“The first step is to tone down the prophecies of doom and switch from panic mode to bewilderment. Panic is a form of hubris. It comes from the smug feeling that one knows exactly where the world is heading: down. Bewilderment is more humble and therefore more clear-sighted. Do you feel like running down the street crying “The apocalypse is upon us”? Try telling yourself, “No, it’s not that.Truth is, I just don’t understand what’s going on in the world.”
— 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018)
(AP) “The scientist who won the race to deliver the first widely used coronavirus vaccine says people can rest assured the shots are safe, and the technology behind it will soon be used to fight another global scourge — cancer.
The vaccines made by BioNTech-Pfizer and U.S. rival Moderna uses messenger RNA, or mRNA, to carry instructions into the human body for making proteins that prime it to attack a specific virus. The same principle can be applied to get the immune system to take on tumors.
“We have several different cancer vaccines based on mRNA,” said Tureci, who is BioNTech’s chief medical officer.
Asked when such a therapy might be available, Tureci said “that’s very difficult to predict in innovative development. But we expect that within only a couple of years, we will also have our vaccines (against) cancer at a place where we can offer them to people.”
Before you say, impossible, consider that the best scientific minds in the world were certain it was impossible to create a COVID-19 vaccine in less than a year.
I’ve long believed technology would be our salvation. We’re not going to become better, more enlightened people. But our tech will get better and better, despite the efforts to “make America great again.” This NYT op-ed reinforced that (and made me feel good). Like all human progress, this will come with difficulties:
“What happens to people who work on ranches if labs take a significant share of the market? The political difficulties will be complicated by the fact that the people who will profit from these high-tech industries tend to live in the highly educated blue parts of the country, while the old industry workers who would be displaced tend to live in the less educated red parts.”
Like your mom told you: Study hard and stay in school.
It’s impossible for me watch this and not believe we’ll see a day when it will be nearly impossible to distinguish between the best robots and humans. Oh sure, you be able Turing Test them and know which is which. But they don’t need to be human like to be very useful to humans.
Could one of these clean the hospital room of a COVID patient? Disarm that camper bomb in Nashville? Will one of these guys take me upstairs to my office when I’m no longer able to climb the stairs.
You an go all RoboCop and Terminator on this but I choose to believe we’ll find more good uses than bad. And perhaps the Boston Dynamics guys can build in some failsafes for when they’re misused.
PS: This video has been viewed almost 9 million times in the last 24 hours.
I’d like to live long enough to have a chat with an AI that:
Because there is no one who has or will get to know me that well. What would it be like to interact with an intelligence that “shares” those experiences? I cannot imagine.
Near the end of the video there’s a reference to presentism and eternalism.
“Philosophical presentism is the view that neither the future nor the past exists. In some versions of presentism, the view is extended to timeless objects or ideas (such as numbers). According to presentism, events and entities that are wholly past or wholly future do not exist at all. Presentism contrasts with eternalism and the growing block theory of time, which hold that past events, like the Battle of Manzikert, and past entities, like Alexander the Great’s warhorse Bucephalus, really exist although not in the present. Eternalism extends to future events as well.” (Wikipedia)
Most of my reading (and many hours of meditation) makes me lean toward presentism. It’s always now. But –as suggested in the video– physicists insist the math argues for eternalism. And I’d kind of like for that to be “true” as well. Perhaps both can be true, depending on what time it is.
“A new study from psychologists at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario Canada reports observations of the transition from one thought to another in fMRI brain scans. Though the researchers don’t detect the content of our thoughts, their method allows them to count each one, and they say we have about 6,200 thoughts per day. The researchers refer to them as “thought worms.”
“We had our breakthrough by giving up on trying to understand what a person is thinking about, and instead focusing on when they have moved on. Our methods help us detect when a person is thinking something new, without regard to what the new thought is.”
[Repeat]
The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly (2016)