Loss of cell identity drives human aging: Two new papers
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Loss of cell identity drives human aging: Two new papers
Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
dyauspitr · · focus · HN ↗
Do we currently have the ability to do targeted methylation or de methylation at sites in cells?
SlightlyLeftPad · · focus · HN ↗
[0]: <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/tracybrower/2024/09/15/how-being-hopeful-reduces-stress/" rel="nofollow">https://www.forbes.com/sites/tracybrower/2024/09/15/how-bein...
amelius · · focus · HN ↗
missedthecue · · focus · HN ↗
I think the former group almost certainly outweighs the latter group at least in the Western hemisphere, but I know the Western hemisphere has been steeped in a deep malaise of anti-optimism for several decades preceding AI to begin with. That it's almost a game to identify all the ways anything new might be bad, rather than celebrating the obvious ways they are good. And this penchant invariably biases their developing opinions of all new technology, be it AI or anything else.
DennisP · · focus · HN ↗
Space, nuclear fusion, advanced fission, the internet since about 1993, blockchain, anti-aging, I've been a big fan of all of it. But I've read the AI safety arguments and seen what a lot of researchers say about it, and I'm seriously worried.
sfn42 · · focus · HN ↗
And then there's fears that someone might use it to engineer a super virus or something like that, which isn't really a new worry. People could do that before too, but it turns out creating a global epidemic isn't really a thing very many people want to do, and it's harder than most people imagine.
"AI" are just chatbots. They can't fabricate robots to take over the world, in fact they have very limited reach into the real world altogether. Sure maybe you could envision some kind of malicious hacking, sabotaging some industrial control system to create a disaster of some kind or whatever but that was a worry before AI too which is why most critical systems like this are air gapped and have safety mechanisms.
So I really just don't understand how people think AI will destroy the world. And I think its especially frustrating to see all this energy going into AI-related despair when climate change actually is on the brink of actually destroying the world in a completely real and concrete way, but most people don't give a shit about that. Some people will say it's natural cycles or some other variant of denying the problem, others will say it's not a big deal, yet others will say science will solve it, we'll capture the carbon or spray aerosols into the atmosphere to stop the warming etc.
And they're all wrong. It's not natural cycles - shocker, climate scientists know about natural cycles. It is a huge deal. We're at +1.5c now and it's already having huge compounding effects. Warming is accelerating, we'll likely be at +3c in just a few decades. That is already approaching apocalyptic levels of warming.
Carbon capture is a joke, there is absolutely no way carbon capture solves climate change. We would need tens or hundreds of thousands of carbon capture facilities all over the globe, it would be the largest engineering project in history by orders of magnitude. There would be many times more capture facilities than power plants. Nevermind the energy, concrete, chemicals etc required to build and run all of them, not to mention actually deal with all that carbon they would be capturing. It's not feasible.
Climate engineering would be highly experimental, and it would also be a gargantuan project requiring enormous economic investment. It would likely have huge unintended consequences, and it might not even work. It might also have different consequences for different nations creating huge political issues - what if a country does climate engineering that's good for them but disastrous for their neighbours? Is it even possible to do climate engineering in a way that isn't bad for someone? Is it even possible/feasible to do it on the scale necessary to actually combat global warming?
Yeah I don't know why people are panicking about AI, if there's anything you should be panicking about it's global warming.
DennisP · · focus · HN ↗
I'm not concerned about today's AIs. But three years ago they couldn't add numbers accurately and now they're doing world-class mathematics. If it gets much smarter than us, then it will run the world economy, because anyone who doesn't use it to run things will be outcompeted by those who do. At that point we'll have lost control.
sfn42 · · focus · HN ↗
If we had control we would have looked at the situation and gone balls deep into nuclear and other green alternatives many decades ago.
dahart · · focus · HN ↗
“We” certainly have had control the whole time, “we” have been consciously creating greenhouse gas emitting machines while knowing the consequences. It is the economics. The delay in environmental consequences combined with the immediate financial benefits of easy power & transportation made the choice too tempting for some.
The kind of control you’re talking about is self-control. We’ve always had the option to stop our bad behavior, and we chose not to. And we still have the option to exercise self-control with AI. The question is whether that option might disappear soon. Can AI get good enough that we will actually lose the choice to regulate ourselves?