The idea that you can have autonomous cloud labs running experiments on a loop without human intervention, testing hypotheses, running the experiments, seeing the results, creating a new hypothesis, testing it and running it, and ultimately getting to a conclusion, that is in our sights.
I do think we should expect more speciation in the intelligences. Um like, you know, the animal kingdom is extremely diverse in the brains that exist and there's lots of different niches of of nature and some animals have overdeveloped visual cortex or other part kind of parts and I think we we should be able to see more speciation and um you don't need like this oracle that knows everything.
The only highly populated industrial country unable to trivially meet its electricity and synthetic fuel needs with solar alone is the United Kingdom, due primarily to a high population density and high latitude. The Nordic and Baltic countries are tiny by comparison. Among other problems, the UK needs to decide if it wants the future where energy is cheap and it is rich, or the future where energy is expensive and it is poor. If the former, it is time to get serious about large scale deployment of wind power, using home-grown vertically integrated technology at prices as low as $10/MWh.
While the fact that merely scaling up AI models often results in qualitative leaps in performance may seem empirically mysterious, in retrospect it should be seen as a rational necessity.
I think that the enshittification framework goes a long way to explaining it, moving us out of the mysterious realm of the 'great forces of history,' and into the material world of specific decisions made by named people – decisions we can reverse and people whose addresses and pitchfork sizes we can learn.
With silkworms, absolutely let's not modify it genetically. Let's not modify it genetically. And then some. Because why did we get there to begin with 4,000 years ago in the Silk Road? And we should never get to a point where we evolve life for the service of mankind at the risk of these wonderful creatures across the across the kingdom of life. I don't think about the same kind of ethical range when I think about bacteria.
Buroker is a reliable author of very fluffy mind candy, either science fiction or fantasy. A lot of her output is re-working material from identifiable prior art, without hewing so closely to the canon as to constitute fan fiction.
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