Links for 2022-04-09
This might quite literally be humanity's final decade and almost nobody even knows about it. Normies who only read what prestigious newspapers and journals highlight for them won't realize the importance of these developments before the nanobots start converting the hemoglobin in their arteries into computronium. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wrkEnGrTTrM2mnmGa/it-s-time-for-ea-leadership-to-pull-the-fast-takeoff-fire
“Time Jump” by 30 Years: Old Skins Cells Reprogrammed To Regain Youthful Function — ‘Our method rejuvenated multiple cellular attributes including the transcriptome, by around 30 years as measured by a novel transcriptome clock. The epigenome was rejuvenated to a similar extent.’ [Paper] [Press report 1] [Press report 2]
Intro to hacking with the lambda calculus — “This post is about lambda calculus. The goal is not to do maths with it, but rather to build up definitions within it so that we can express non-trivial algorithms easily. At the end we will see a lambda calculus interpreter written in the lambda calculus, and realise that we're most of the way to Lisp.” https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/D4PYwNtYNwsgoixGa/intro-to-hacking-with-the-lambda-calculus
Download for free (only available for a few days): Greg Restall, Proofs and Models in Philosophical Logic https://www.logicmatters.net/2022/04/07/greg-restall-proofs-and-models-in-philosophical-logic/
Want general AI? You need to incorporate symbolic reasoning: …LSTM inventor lays out a route to build general intelligence… https://m-cacm.acm.org/magazines/2022/4/259402-toward-a-broad-ai/fulltext
Language models are about to get a whole much better without costing more to develop https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/midXmMb2Xg37F2Kgn/new-scaling-laws-for-large-language-models
“In simple great filter model, planet achieves sequence of hard steps before deadline, & are roughly equally spaced in time. New analysis shows set-back & dead-end processes makes hard steps cluster more closely, allowing more hard steps in Earth history.” https://overcomingbias.com/2022/04/great-filter-steps-with-set-backs-dead-ends.html
Fat Shaming Kids in Singapore https://adriandsouza.substack.com/p/fat-shaming-kids-in-singapore?s=w
This Startup Wants to Kick-Start a Molecular Electronics Revival — “The new vision, shared by Roswell and other on-chip molecular technology makers, is of biosensors that would enable people to check in on biomarkers like vitamin levels or evidence of an infection with only a little more hassle than it now takes to check their heart rate on a smartwatch. In Roswell’s case, thousands of biosensors could detect different molecular interactions simultaneously, and the chips would be disposable.” https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/03/31/1048672/roswell-molecular-electronics-revival/
Boston Dynamics’ “Stretch” robot hits production, and it’s already sold out https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/04/boston-dynamics-stretch-robot-hits-production-and-its-already-sold-out/
"in 2021 … 18 companies worldwide had received a total of $1.9 billion in funding … Of all the companies dealing in nuclear fusion surveyed, 15 were founded in the last decade and 12 over the previous five years." https://www.inverse.com/innovation/fusion-clean-power
The dark matter of the brain. Electrical synapses – omnipresent and yet hardly explored https://www.mpg.de/18511035/0405-psy-the-dark-matter-of-the-brain-155111-x
DARPA Kicks Off Program to Explore Space-Based Manufacturing https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2022-03-23
“The Ten-Day War (Slovene: desetdnevna vojna), or the Slovenian War of Independence (slovenska osamosvojitvena vojna),[5] was a brief armed conflict that followed Slovenia's declaration of independence from Yugoslavia on 25 June 1991.[6] It was fought between the separatists of the Slovenian Territorial Defence and the Yugoslav People's Army.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten-Day_War
Bucha is worse than initially feared. Russian soldiers there used the city as an arena for a depraved blood sport of torture, execution and mutilation. As investigators sweep through to process the bodies, that cruelty is coming into focus. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/04/06/bucha-barbarism-atrocities-russian-soldiers/?itid=hp-top-table-main
In case you do not yet believe that transformative artificial intelligence is close enough to be decision-relevant, can you name some specific breakthrough that would convince you otherwise?
Note that this must be something that does not yet constitute a transformative breakthrough itself but which suggests that such a breakthrough is near enough in time to affect your plans and behavior.
By "transformative", I mean something that will fundamentally alter the whole socioeconomic fabric of civilization.