Lifeboat Foundation

With the massive degree of progress in AI over the last decade or so, it’s natural to wonder about its future – particularly the timeline to achieving human (and superhuman) levels of general intelligence. Ajeya Cotra, a senior researcher at Open Philanthropy, recently (in 2020) put together a comprehensive report seeking to answer this question (actually, it answers the slightly different question of when transformative AI will appear, mainly because an exact definition of impact is easier than one of intelligence level), and over 169 pages she lays out a multi-step methodology to arrive at her answer. The report has generated a significant amount of discussion (for example, see this Astral Codex Ten review), and seems to have become an important anchor for many people’s views on AI timelines. On the whole, I found the report added useful structure around the AI timeline question, though I’m not sure its conclusions are particularly informative (due to the wide range of timelines across different methodologies). This post will provide a general overview of her approach (readers who are already familiar can skip the next section), and will then focus on one part of the overall methodology – specifically, the upper bound she chooses – and will seek to show that this bound may be vastly understated.

Part 1: Overview of the Report

In her report, Ajeya takes the following steps to estimate transformative AI timelines:

Tracking travel patterns of subatomic particles called muons helps reveal the inner worlds of pyramids, volcanoes and more.

Aulos Biosciences is now recruiting cancer patients in Australian medical centers for a trial of the world’s first antibody drug designed by a computer.

The computationally designed antibody, known as AU-007, was planned by the artificial intelligence platform of Israeli biotech company Biolojic Design from Rehovot, in a way that would target a protein in the human body known as interleukin-2 (IL-2).

The goal is for the IL-2 pathway to activate the body’s immune system and attack the tumors.

It took 20 years for Arkady Volozh to build Yandex into Russia’s Google, Uber, Spotify, and Amazon combined. It took 20 days for everything to crumble.

A comet discovered last July is fast approaching our part of the solar system and might reach binocular visibility (at least) by May 2022. It’s designated C/2021 O₃ (PanSTARRS). The comet will be emerging into our western evening sky at least by early May. The comet is currently passing close to the sun, and it might not survive that passage … but if it does, get ready! Charts below.

Comet PanSTARRS will come close to the sun, closer than the planet Mercury. Its closest point, called its perihelion, will come on April 21, 2022. It’ll sweep 0.29 astronomical units (AU) from our star (1 AU = 1 average Earth-sun unit of distance). So – given that Mercury’s sunny side reaches temperatures of around 750 to 800 degrees Fahrenheit (up to about 430 degrees Celsius) – you can see that Comet C/2021 O₃ (PanSTARRS) will really feel the sun’s heat.

That’s why Comet C/2021 O₃ might disintegrate, as some comets do, when nearest our star.

The 3D-printed containers keep a log of all break-in attempts, meaning your snail mail just got way safer.

Suppose you want to mail a court document to someone across the country—you don’t want anyone to see the secure information inside, of course. So, you seal it into a container that has special sensors built into its walls, and electronics that monitor the shield of sensors. Now, the container is armed and monitoring.

Continue reading “This ‘Tamper-Evident Container’ Snitches on Meddlers and Thieves” »

This technology has the potential to deliver value to billions of people.

Summary: Glutamate binds to the subunits of its receptor only in specific patterns. The findings upend previous belief that each subunit binds glutamate independently and points to a new level of complexity in neurotransmission and drug response.

Source: Columbia University.

One of the most important molecules in the brain doesn’t work quite the way scientists thought it did, according to new work by researchers at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and Carnegie Mellon University.

NEW ORLEANS— Donated immune cells mixed with a molecule that helps them home in on tumor cells have dramatically shrunk tumors in most of the 22 people with blood cancer who received experimental infusions. The results, reported yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), are a new twist on cell therapies that harness a patient’s own immune cells to treat cancer. The new treatment is simpler to make than other cell therapies for advanced lymphoma, or cancer of the lymph system, the study’s leaders say.

“It’s an interesting idea,” says hematologist and oncologist Jeffrey Miller of the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, who was a panelist at the plenary session where the work was presented.

CAR-T cells, immune cells genetically modified to carry a surface protein that helps them home in on cancer cells, are the best known cancer cell therapy. Although approved for some types of leukemia and lymphoma, CAR-T cells can cause serious side effects and must be custom-made from a person’s own T cells.