The problem is arguably making a DIY vaccine is less rational, if rational is defined by “optimizing our personal survival and wellbeing”. The best we can do presently seems to be:
a. Work in tech for the high personal income and decent job satisfaction
b. Work in tech on AI to nudge the needle to the extent we can as individuals (and also increase income and job satisfaction)
c. Make the decisions we can make—what college to accept, what car to buy, what job offer to accept—based on quantifiable, expressible metrics that factor in probabilities of failure
d. Sign up for cryonics, use any other method of life extension that has credible evidence behind it
That’s all we can do. We individually are motes of dust, it took the collective efforts of millions of people to develop the infrastructure where rational thought and discussions are even sorta possible. We need to invent artificial intelligence to determine what the actual unbiased, rational decision for a complex real world decision even is. I would say that AlphaGo Zero and other efforts, where an AI agent trained with no starting human priors learned to outperform humans, is one of the first proof of concepts that shows such a machine is even practical, and that was 2017! (and it only tells you the approximate rational answer in the restricted game of Go, we do not yet have an AI that can tell you the right legislation to pass to say minimize childhood hunger or some other agreeable worthy cause)
The vaccines that were made by Big Pharma had the collective infrastructure and efforts of thousands of people who specialized in related subfields their entire lives. Unless we have a tool like an AI agent available to us that we can expect to outperform the experts (and if we were playing against every Go player in all of Asia we now could) we can’t do better. Yet.
The problem is arguably making a DIY vaccine is less rational, if rational is defined by “optimizing our personal survival and wellbeing”. The best we can do presently seems to be:
a. Work in tech for the high personal income and decent job satisfaction
b. Work in tech on AI to nudge the needle to the extent we can as individuals (and also increase income and job satisfaction)
c. Make the decisions we can make—what college to accept, what car to buy, what job offer to accept—based on quantifiable, expressible metrics that factor in probabilities of failure
d. Sign up for cryonics, use any other method of life extension that has credible evidence behind it
That’s all we can do. We individually are motes of dust, it took the collective efforts of millions of people to develop the infrastructure where rational thought and discussions are even sorta possible. We need to invent artificial intelligence to determine what the actual unbiased, rational decision for a complex real world decision even is. I would say that AlphaGo Zero and other efforts, where an AI agent trained with no starting human priors learned to outperform humans, is one of the first proof of concepts that shows such a machine is even practical, and that was 2017! (and it only tells you the approximate rational answer in the restricted game of Go, we do not yet have an AI that can tell you the right legislation to pass to say minimize childhood hunger or some other agreeable worthy cause)
The vaccines that were made by Big Pharma had the collective infrastructure and efforts of thousands of people who specialized in related subfields their entire lives. Unless we have a tool like an AI agent available to us that we can expect to outperform the experts (and if we were playing against every Go player in all of Asia we now could) we can’t do better. Yet.