Links for 2022-06-07
A list of reasons why AGI (artificial general intelligence) will kill you: “So far as I'm concerned, if you can get a powerful AGI that carries out some pivotal superhuman engineering task, with a less than fifty percent change of killing more than one billion people, I'll take it...Practically all of the difficulty is in getting to "less than certainty of killing literally everyone".” https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a-list-of-lethalities
I've made it a habit to think about this conundrum every time I look at the starry sky: Why can I see the stars? Why are they not surrounded by Dyson spheres? https://www.overcomingbias.com/2022/06/beware-cosmic-barriers-disasters.html
Glycine has been detected in interstellar space, and now more than 20 types of amino acids were found on an asteroid the very first time we brought back a sample bigger than micrograms. https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2022/06/9a7dbced6c3a-amino-acids-found-in-asteroid-samples-collected-by-hayabusa2-probe.html
Large language models will change science https://xcorr.net/2022/05/30/large-language-models-will-change-science/
"Teaching Models to Express Their Uncertainty in Words", Lin et al 2022 (finetuned-GPT-3 calibrated about answer correctness, w/'uncertainty' in embedding) https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.14334
“We observe a 23% increase in incivility [among American politicians] over a decade on Twitter… The rise was partly driven by reinforcement learning in which politicians engaged in greater incivility following positive feedback.” https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/19485506221083811
The Modern World Can't Exist Without These Four Ingredients. They All Require Fossil Fuels — “Life now begins (in maternity wards) and ends (in intensive care units) surrounded by plastic items made above all from different kinds of PVC: flexible tubes (for feeding patients, delivering oxygen, and monitoring blood pressure), catheters, intravenous containers, blood bags, sterile packaging, trays and basins, bedpans and bed rails, thermal blankets.” https://time.com/6175734/reliance-on-fossil-fuels/
"Global conservation efforts are often naive to the threats posed by significant growth in renewable energies. Production infrastructure (e.g. for wind and solar farms) has a significant spatial footprint and other environmental risks, but potentially more extensive are the direct and indirect consequences of associated mining activities." https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17928-5
An extremely lightweight drone that is based on the maple tree’s seeds weighs under 100 grams and can hover for 40 minutes. The drone is capable of carrying small payloads. https://techxplore.com/news/2022-05-tiny-drone-based-maple-seed.html
Ultra-Near-Termism: Literally An Idea Whose Time Has Come https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/LSxNfH9KbettkeHHu/ultra-near-termism-literally-an-idea-whose-time-has-come
The Third Age of JavaScript? https://thenewstack.io/the-third-age-of-javascript-an-update-from-reactathon/
This makes me curious about how those people on Mars would end up being dead. Would the AGI kill them first or would they run out of resources before it reaches Mars?
There is an awesome science fiction series about this which you can read freely here.
Is skin color the only attribute that allows us to tell apart different races? Take a look at these photos of albinos:
Could neural networks be trained to accurately predict ancestry from facial characteristics?
See also:
Medical AI systems can easily learn to recognize self-reported racial identity from medical images with high accuracy https://news.mit.edu/2022/artificial-intelligence-predicts-patients-race-from-medical-images-0520 (See also this older post: AI can trivially learn to identify the self-reported racial identity of patients to an absurdly high degree of accuracy: https://lukeoakdenrayner.wordpress.com/2021/08/02/ai-has-the-worst-superpower-medical-racism/)
244 genetic variants influencing differences in face shape between Europeans and East Asians have been discovered, and some differences are "caused by a directional selection, due mainly to a local adaptation in Europeans." https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-022-01038-7
Sketching someone’s face based solely on a DNA sample sounds like science fiction. It isn’t. Chinese scientists are trying to find a way to use a DNA sample to create an image of a person’s face. https://nytimes.com/2019/12/03/business/china-dna-uighurs-xinjiang.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share