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.
ben_w · · focus · HN ↗
We can't even turn off the coal plants when the owners specifically want to because it's not making money, in part because the President thinks Global Warming is a hoax: <a href="https://www.utilitydive.com/news/washington-earthjustice-sue-doe-centralia-emergency-order-transalta/813754/" rel="nofollow">https://www.utilitydive.com/news/washington-earthjustice-sue...
Also, there's a whole bunch of companies pursuing space-based data centres, which I think are dumb for a lot of reasons, but not quite dumb enough to not be a threat in this kind of manner as a few thousand GPUs is entirely doable before anyone decides it's not value for money.
Also, we demonstrably have useless-to-just-bad monitoring in place, which is how all the things on <a href="https://www.felonybench.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.felonybench.com happened. That the companies could have done better, and should have done better, does not change the reality that they in fact did not notice until after the events.
Also, there's at least two companies putting these things in control of wet labs. Good news: they're currently too bad at this to pose a threat. Bad news: "currently" is doing the heavy lifting.
Also, there's a lot of people who are blindly using agentic AI and not checking anything, despite all the advice and case studies about why this is a bad idea and to not do that.
Also, there's a lot of people e.g. on Hacker News whose response to all the attempts to create guard rails on the AI's behaviour is to call this "censorship" or "a lobotomy"; and also a lot of people whose response to calls for regulation of the companies is that this is "regulatory capture". (Worse news: The US president has rejected calls to slow down AI, saying "whoever wins AI, wins").
> 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.
The number of people able to do so has likely gone up by a factor of 10x or so in the last decade. AI's ability to use tools on behalf of their users is a further amplifier on this, unless safeguards are in place. Bad news, "safeguards" is a pretty vague term, and vague platitudes are not enough.
More worrying is the possibility that some idiot will set biology challenges similar to the cybersecurity challenges which led to HuggingFace, with similar lack of oversight, and the agents will do much the same thing but with DNA/RNA-on-demand services. I really hope their equipment is better secured than HuggingFace was.
Good news: the agents in the HuggingFace incident did not act with what would be called destructive "intent" if a human did it. Bad news: they still did the things.
> "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.
No, they're not "just" chatbots. They're also tool users that can see.
Good news: yes, they can't fabricate robots. Bad news: Guess what Musk is trying to do. Good news: Musk's timelines are wildly overoptimistic.
> 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.
Bad news: We're really bad at properly air-gapping stuff. We only know about Stuxnet because it breached an air-gap. This kind of thing happens a lot, even for really important stuff.
> So I really just don't understand how people think AI will destroy the world.
Ultimately, all it needs for this is to do what it was told, instead of what was meant.
All humans acting perfectly would prevent all the bad outcomes I can think of, but (1) that never happens, and (2) "that I can think of" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
> Yeah I don't know why people are panicking about AI, if there's anything you should be panicking about it's global warming.
People can care about more than one thing.
Look, you're worried about climate change: AI appears to be quite effective at convincing people of stuff, just consider how bad it would be if all the people who get rich from greenhouse gas emissions outspend environmentalists on AI-driven PR/marketing.
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