Links for 2022-07-04
“I went through all 1,566 pages of the 1980 Sears catalog to find items I could easily compare with present-day products. Almost every item I looked at saw significant declines in the hours of work required it buy it.” https://fullstackeconomics.com/24-charts-that-show-were-mostly-living-better-than-our-parents/
"I found that it is not plausible that lithium plays a major role in the obesity epidemic, and that a lot of the claims the SMTM authors make about the topic are misleading, flat-out wrong, or based on extremely cherry-picked evidence." https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7iAABhWpcGeP5e6SB/it-s-probably-not-lithium
Brain-Signal Proteins Evolved Before Animals Did https://www.quantamagazine.org/brain-signal-proteins-evolved-before-animals-did-20220603/
Stopping Memory Loss: Blood Vessel Breakthrough Major Step Towards Alzheimer’s Treatment https://scitechdaily.com/stopping-memory-loss-blood-vessel-breakthrough-major-step-towards-alzheimers-treatment/
“At the time of his arrest, Ames had compromised more highly classified CIA assets than any other officer in history until Robert Hanssen's arrest seven years later in 2001.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldrich_Ames
“Hanssen sold thousands of classified documents to the KGB that detailed U.S. strategies in the event of nuclear war, developments in military weapons technologies, and aspects of the U.S. counterintelligence program.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hanssen
“Klaus Emil Julius Fuchs was a German theoretical physicist and atomic spy who supplied information from the American, British and Canadian Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union during and shortly after World War II.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Fuchs
“It was considered one of the CIA’s worst failures in decades: Over a two-year period starting in late 2010, Chinese authorities systematically dismantled the agency’s network of agents across the country, executing dozens of suspected U.S. spies.” https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/08/15/botched-cia-communications-system-helped-blow-cover-chinese-agents-intelligence/
Recent human evolution: A gene variant that aids metabolism of plant food into essential fats is much higher in traditionally vegetarian Indians. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Positive-Selection-on-a-Regulatory-Polymorphism-in-Kothapalli-Ye/ea50f42c38110d8d3da98e13c10a1830a73446ea?p2df
Reproducible between-person brain-behavior associations DO NOT always require thousands of individuals https://psyarxiv.com/sfnmk
DeepMind's Demis Hassabis:
“[Gato] itself can be scaled up massively more than we've done so far, and obviously we're in the middle of doing that.”
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gfr50f6ZBvo&t=358s
Note: Gato is a scalable generalist agent that uses a single transformer with exactly the same weights to play Atari, follow text instructions, caption images, chat with people, control a real robot arm, and more: https://dpmd.ai/Gato
More AGI predictions from Alphabet's DeepMind: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SbAgRYo8tkHwhd9Qx/deepmind-the-podcast-excerpts-on-agi
“Every year [the number of people who roll their eyes at the notion of AGI] becomes less.”
“I always felt that somewhere around 2030-ish it was about a 50-50 chance. I still feel that seems reasonable.”
“I think that [AGI] it's coming relatively soon in the next you know–I wouldn't be super surprised–in the next decade or two.”
That the singularity is near is now an expert position rather than a fringe futurist prediction.