End Times: A Brief Guide to the End of the World: Asteroids, Super Volcanoes, Rogue Robots, and More by Bryan Walsh is a rather entertaining overview of the end. In the book, he describes the broad categories of how we could end it all for humanity.
I found the book to be well-researched (as far as I can judge) and it doesn’t go too far in putting a number on everything (e.g. comparing the different risks).
It also isn’t too focused on technological innovation, nor on stopping ourselves in our tracks and saying that innovation is bad.
Topics:
Asteroids (for the first time in history we might not be done for this time, but detection is still very hard)
Volcano (could help with climate change, but if it’s a supervolcano/eruption, then we’re royale screwed)
Nuclear (can still go wrong, difficult to estimate effects of nuclear winter, probably a small group would survive)
Climate change (happening, maybe innovate our way out of it, carbon capture)
Disease (more because of better connectedness, but fewer people die of them (better health), but…)
Biotechnology (… we could engineer one that both infects a lot of people, and then kills them all (or just a subgroup, reminds me now of Utopia (Channel 4 series))
Artificial Intelligence (if goes wrong, could be very wrong, but I’m somewhat convinced by David Deutsch that if we do it, we can only do it the right way, timeline unknown)
Aliens (where are they, but isn’t too important subject in the book)
Overall very enjoyable and well-written. If only someone had decided not to do the voice acting (my goodness).
Part III analyzes religion and its effects in today’s world: Does religion make us moral? Is religion what gives meaning to life? What should we teach the children? Dennett bases much of his analysis on empirical evidence, though he often points out that much more research in this field is needed.
He doesn’t take a hard stance (or at least not as far as I read it), but does make a great point/case for being more hostile towards religion (and teaching it to kids).
There are many more questions to be answered and I hope he has sparked some to go and find some.
The Redemption of Time by Baoshu (translated by Ken Liu) was an awesome end to the Three-Body series. I really loved how he (another writer) brought everything together and closed many loops in the original books.
Reviews online seem divided a bit more, and focus on how the story is told. I think I just really loved how things from far earlier came back and were used again.
10% Happier by Dan Harris is a meditation (ghehe) on meditation and how it has helped him. Although the book is fun to read/listen to, it provides little information per page/chapter. Recommended if you’re into biographies of this kind and fun description, but read a long-form article if you want to learn why meditation is all the rage.
Human Compatible by Stuart Russell is a great intro to where we are now with AI. It also lays out some of the problems and ways to tackle them.
I liked the book as a lay-person overview of where we are with AI. Stuart Russell does a great job of not looking too far ahead and also foreseeing some problems that we already have. There was no clear distinction between AI today and AGI, and that divide might be too technical/doubtful, but I (and Russell too) think the systems of today won’t get us to AGI.
“Russell goes over all the recent debates in AI – Facebook, algorithmic bias, self-driving cars. Then he shows how these are caused by systems doing what we tell them to do (ie optimizing for one easily-described quantity) rather than what we really want them to do (capture the full range of human values). Then he talks about how future superintelligent systems will have the same problem.”
In a way this is an analogy to a 4 year old, they will do what you tell them to do, but here are the first signs that they will do this literally and not per se as you intended them to do it.
“(from the book) The problem comes from confusing two distinct things: reward signals and actual rewards. In the standard approach to reinforcement learning, these are one and the same. That seems to be a mistake. Instead, they should be treated separately…reward signals provide information about the accumulation of actual reward, which is the thing to be maximized. “
This part highlights some of the work that has already been done on solving the ‘fuck-now-the-world-is-a-paperclip-problem’.
The article also looks at how algorithms (current day AI) is doing things wrong, but concludes that in general there isn’t much to worry about. For example deep fakes have been around for some year, it isn’t being used widely (but yes, there are examples, but the same goes for forging a signature).
Title: New GMO Mosquitoes Aim to Eradicate Malaria, But Could Be Disastrous
Go for the clicks XD Title is way too alarming (and expert they spoke to is from another field), but good explainer videos linked. Still not sure how fast this is going to happen, but why not.
One point I think about is that we also have gotten rid of mosquitos here in Europe, and our system didn’t break down. And from the series ‘Unnatural Selection’, I can also imagine that people who suffer from malaria really want this!
Title: How to Use Occam’s Razor Without Getting Cut
“Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.” And for scientists, “When you have two competing theories that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is better.“
A bit above my pay-grade, but ink-blots as an analogy for electrons with regard to the multiverse.
“So too the electron occupies many states simultaneously, but not all states can be observed simultaneously (again, to push another analogy: this is akin to the fact that you cannot observe many different times simultaneously. You see a discrete time on the clock, even though you know there must be a continuous number of possible times that have happened and will happen). “
“[U]nlike what you may have heard it is not the case that an electron can be simultaneously a wave and a particle all at once in a universe.”
Title: The Obesity Code: Unlocking the Secrets of Weight Loss
A great website that reviews health and nutrition books. This one gets a 60% score (meh), especially because of the low scientific accuracy, but ok healthfulness (if you follow the advice).
Title: Cancer mortality predictions for 2019 in Latin America
Just like the above one, linked from Future Crunch newsletter. Cancer mortality rates are falling.
“Between 1990 and 2019, mortality from all neoplasms is predicted to fall by about 18% in Argentina, 26% in Chile, 14% in Colombia, 17% in Mexico and 13% in Venezuela, corresponding to almost 0.5 million avoided cancer deaths. No decline was observed in Brazil and Cuba.”
Title: London Says Air Pollution Fell By Roughly A Third After New Emissions Rules
“According to the report, nitrogen dioxide pollution has fallen by 36% in the central zone since February 2017, when the city first announced a “toxicity charge” on older vehicles.”
Title: Maybe It’s Not YouTube’s Algorithm That Radicalizes People
“The paper, written by Penn State political scientists Kevin Munger and Joseph Phillips, tracks the explosive growth of alternative political content on YouTube, and calls into question many of the field’s established narratives. It challenges the popular school of thought that YouTube’s recommendation algorithm is the central factor responsible for radicalizing users and pushing them into a far-right rabbit hole.”
“Instead, the paper suggests that radicalization on YouTube stems from the same factors that persuade people to change their minds in real life—injecting new information—but at scale. The authors say the quantity and popularity of alternative (mostly right-wing) political media on YouTube is driven by both supply and demand.”
“Psychedelics have a remarkable capacity to violate our ideas about ourselves. Is that why they make people better?”
There isn’t a consensus about the ‘I’ and how our brains exactly work, there are many theories from different perspectives. Psychedelics might be a way to come closer to the truth.
“A possible solution comes from the predictive processing theory of cognition, the second set of principles we need to introduce. The details of the framework are still hotly debated, especially among its proponents. However, in broad outline, it views the brain as a prediction machine that models the causal structure of the world to anticipate future inputs. Any discrepancies between an expectation and an input take the form of an error signal that demands a response from the organism – either by updating the internal model, or acting to reduce the unpredicted input.” and “One startling consequence of predictive coding is that perception becomes little more than a kind of controlled hallucination. We do not experience the external world directly, but via our mind’s best guess as to what is going on out there.”
“There’s now considerable evidence about the patterns of brain activity that correspond to the hierarchical self-model. These neural correlates are implemented in certain brain circuits, in particular the salience network and the default mode network.” and “To simplify things a bit, we can say that the default mode network is frequently linked to the narrative self, while the salience network is associated with a more minimal, embodied self and its affective states.”
Let me stop quoting here, you should read the article if interested. The link to psychedelics is that they break the models or make them more open to new paths/interpretations. You will have another way of seeing yourself.
We are making explanations now, but before we didn’t have any, how and why?
One start is the Scientific Revolution, so what happened there (that lead to better explanations)? It isn’t that knowledge comes from the senses. It also isn’t induction. Scientific knowledge is not based on anything, it’s based on conjecture! and tested by observation. But this also isn’t all, we had conjecture and observations (e.g. greek myths why it rained).
“This easy variability is the sign of a bad explanation, because, without a functional reason to prefer one of countless variants, advocating one of them, in preference to the others, is irrational. So, for the essence of what makes the difference to enable progress, seek good explanations, the ones that can’t be easily varied, while still explaining the phenomena.”
“The search for hard-to-vary explanations is the origin of all progress. It’s the basic regulating principle of the Enlightenment. So, in science, two false approaches blight progress. One is well known: untestable theories. But the more important one is explanationless theories. Whenever you’re told that some existing statistical trend will continue, but you aren’t given a hard-to-vary account of what causes that trend, you’re being told a wizard did it.”
Title: Free Will / .. Consciousness, Creativity, Explanations, Knowledge and Choice
Another article from Brett Hall (I’ve been going through his website a bit). He argues for free will as something that is real and emergent.
He agrees there is no ‘naive/libertarian’ free will (that something from outside the laws of physics makes you ‘free’).
He also states that we humans are unique as ‘universal explainers’ or entities that can create explanatory knowledge.
“The creativity is a unique thing people have and other animals do not. So we “feel” consciousness in ourselves but we “observe” creativity in others. I postulate: Creativity (of the kind where people create explanations – create knowledge) is just the outward manifestation of an inner consciousness. What it “feels like” to be creative is “consciousness”.“
Hall also argues that our ‘self’ really is the person that is lost in thought, maybe even more than the meditator who ‘discovers’ himself.
An article about why Google has stayed relevant (and very profitable). One key point is just more ads in search results, especially on mobile. In the article the hotel listing companies are used as an example. And it shows how booking.com and Amazon find a way around it (get customers to come to them directly).
Title: Modern genetics will improve health and usher in “designer” children
A company called Genomic Prediction is letting people choose their babies (when doing IVF), based on disease and/or ‘positive’ traits. No CRISPR or anything like that, but selection. Also: designer babies.
“In 2007 he and his colleagues used models to show that for a condition with a prevalence of 10% in the general population, approximately 10,000 volunteers are required to identify the snps marking the 5% of those at highest risk of developing that condition.”
“In the end, then, it is generally a good idea to remember that human beings have already been optimised by a powerful agent called natural selection. Trade-offs between different pieces of physiology, even in domestic animals, will have been forged in the crucible of evolution and will generally be optimal, or close to it. Genetic tinkering may sometimes improve things. But by no means always.”
Title: The plant-based diet | Michael Greger, MD, | TEDxBismarck
Eat plant-based, the ones with complete cell walls.
Molecular Assemblies is trying to revolutionize synthetic biology. They want to write DNA molecules using enzymes. They have $12 million in funding, there are at least 7 other companies trying too.
“George Church, a geneticist at Harvard University who is a cofounder of both the Human Genome Project and GP-write, says chemical DNA synthesis methods generally induce an error every 1 in 300 bases. Error-correction methods can improve the figure to 1 in 10,000. When enzymes naturally copy a strand of DNA in cells, however, the error rate is close to one in a billion. But he agrees with Kosuri that no enyzmatic synthesis company has come even close to such low error rates.”
Title: Latest advances in aging research and drug discovery
This field is still young (as we all hope to stay), so much needs to be done before we can say that we can do intervention X to live 10 healthy extra lives.
One key idea from the paper is to put the focus on healthspan (instead of lifespan) and get support for those interventions easier.
Another one is that we need good markers of age(ing). If we know what reliably happens during ageing, we can see if interventions prevent/reverse this from happening.
Title: What We Can Learn From the Near-Death of the Banana
Bananas are (here) an example of how our system is quite fragile, so fragile that one disease could wipe out all banana’s (because 99% are genetically identical).
Maybe we can innovate our way out of this mess (genetic editing), but then buyers/sellers should want them.
Title: I Found Work on an Amazon Website. I Made 97 Cents an Hour.
So the average is more like $1.77, but yeah. And these are tasks mostly done by Americans. Not cool Amazon (but also showing that some people are willing to do this work for this wage).
“Mechanical Turk is now one of a handful of big players in the field known as crowdwork or microwork. (One crowdwork company, Prolific, used by academic researchers, enforces a minimum wage: $6.50 an hour.)” (better)
The article continues to list why some people ‘turk’, and it’s rather depressing (e.g. to pay for insulin).
The customers range from universities and NYtimes (where this article is published) to businesses that need transcribing of business cards.
In the end, it could be a good practice, but then I think it should be used mostly as opportunity by people from countries with lower wages.
Title: Heliogen’s new tech could unlock renewable energy for industrial manufacturing
“At its core, Heliogen is taking a well-known technology called concentrated solar power, and improving its ability to generate heat with new computer vision, sensing and control technologies, says Gross.” (also backed by Bill Gates)
Title: Terminally ill scientist ‘transforms himself into world’s first full cyborg’
(note that the ads on this website are just too much) Good story about how a doctor has given his body many upgrades/adjustments to live longer and thrive.
Title: TEDxBrussels – David Deutsch – The Unknowable & how to prepare for it
If we look towards the future, we will become worse at predicting specific events (because of our creativity and faster innovation). We can use general explanatory knowledge to prepare for the future (which reaches beyond the planning horizon).
Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas R. Hofstadter is a tome of a book. As of writing this intro, I’m only at 1/7th of the way there.
In the intro, he writes that the book is about the question: how can life exists from inanimate matter (no life). Here on planet earth, it started quite quickly after the conditions were right. What makes it so.
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky is an interesting sci-fi book that takes the human race towards a new planet. Alas, the humans don’t really get to land and some other species gains consciousness over time.
I really enjoyed the book and can recommend it as a good sci-fi book without much technology/universe building.
The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli is a lucid description of what time is and how it flows. It is based mostly on our best (and consensus) understanding of physics but also interlaced with some conjecture and his own work.
One of the main ideas is that time is not set as one moment, it depends on where you are (and how quickly it goes by depends on how far away we are from mass, e.g. the earth).
