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Comment by baoooooooooooo | Hacker News Reader

Crikey it’s a pretty charitable vibe given the whole Navier-Stokes thing, OpenAI trying to stiff him out of co-authorship. I guess any of that sentiment is outweighed by a sense of optimism for where this goes

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Where does it go? Machines owned by 10 people robbing us of the joy of discovery and the fruits of our labor... for what?

They certainly arent going to give you that cure for cancer, if it were to ever come.

> Where does it go? Machines owned by 10 people robbing us of the joy of discovery and the fruits of our labor... for what?

For what? So some guys can be richer and more powerful. What could possibly be more important than themselves? You? Your future? We're nothing, and have been told to be excited and curious about our coming obsolescence and powerlessness.

Seriously, what's special about oncology that convinces you there will be no progress?

I think gp was saying they'd never give it to you, not that they'd never make progress.

A normal conspiratorial comment about the cure for cancer being kept secret would have been downvoted into oblivion, but sprinkle in some spooky AI stuff and suddenly it's fine

In the interest of steel-manning, I think it’s not about a cure being kept secret but rather non-elites being stripped of the leverage they would need to access it.

You were never stripped of anything

Labour value. Not in the past, but the argument is that it is being threatened.

That a peasant could be so insolent to imagine themselves deserving of the fruits

That is ridiculous. You cannot withhold something like an effective cure for cancer from broad adoption, and thinking you can is just conspiracy bullshit. Imagine an internal OpenAI model develops it tomorrow. Would everyone of the thousands of OpenAI scientists get in on the conspiracy to keep it secret, even though many of them probably know someone dying from cancer right now? Obviously not.

I'm sorry, do you understand how the medical industry works? It wouldn't be one cure, it's going to be dozens of treatments, each of which will be incredibly expensive.

Or else how do you explain Danyelza? Used to treat neuroblastoma, costs upwards of $1m per year. Do you have any proof that this will be different?

You're calling realistic people conspiracy theorists. Whose side are you on?

The medical industry makes medicines very expensive because they include the enormous costs of research. If AI makes research much cheaper, then medicines will get cheaper too.

I'm also against absolutely anyone who asks me "whose side I'm on" as part of an argument.

Just like when the medical industry made insulin cheap because it’s been around forever and costs nothing to manufacture.

Insulin is very cheap in countries with normal health insurance systems (everywhere except the US).

> I'm sorry, do you understand how the medical industry works?

Yes, I actually work in the medical industry. There is no hiding the cure for cancer.

> Or else how do you explain Danyelza? Used to treat neuroblastoma, costs upwards of $1m per year. Do you have any proof that this will be different?

Oh, you are American. Let me tell you a secret: the problems of your healthcare insurance system are not a worldwide phenomenon, nor an immutable fact of this universe. Perhaps the cure for cancer, if expensive, will not be easily available to the poorest Americans, at least initially (the cost will come down sooner or later). But that is a very different claim from "they'd never give it to you".

> Yes, I actually work in the medical industry. There is no hiding the cure for cancer.

There's no need to hide anything, it's just pay-walled (and it's not an hypothesis, most human beings on this planets cannot afford the SotA treatments for their cancer today).

burn

What makes you think we'll be able to afford them? You won't be making any money anymore, hope you've saved up!

> Machines owned by 10 people robbing us of the joy of discovery and the fruits of our labor... for what?

This happened to software engineers already. Mathematics isn't special.

Mathematics has it slightly worse, since math is a "closed system" that does not require running experiments, talking to customers, etc.

That said the software folks can teach the math folks a thing or two when it comes to dealing with grief I am sure.

> They certainly arent going to give you that cure for cancer, if it were to ever come.

Conspiracy bullshit. You cannot keep something like an effective cure for cancer under wraps. There is no plausible logic how that would not leak sooner or later.

Knowing is the easy part. An effective cure for cancer will probably be a procedure where you get your tumors sequenced, an AI model considers the unique genetic context and creates a specific treatment. Think CAR-T cell therapy or mRNA vaccines. Then this needs to be manufactured.

All of this means you will need to be rich or have your country invest lots of money into health care systems. In a world where humans don't provide economic value anymore, why would that be?

The cost of such therapy will inevitably go down over time.

Well rich folks using such services will eventually push the price down, however complex and ridiculous the actual process will be. Its not like they are immune of all these ailments, not yet at least.

The information needed to build a basic nuclear explosive device is rather easily available. Now go build one.

I am talking about an *effective* cure developed by AI. If curing cancer with it is as complex as building a nuclear weapon, then the cure might as well not exist.

> If curing cancer with it is as complex as building a nuclear weapon, then the cure might as well not exist.

They exist, I assure you!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_with_nuclear_we...

You don’t want to see Elon get to 100 trillion and start a sex slave colony on Mars? What are you crazy?

Trying to slow down this for the joy of discovery is a deeply anti-intellectual position. I think that position is similar to when everyday people get mad about the minor spending on the NSF, picking apart people who study beetles on Fox News with no context etc.

There are real safety concerns with AI that can be made very convincingly though.

I think I would feel a lot better if it wasn't a $15 million cannon being fired from a silicon tower inside of the labs across vast swathes of fertile ground that would otherwise be used to train budding mathematicians. For instance, if it was the budding mathematicians themselves who were making these discoveries using their own tools.

I feel something about human nature makes us treat joy of discovery, status, etc. as a source of energy and motivation. I hope we'll find other ways to keep some "strategic intellectual reserve" of mathematicians alive.

What if we just discovered an alien artifact with the next 200 years of math? I can see arguments to throw it away for safety, who knows if the aliens are getting us to nuke ourselves or whatever, but throw it away so a few hundred/thousand of the most elite thinking humans can have the joy of credit for discovering each thing?

If the argument is that we have discovered 200 years of math in 1 year that we might need to throw out for fear that blindly applying its incomprehensible results will lead us to ruin, then I would say: why not settle for 199 years of math in 1 year which can be verified by our human intellectual reserve that we will train on the remaining 1 year?

I never said they are trying. They already have.

>OpenAI trying to stiff him out of co-authorship

Did that actually happen? The emails that were originally released had OpenAI refusing to list him as a coauthor on OpenAI's paper but they suggested he should release what he already had done ahead of OpenAI's release. There was certainly nothing to suggest he should be robbed of credit for his own work.

Has anything new come to light since, or is this just another game of Chinese whispers?

And if he did release what he had, I imagine OpenAI would probably have cited him in their paper.

They refused to put him as a coauthor; which is… standard practice, because he wasn’t a coauthor.

I don't see a sense of optimism in this quote.

He's comparing it to "lot of incredible developments". Clearly he thinks this is one too!

Yes, it is incredible. But that doesn't mean it is cause for optimism.

That's your lack of optimism, not his.

No. I didn't say I wasn't optimistic, nor that I was optimistic, nor even that Alpöge was or wasn't optimistic. I just said that his statement about the current developments being incredible doesn't imply that he is expressing optimism.

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