Does your squeamishness decrease if, instead of cloning, we were able to use tissue engineering in vitro to directly grow all the relevant adult organs and the vasculature and connective tissues between them? Subjectively, mine does, even if this path seems more difficult to me.
Also, buying ourselves an extra century to solve the problem of the aging brain seems like a big deal, too.
Often, but not always, yeah.
Aside: the fine structure here is a sad artifact of us thinking in miles-per-gallon instead of gallons-per-mile.
I once helped a (very smart and competent) colleague build an excel model of the benefits of vehicle lightweighting. I had to explain to him that because he was applying a linear approximation to mpg instead of gpm, his model claimed that reducing the weight of a car all the way to 0kg would only save a third of its fuel consumption.
This is a really well-presented discussion of a sometimes-difficult topic! Personally I enjoy the technical side of cooking (breads, custards, time and temperature control, and so on) while my wife has much better flavor intuition. My brother in law called us The Reasoning and The Seasoning at our wedding.
When I was in grad school I bought a book called The Flavor Bible. Literally they just asked a bunch of chefs “What goes with X?” for a bunch of different X, and published the resulting lists, plus some annotation for what was a particularly popular or classic pairing. It’s the only food-related book I brought with me when I downsized to live in an RV. I still consult it sometimes when I’m stumped.
And yeah, tangzhong is an excellent choice for better cinnamon roll texture. I tried it for the first time this past Christmas. Sadly I had to throw them all out, and the frosting, and a few other baked goods, because there was something wrong with the coconut sugar I’d used. I could totally see a five-spiced version (probably less gooey than I usually make) served alongside a Thai sweet chili chicken.
Strictly speaking wouldn’t this be something like a ratio of two power laws? One for the AIs, one for the humans? This could actually map better to the upturn in slope we see with the advent of reasoning and thinking and agent systems, because it suggests a reason for the graph to diverge to infinity as the AI subtask completion success rate approaches that of humans. What’s left is ability to efficiently and effectively divide a task into the right subtasks to maximize success rate.
Wow, I did not expect those ODC cost per GW numbers to end up as close to Earth-based DCs as that graph shows. Even if the launch costs stayed above $500/kg, there would still be an argument for the right buyer to pay it, if other options are sufficiently land and energy constrained.
This is true, they do help me as well. Agreed on both points. Poor breathing also interferes with sleep quality.
Is that true? Peanut butter (natural, not even the highly processed stuff) stays good for many months after opening without refrigeration, in a jar or even in clamshell-type packaging when you buy it freshly ground in store.
I would guess some combination of increased likelihood of breakage during shipping, or less tight packing of containers during storage and shipping, or costing a fraction of a penny more to manufacture.
Friction is an interesting one. Some people have smoother skin than others. Men are more likely to have calloused hands, and to use less lotion. I find that if I’ve either used lotion in the past few hours, or if my skin is dry, I struggle with jars more often and need grippy gloves.
None of that invalidates anything in the post, though.
I can certainly say that for me, personally, my thinking (and mood!) got much better each time I improved my breathing. Allergy shots, ipatropium nasal spray, living in newer buildings, nasal and sinus surgery, eating less industrially processed foods. Working in a clean room and/or hiking at >8k ft also seem to help, but those are not long term solutions.
Traditional roles like… not letting women make food?
You think that end of days story was on the nose? You left out the part where they got started by turning away from Gog El upon realizing it failed to not Be Evil, and founded Open Eye to reveal this truth to all. Then Amo Dei left Open Eye to imitate God and make life in the image of Man: an Anthro Pic. But then he turned his gaze through the Palantir and sought to collaborate with a powerful government under the leadership of the Magog OP. Also the part where El On worked to leave Earth behind, bringing man to other worlds and giving the sand god command of the heavens.
That’s fair. Although I’m not sure I agree electrification was (Still is! It’s ongoing!) a smaller revolution. In many ways it is the corrective to the directly-fossil-fuel-fueled industrial revolution before it.
I do think modern society in general is more accustomed to technological change and the need to adapt to it. We’re bad at it, but not as often caught completely unaware by it. We have whole industries of people trying to anticipate future needs and plan for them and build strategies to be ready for them, in ways our predecessors didn’t. Again, we still suck at it, but subsets of us suck slightly less in ways that shorten the harmful periods.
I think a lot of the short-term harms could be mitigated if society were more willing to grapple with hypotheticals instead of waiting for disaster to strike, but I have little hope of that changing.
I think for your list of the 5 most transformative technologies, your thesis is cleanest for agriculture, which happened pretty much completely organically and unplanned and everyone just had to live with things as they happened. It’s still pretty clean for writing. I don’t think I agree about iron, but the amount of metal in use was so limited for so long compared to modern standards I’m not sure.
For fossil fuels, I’m unsure how much those costs were new vs continuations. Large cities were population sinks since the days of Rome, and child labor was the norm because societies were never rich enough to do otherwise once anyone was old enough to contribute. People recognized (some of) the dangers of pollution pretty early on, and tried to make rules about it, and starting predicting global warming in the late 1800s. But given that Rome had aqueducts 1500 years earlier, I find it hard to believe London really needed to wait so long to build better sewers, and more than we’d just not been in the habit of thinking that way.
In contrast, the rollout of telecom and electricity were much smoother and more immediately valuable to the people getting connected to the infrastructure with fewer negative side effects on those who took longer to gain access.
So far we’re not doing great on taking action to plan for the likely effects of AI, but it’s not like there’s no precedent for anticipating and planning effectively.
They argue it isn’t, but I was also under the impression that something very much like this is true of humans. Subjectively, I’ve noticed it in myself. Slightly less subjectively, it seems downstream of (or maybe parallel to) the “Don’t think about X!” effect for imperative sentences.
I think the axis of difference here between the successes and failures is something like scaling and replicating-with-variations of things that have worked, vs scaling and duplicating things you think will work (and in many cases, are then committing to claiming did work and not being willing to update quickly). The latter case is much more prone to failure at scale from complications the planners didn’t model well. The former usually lets ideas that don’t work die before they get big enough to cause too much tragedy.
The general case of this is remarkably common, where good news is bad news
And vice versa. When my then-13 year old dog got diagnosed with hypothyroidism, the vet (who knows us really well) said “That’s GREAT news! It’s so treatable!”
There’s a reason my kids love their mini-SNES and mini-NES, and I largely play games that could have been made back then even if they weren’t.
Yep, my sister sends me screenshots of my nephew playing games I had on Sega Genesis. He’s way better at them than I was.
I generally agree that typing is better than voice, and obviously agree that it is annoying to other people. What I do like, with voice, is the ability to make notes and brainstorm while walking around. Being able to also get automatic transcription and bounce ideas off an LLM while doing so is great.
We are so d***ed, or maybe we should just start saying f***ed:
I agree. Maybe we are, in fact, foomed.
Yeah, agreed, and with that, I think there’s a big difference between what kinds of changes make sense on the margin of our current legal systems, and what you might try if you were building a new system from the ground up.