses) of fentanyl dissolved in it. Your best bet would be to detect some residue of the oil on product seized off the streets and work backwards from that.
Of course, "as long as the profit margin is that high, we could go full iron curtain on our borders and would not stop the trafficking" is not a politically acceptable answer. Hence some snake oil salesmen are able to get your tax dollars for products which have not been proven in adversarial conditions. (To train an AI, it is not enough to have a ton of samples, you would need known positive and negative samples. Also, while we are playing buzzword bingo, why not mention that the shipping manifests will be securely stored on The Blockchain?)
The deliberately clumsy term "AInotkilleveryoneism" seems good for this, in any context you can get away with it.
Hard disagree. The position "AI might kill all humans in the near future" is still quite some inferential distance away from the mainstream even if presented in a respectable academic veneer.
We do not have weirdness points to spend on deliberately clumsy terms, even on LW. Journalists (when they are not busy doxxing people) can read LW too, and if they read that the worry about AI as an extinction risk is commonly called notkilleveryoneism they are orders of magnitude less likely to take us serious, and being taken serious by the mainstream might be helpful for influencing policy.
We could probably get away with using that term ten pages deep into some glowfic, but anywhere else 'AI as an extinction risk' seems much better.
What I don't understand is why there should be a link between trapped priors and an moral philosophy.
I mean, if moral realism was correct, i.e. if moral tenets such as "don't eat pork", "don't have sex with your sister", or "avoid killing sentient beings" had an universal truth value for all beings capable of moral behavior, then one might argue that the reason why people's ethics differ is that they have trapped priors which prevent them from recognizing these universal truths.
This might be my trapped priors talking, but I am a non-cognitivist. I simply believe that assigning truth values to moral sentences such as "killing is wrong" is pointless, and they are better parsed as prescriptive sentences such as "don't kill" or "boo on killing".
In my view, moral codes are intrinsically subjective. There is no factual disagreement between Harry and Professor Quirrell which they could hope to overcome through empiricism, they simply have different utility functions.
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My second point is that if moral realism was true, and one of the key roles of religion was to free people from trapped priors so they could recognize these universal moral truths, then at least during the founding of religions, we should see some evidence of higher moral standards before they invariably mutate into institutions devoid of moral truths. I would argue that either, our commonly accepted humanitarian moral values are all wrong or this mutation process happened almost instantly:
On the other hand, for instances where religions did advocate for tenets compatible with humanitarianism, such as in Christian abolitionism, do not seem to correspond to strong spiritualism. Was Pope Benedict XIV condemning the slave trade because he was more spiritual (and thus in touch with the universal moral truth) than his predecessors who had endorsed it?
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My last point is that especially with regard to relational conflicts, our map not corresponding to the territory might often not be a bug, but a feature. Per Hanson, we deceive ourselves so that we can better deceive others. Evolution has not shaped our brains to be objective cognitive engines. In some cases, objective cognition is what it advantageous -- if you are alone hunting a rabbit, no amount of self-deception will fill your stomach -- but in any social situation, expect evolution to put the hand on the scales of your impartial judgement. Arguing that your son should become the new chieftain because he is the best hunter and strongest warrior is much more effective than arguing for that simply because he is your son -- and the best way to argue that is to believe it, no matter if it is objectively true.
The adulterer, the slave owner and the wartime rapist all have solid evolutionary reasons to engage in behaviors most of us might find immoral. I think their moral blind spots are likely not caused by trapped priors, like an exaggerated fear of dogs is. Also, I have no reason to believe that I don't have similar moral blind spots hard-wired into my brain by evolution.
I would bet that most of the serious roadblocks to a true moral theory (if such a thing existed) are of that kind, instead of being maladaptive trapped priors. Thus, even if religion and spirituality are effective at overcoming maladaptive trapped priors, I don't see how they would us bring closer to moral cognition.