I'm legit pretty excited about applying AI to accelerate biological and medical discovery.
It's already happening right now, still in relatively mundane ways, but there's so much to do.
It's already happening right now, still in relatively mundane ways, but there's so much to do.
At least one data point in favor of this view is the middling success of the AI rollout so far. Of course it’s eclipsed in the short run by the number of jobs cut to fund AI rollouts.
“The task”
You really did not answer the question.
Given present culture wars, that last one may cause a lot of drama all by itself no matter how good it gets. But hopefully you get the picture about how transformative it can be.
Paying for it? Well, there's a reason I chose to move to Germany rather than the USA after the Brexit referendum.
How much is possible there, is only constrained in our understanding of biology. How difficult that turns out to be for a super intelligence… who knows? If we are actually on the cusp of the AI singularity, the future is going to be weird and/or wonderful and/or horrible, but definitely unimaginable different than today.
My mind is kind of shooing away from this intuitively. Too hard to believe. My whole life experience has been living in a different world. But imagine if "we" could actually create human level intelligence, say, for the price of a 100k USD/EUR/GBP. It could only do knowledge work, of course, but it would easily pay for itself and thus be mass produced. What is the market cap for cheap knowledge work? I would be surprised if it is only a billion human-equivalents, given humans find new creative ways to pay for themselves all the time. That explosion alone is mind-boggling and it does not rely on super-intelligence.
All of this should make one point clear: At no other point in history has it been more important to have our power structures be aligned with the interests of society.
Sure, sure, but upthread said "biological and medical" so I was taking it that way.
> Why upload your conscience to silicon, when your body can be anything, your brain can experience anything, you brain can be reshaped to be anything.
I'd avoiding considering this one for now, simply because there's too many open questions. I don't expect it to be a physics problem, but I can't rule that out.
> All of this should make one point clear: At no other point in history has it been more important to have our power structures be aligned with the interests of society.
Yup.
Unfortunately, the human alignment problem is hard, let alone the AI alignment problem.
Does Germany have a large enough share of these companies to be on the winning side of this or is the country effectively in the same position as the average American? Just think how much could a company charge Germany to extend the life of its citizens, could Germany actually afford to pay that price especially if and when it tax base shrinks?
The time-limited and jurisdiction-limited nature of patents aside, one of the great things about being a country is you can do things like pass laws saying "we have decided to force you to sell to us at the price we specify, and if you refuse we will shoot you".
How taxes work when labour shifts to AI is anybody's guess.
But these companies aren’t based in Germany, so you’re talking about invading other nations. It’s starting to sound like this version of the optimistic outcome is World War 3.
If they don't want to do business in Germany*, they don't get to file a patent in Germany*, they don't get to sue Germany* for ignoring a patent that was geographically limited to not include Germany*.
* might be "EU", I have not checked.
If you sell medicine to me here in Germany, you go through the German government.
If you decide not to, you inherently allow someone else to get the pantent for your tech in Germany.
Costs of medicine will get absorbed only to the extent they are considered acceptable, this is true for everyone. The biomedical firms know this, which is also why recently it is the US who pays the most for medicines.
This argument is cute and all, but ... does a data-point of 1 from 200 years ago really give us much confidence? We replaced physical labor with a massive service sector.
Now we're automating the service sector so now people can go to... eeh... the 3rd category of jobs? Seems like physical labor is the most stable career at the moment; what machines have not already automated is pretty difficult to replace it turns out. But we outsourced most of that to low cost countries except plumbers and electricians.
But will a population of plumbers really be able to maintain a population of plumbers employed?
I literally do not give a fuck about some hypothetical more productive activity I might be able to do in 150 years if it destroys my very real present ability to take care of my family today.
It took a long time for politicians to notice that Karl Marx had a fucking point.
"May you live in interesting times" as the Chinese say.
At this point, it's condescending to keep rehashing the "this is just the next industrialization era". It's been beaten to death as an invalid comparison more on this website than maybe any other.
If AI becomes a primary catalyst for advancement it further moves the needle in the monetary direction.
That redfines advancement to mean something different than what is beneficial to society to be what is monetarily best for the owners of said advancment.
Sure, the transformer is great for making larger neural networks with better learning potential, which are improving protein folding models a fair bit. But do we need the combined budget of the Apollo program or interstate highway system (adjusted for inflation) per year, to develop better molecular simulation models? (no, the most advanced ones run on mundane hardware and trained just fine on pre 2020 infrastructure).
So while it's true that; "AI" ((primarily) Neural network based deep learning techniques) are wonderful tools to make society better; slop generators absorbing the entire energy budget of a few small nations to generate infinite propaganda, linked-in posts and shrimp Jesus is only tangentially helping in that goal while destabilization civilization in the process.
Tens of millions of people in the US alone cannot obtain basic healthcare today, how would this outcome change for them because AI solved it? The only solid paths are regulation or prying the machine from the hands of those who hold it. GLP-1s are only widely available globally affordably because the patent expired, for example.
Who is exactly going to benefit here because Americans have been given a rotten deal by neoliberalism for the last 40 years.
We now live in a world where you cannot be a professional engineer without expensive CAD software, you cannot run most businesses without some expensive licensed software for managing your books, HR, supply chain, etc. or you will just get destroyed in the market by more efficient competition. I guess my thought process on this is a little simplified, as I was thinking about how software you can run yourself is "infinitely copyable" for free. This question gets more nuanced with SaaS. While some of the enshittification can be argued to be rent-seeking behavior to have a bigger moat, you cannot perform a "DRM crack" of a webapp like you could with software restricted by CD keys and the like, creating SaaS versions of most products provide real benefits. Running a large hosted service is a serious ongoing commitment that takes real investment to maintain.
It feels like we haven't finished this necessary conversation in the pre-LLM world, about how software was creating giant powerful institutions that we were totally unprepared to regulate. In a world that looks so likely to be coming pretty soon, where LLMs can maintain a SaaS with very little human input, I just don't think we're ready for the consolidation of power that is coming.
And to the particular point being made about biomedical research, it is already pretty trivial to argue we have cartoon villain levels of evil already happening with both deciding how research dollars are allocated (diseases that disproportionately affect the poor are worked on less), and how many people we are leaving out of the modern medical system to just suffer or die at home.
We need to grapple with the fact that we have developed really powerful tools to reduce suffering, and alongside that development we have created legal tools and institutions that indefinitely keep innovations behind paywalls with prices chosen by powerful rich people. Maybe these two things need to exist together to create incentives for investment, but it feels like we need to have better conversations about how we can actively manage the knobs and levers of the economy to produce better outcomes for more people.
https://www.science.org/content/article/not-alive-not-dead-d...