Chance-Device

Would you prefer we leave it entirely to the AIs? That’s an option, probably the default option. If you’re opposed to it, then why advocate for it?

This is an overreaction. Yes, with AI we can all write our own features and bug fixes for open source, but there’s still community benefit in having a canonical version somewhere, rather than everyone writing bespoke solutions for themselves.

The story probably is being curated off the front page, but to be fair I understand the motivation. There aren’t many subjects that inspire as many high emotions as Israel. Everyone has strong options. The mods probably think it’s not worth the trouble to police the threads and they’re probably right. Nobody is going to change any minds in any of those threads anyway.

I can hear the desperation in your voice.

When the digital cameras first came out, they were pretty terrible. Low res, bad colors, small memory. By all rights the consumer should have taken a look at the difference in quality between film and digital and stayed with film. Certainly, if as was imagined in some circles, the average consumer was the kind of connoisseur that valued quality photographs.

The average consumer was not the kind of connoisseur that valued quality photographs. The average consumer wanted something cheap and simple that allowed them to take photos and skip bringing them in to the shop to have them developed. The average consumer wanted to have their photos on their computer without scanning them, and didn’t want to pay a Polaroid premium for instant shots.

Over time digital cameras got better and better until the technology was subsumed into phones. Few people are unhappy about how it went.

This is how these things go. An inferior good is made, competes with the incumbent on cost and convenience, and is improved over time to become the dominant kind of good. This is the definition of disruption. The software industry, after decades of doing the disrupting, is now being disrupted.

The consumer will be happy about it.

Sounds like you’re in denial about the impacts of AI.

Well I do assume lab automation in all the hard sciences. Social science already doesn’t reproduce so no difference there.

It will be absolute carnage when AI starts going over published papers and trying to reproduce results, and I mean across the board. Every field.

If you want to see paper retractions, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Haha. That’s almost verbatim what the guy said. Here, let me grab that for you:

> things that I do and that my colleagues do, this kind of like curiosity-driven, you know, applied math, computational physics type research has always been justified by, I would argue, intentionally blurring the line between what I would call, you know, science as product versus science as process

> science as product is very kind of clear-cut. It’s, you know, things like, you know, cure cancer, solve nuclear fusion, generate, you know, clean energy.

> And then there’s science as process, which is kind of the curiosity-driven stuff about, you know, like, “I want to understand protein folding,” or, “I want to understand, you know, turbulence,” or, “I want to understand quantum gravity,” or something. And broadly speaking, we have tended to justify the latter by kind of laundering it through the former

And the examples he gives are actually the more defensible ones, he talks about a friend of his working on some abstract algebra under the false guise of cryptography research later.

And it’s not just him saying it, this is simply true. He should be lauded for admitting it publicly, this is the only way any progress is made. At least, it used to be. Now it’ll be AI instead.

Actually yes, I think that AI will end up in a place where additional human effort, even at the highest level of suggesting what directions to look in, will become a rounding error compared to what the AI will achieve by itself.

So as measured by utility, I absolutely believe we don’t need humans doing science into the future. I’m sure people will continue doing it, but not for utility, for enjoyment - as a hobby. Probably we’ll all end up as dedicated hobbyists.

Nobody determined the usefulness of the internal combustion engine or the aeroplane after the fact. They were goals specifically worked towards. For every useful discovery that comes from this hobbyist approach there are far more that aren’t, and those would have been discovered during a goal orientated research program.

However, with AI it actually may become so cheap that the scattergun random approach becomes more viable rather than less. It’s when human time and resources are scarce that you need to optimise. The hobbyist approach may therefore ironically continue, but without the hobbyists.

I believe he now just leaves them in his truck and drives it a bit further each day.

Indeed. I wonder how much work it would be to make this antibiotic resistant. Then the Russians develop some bacteriophage that infects and kills the bacteria as their own cure.

> Do we currently have the ability to do targeted methylation or de methylation at sites in cells?

No, and you probably wouldn’t want it if you could. You don’t know what mutations are lurking in the genes that have been switched off or the consequences of turning them back on.

I’ve thought about this a bit, and what resetting the methylation map really requires, in addition to actually resetting that map, is resetting your genome to a known good state.

That’s pretty radical, but to selectively switch methylation on and off with precision you’re already talking about science beyond anything we have, featuring custom engineered constellations of proteins that unwrap your chromatin from around histones and then walk along it changing methylation state, then pack everything back.

And doing it for each cell type, without applying the wrong map anywhere.

And knowing what all the cell types and their correct methylation maps actually are.

And assuming that methylation isn’t used anywhere, for example in the brain, in a way we don’t expect.

And methylation isn’t the only kind of epigenetic modification.

So, if we’ve solved all of those problems, rebuilding your DNA to a clean, mutation free state at the same time should be a breeze.

We really do need AI for this if any of it is going to be remotely feasible.