For a while I've kept a list of the things that could be "good" swan events, but to be fair I didn't have "room temperature superconductor on that list" :-)
Other things that could happen:
1) Fully decoding the cellular mechanism of cells allowing for the curing of any disease, repairing any genetic disorder.
2) Commercially viable fusion energy. Will change a lot of things.
3) An AI subsystem with some reasoning ability (yeah, could go either way)
Etc.
Although I'm pretty sure there are plenty that many people can think of, so it doesn't really detract much from your point.
Shoutout to 50 things that made the modern economy, a great podcast/book.
Sorry not sorry if I just subjected you to the same.
It's an interesting and thought-provoking list though.
GPS, disposable razor, many of these are not impactful enough to be "black swan but good".
And things like clocks and batteries were slowly refined over many, many years, so they don't fit either.
For some reason, I'm not entirely willing to believe that my parents (who are still alive) had a less happy life than I have even though they didn't grow up with an iPhone. And it's not like modern conveniences have no downsides (e.g. increase in stress). That's not to say I would give up on these things readily, I'm just way too used to them.
I think probably most people could agree that treatments for diseases that regularly also affect young / middle-aged peolle are a good thing. It's hard to argue that someone in the prime of their life should die of some silly infection.
Language, standards, the internet, agriculture, glass, sunscreen, resilient rice, sterilization, human flight, spontaneous development of sentient life in the universe…
When you think about it all, you start to appreciate how miraculous things actually are.
Unless it's too comment on 'throwaway mentality', modern consumerism, etc., the book meaning 'made the modern economy' more literally/broadly than you're referencing it for here?
Why is disposable razor on the list but not electricity, computing, refrigeration, metallurgy, microscopy, or eye glasses?
Penicillin was the first highly effective AND mass producible antibiotic, though.
Also, tea making was a huge sanitary step forward.
More seriously AI has made lots of things better, it’s really the hype cycle that’s disappointing. More FPS in games just isn’t as exciting as self driving cars. But by the time you can buy a level 5 self driving car the technology will be pedestrian.
When I was a kid in the 90's I already enjoyed electricity and electronics and I would play with those low power incandescent lightbulbs powered by 9V batteries. They would generate a lot of heat and very little light, to the point that it wasn't easy to tell if it was on when the sun was bright.
With a modern LED and the same setup you could generate enough light to blind yourself.
LEDs are genuinely revolutionary in a way everyone just kind of overlooks.
There hasn’t been a full scale war between major powers since.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukraine-war-already-wit...
Yet all the major powers have launched multiple, lengthy full scale wars since.
So I would argue they are either neutral or massive negative.
Electric cars mainstream
City of Hope scientists develop targeted chemotherapy able to kill all solid tumors in preclinical research
Apparently. I'm not an expect, but it's what I have encountered elsewhere.
Still great news! But not quite as revolutionary as the headline implies.
City of Hope thinks they've found a chemotherapy that's "able to kill all solid tumors","in more than 70 cancer cell lines".[0]
According to the National Cancer Institute[1], there are "more than 100 kinds of cancer". They're listed here: [2] Some of those cancers are soft tissue, so they aren't affected by this treatment.
I didn't know what a cancer "line" was, so I looked it up. "Cancer cell lines are valuable in vitro model systems that are widely used in cancer research and drug discovery."[3] So, they're not cancers in people, but cell cultures they can test drugs on.
This probably doesn't give you much more information than you already have, based on what you heard elsewhere, but I learned enough to figure maybe it would help someone else, too.
Whether this'll work in people, I guess we'll find out when they start the Phase 1 clinical trial. If you, or someone you know think you might benefit from this, there is a link to sign up for Phase 1 trials.[0]
It appears to have worked in pre-clinical trials, so they have tested this to make sure it doesn't kill people outright, the same way it does cancer cells.[4]
[0]https://www.cityofhope.org/city-hope-scientists-develop-targ...
[1]https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/understanding/what-is-ca...
[2]https://www.cancer.gov/types
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00016-009-0006-9
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.ns.39....
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph241/yoon1/
https://www.chemeurope.com/en/encyclopedia/Muon-catalyzed_fu...
> Even if muons were absolutely stable, each muon could catalyze, on average, only about 100 d-t fusions before sticking to an alpha particle, which is only about one-fifth the number of muon catalyzed d–t fusions needed for break-even, where as much thermal energy is generated as electrical energy is consumed to produce the muons in the first place, according to Jackson's rough estimate
Yep, it's challenging. Maybe this rate can be improved by applying alternating voltage to reactor. Muons are charged particles, so they can be accelerated further. (Just idea)
Some of the “good” black swans at the top of my mind…
As for dictators: it's not like guillotines stop working.
What will keep dictators (if eternally young, or their offspring if not) in power forever is competent and obedient AI manning the police and army.
I can't agree. We can have eternal dictatorship now. Nothing prevents it except other people, therefore people will prevent eternal dictatorship just as now (with various results).
Anyway, Im ready to accept this risk.
We already see the advantage age provides when building influence for US politics.
If people could live for much longer then they’re likely disincentivised to procreate due to worries of overpopulation and then, in one way of thinking, you’re hypothetically depriving a line of offspring of lifetimes they’d otherwise have if you’d had what we consider a normal lifespan now.
Yes I realise there are probably an infinite number of takes on this, I’m just pointing out one possible way of looking at it for the sake of saying not all technological advances have universally positive outcomes.
That's all without even mentioning other benefits like cumulative knowledge of multiple lifespans being contained in one person allowing for new scientific breakthroughs.
5) programmable matter / nanobots - the applications of a swarm of nanobots or even microbots are pretty much endless.
Not the revolution people are claiming, but it's a huge gain nonetheless.
Considering that we already have a fusion reactor in the skies, I think that the room temp room pressure superconductor is the next best thing. Fusion is good but at this stage, the natural one will just do. Think global network of solar cells interconnected with LK-99.
The creation of a global electricity network perhaps also has some effect on global cooperation.
Now we just need reduce the use of fossil fuels (cars, aviation, heating, industry).
Honestly that doesn’t seem likely to be a black swan event. Not because it is never going to happen, more because it won’t be an event but a slow progression.
It is more likely that as we understand more and more we will be able to cure more and more. It is not like there is some silver bullet piece of research where sudenly we have “fully decoded the celular mechanism”. Plus even if we somehow suddenly and all at once atained all that knowledge (perhaps a flying saucer takes pitty on us and beams down a whole library documenting our cells) it would take a long time while we turn that knowledge into helpfull interventions. And even that progress would be multiple generations long.
It is how becoming a black-belt martial artist is not an “event”. You don’t go from zero to that in one night. It is more of a progression where every day you are about as proficient as you were the previous one, but maybe a tiny bit better. Just applied on a whole species level.
3) has already happened. The AI chat bots aren't very smart, but they're clearly capable of some degree of basic reasoning.
https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...
>Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor?
>We show that the [neuroscience experimental] approaches reveal interesting structure in the data but do not meaningfully describe the hierarchy of information processing in the microprocessor. This suggests current analytic approaches in neuroscience may fall short of producing meaningful understanding of neural systems, regardless of the amount of data.
https://www.cell.com/cancer-cell/pdf/S1535-6108(02)00133-2.p...
Not sure if there is a difference, for sufficiently abstract interpretations of “satisfy the input”
A classic tell of this is people handling out of bounds errors in loops by trying to randomly add or subtract 1 from their for-loop parameters.
I realized that they didn't have a mental model for what a loop did, they had simply memorized the syntax for a loop and were doing advanced pattern matching. Code repeats = write the for-loop syntax I've memorized. And then after seeing that fail with out of bounds exceptions, they learned a new rule: modify the loop parameters and see if that fixes the problem.
When I think about how I write code, or I compare their approach to the other cohort of students I saw, it's a different process. I see in my mind's eye a type of 'machine' that performs the actions that I want to take place. I simulate running that machine in my mind and tweak its design until it works the way I want it to. Only then do I think about syntax and try to translate what's already happening in my mind into source code.
I've seen people get shockingly far into software engineering careers using the pattern matching / guess and check approach. I've wondered if a lot of the handwringing you see on programming forums about the 'leetcode grind' is coming from people who do this pattern matching approach. To them it must seems like the only way to solve these problems is to simply train their internal pattern matching neural networks on huge amounts of examples.
The code that I see GPT generate looks eerily similar to what I saw from those programmers. And that makes sense because I think that functionally they're doing the same thing. Only GPT does it at a superhuman level.
That seems to me to indicate that there's something that at least some humans do with a mental model that our current LLMs lack. If someone figures out how to simulate those mental processes in a computer program I think we'll see a huge inflection point and that's what the original comment (as I read it) is referring to.
I feel our generation (I am in my mid-forties) lived through enormous technological advancements but not as many scientific breakthroughs as the previous generation. So maybe it is not surprising that we are suddenly more likely to have breakthroughs in basic science.
I hope there is a phase transition to science mode now, so we that have a chance to solve the hard pressing issues.
If free-form gene editing were developed today, you would see the elites using it to make themselves immortal, while denying the same to everyone else. If fusion power suddenly became viable, you would see the richest people using it to make themselves even richer, while cementing their stranglehold on vital infrastructure. And it should be obvious to anyone who has been paying attention during the past 3 years that artificial intelligence is above all else an instrument of control, and even in its infancy, access to it is unevenly distributed along the same strata of power that already existed before.
At this point, the only "black swan, but good" event that could happen is a cataclysmic reset of civilization that might somehow see a better phoenix rise from the ashes. Barring that, we're full steam ahead to a techno-totalitarian nightmare future.
A bit of history would do you wonders. Top-down control was the norm*. If it has changed, it’s less now.
* For 95% of the peasant/slave population
Sure, there were lords who claimed large parts of the population as their property. But they often didn't even have a complete list of the people they supposedly "controlled", nor did they have any insight or actual control over their private lives in the sense that modern nation-states do. Legal codes used to contain a few dozen criminal offenses in total – today, there are tens of thousands.
Invasive, pervasive, centralized, highly organized, and sophisticated top-down control of individuals is an entirely new phenomenon that is only made possible by cutting-edge technology in the first place. If you imagine past societies as forerunners to modern police states, you have a very distorted picture of history. Many of them did not even have anything like police to begin with.
Also, pedantic point, you keep referring to good and bad black swan events. I thought the definition of black swan didn't make any assumption about whether the impact is positive or negative? Only that has a huge impact (I haven't read Taleb's book yet, correct me if I'm wrong)
How do you build a warning system for a unsurvivable event, with not wittnesses? Eternal unease and anxiety, regardless of reality.
webster's dystopia definition is "of, relating to, or being an imagined world or society in which people lead dehumanized, fearful lives : relating to or characteristic of a dystopia"
Our civilisation is an energy-junkie who happened to stumble on a huge bag full of cash around 1860 and the discovery of oil distillation. Since then, we have been on a hallucinating trip, burning down our house in the process. Viable fusion is essentially another huge pile of cash being deposited right across the street, just 10 times larger than 2 centuries ago. There is no coming back after that.
With the exception of Avatar, is there any advanced fictional civilization that doesn't use vast amounts of energy in proportion to their tech level? I'd also point to the historical record.
Historical records tell us that energy consumption is a great indicator of civilization advancement, but so is territory. Now, the problem is that there is no further territory to acquire for us as we have pretty much exploited our planet to its bones.
Free cheap energy will just make the planet crumble under our weight.
We need a reduction of human impact on our planet, not an increase of it.
Likely a call out to global warming.
> how is that applicable to fusion tech?
One thing that is never really discussed in terms of fusion energy is what you will do with the heat generated from these processes as there is a theoretical maximum for how much heat the planet can dissipate.
Whether the poster is correct or not, its widely acknowledged that the ability to transition from gravity powered/wind powered energy to coal combustion fueled a great deal of the economic and technological improvements from the 1700s onward (we call it the Industrial Revolution).
And as technology is getting better, both of those outcomes become more probable.
no way, no how. there is every reason to believe that cells are irreducibly complex. we can understand parts in isolation, yes, but a full model of the cell (however that would look) is almost certainly beyond science and even if you had that good luck measuring the full state of a cell without destroying it
I would be curious if anyone with knowledge in the space could comment on whether or not LK-99 may get us closer to viable nuclear fusion?
My understanding is that magnetic field containment systems are at least part of the technical hurdles required to make fusion feasible.
2. Light year capable transport
3. Inertia dampers
4. Mass scale carbon capture technology
5. Robots to prepare space for habitation
6. World recognition to manage resources globally
one of these is not like the others. direct carbon capture works now with the slight caveat that we would have to build 10x our current power supply in fission plants to power them. coccolithophores are an appealing route in principle, but research into their lifecycle and use for sequestration would be a quotidian pursuit for thousands of labs around the world, given funding.
Do you mean communism?
I don't think they were implying communism. Which is good, because IME people on this forum can't have honest discussion or apply critical thinking in the vicinity of the subject. They start rhetoric-dumping and posturing and repeating tired arguments as if preventing thoughts about communism is their ticket to heaven. Sprinkle in a few posts positive-to-neutral on Marx to fuel the fire, and that's the recipe.
https://chat.openai.com/share/c1c779c7-3b5f-4ea7-a864-38561d...
The response you posted seems to be referring to various concepts from theoretical physics and philosophy, specifically the ideas of the Everettian interpretation of quantum mechanics, anthropic reasoning, and the Born rule. Let's break these down:
Everettian interpretation of quantum mechanics: Also known as the Many-Worlds interpretation, it suggests that all possible alternate histories and futures are real, each representing an actual "world" or "universe". In layman's terms, it's the idea that there could be countless parallel universes where every possible outcome of an event happens.
Anthropic reasoning: This is a philosophical consideration that observations of the universe must be compatible with the conscious and sapient life that observes it. In other words, our ability to exist and observe influences how we should interpret the universe.
Born rule: In quantum mechanics, the Born rule is a statistical law that connects the mathematical formalism of quantum theory to experimental observations. It provides the probability that a measurement on a quantum system will yield a given result.
The responder seems to suggest that in a universe with many possible futures (as the Everettian interpretation would suggest), we are more likely to observe "black swan" events that lead to more possible futures.
The idea here is that if an event significantly increases the number of possible futures (like a breakthrough that extends human lifespan), then it effectively increases the number of "observer-moments". In other words, more possibilities for observers to exist and make observations. According to anthropic reasoning, this could make these events more likely to occur than pure chance would predict, because we're only able to observe futures in which we exist.
This line of reasoning is highly speculative and philosophical in nature, touching on deep and unresolved questions in physics and philosophy. It's an interesting thought experiment, but it's important to note that this isn't widely accepted or proven in the scientific community as of my knowledge cutoff in September 2021.
There is a huge amount of what I think in unawarded debate about applying it to the past (IMO, it's very clear where it should be used), but applying it to the future is completely against any kind of logic.
It can certainly lead you to some pretty wacky-sounding conclusions (looking at you Frank Tipler) but I can’t see why it’s obviously wrong for future observers to deploy it in just the same was as we do.
EDIT: I continue the conversation with ChatGPT to try to poke holes in the argument if you’re interested: https://chat.openai.com/share/19871222-9810-4a25-9604-8e690b...
But yeah I suspect the people who are most excited about this news are fusion power engineers!
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-plasma-ph...
>2) Commercially viable fusion energy. Will change a lot of things.
How would that be any better than commercially viable fission breeder reactors (which seem far closer to reality than commercially viable fusion energy)?
Though there are genuine advantages: for as radioactive as the interior of a fusion reactor may get, if you cut power it'll just sit there safely doing nothing. No decay heat, no potential isotopes to leak - maybe a puff of tritium gas - but that's it. It is a technology that has a perfect control loop for safety because it can't self-sustain at all.
I think there should be a bigger effort to change public perception about nuclear fission reactors if we're on the cusp of what is effectively the equivalent of the dream of endless fusion energy in the latest generation fission breeder reactors.
If it's proven to be the case that P != NP, it would hardly change much on the grand scale of things as generally, that's what most people believe anyway. In particular, the world continues to function mostly in the same way (since, even if it was the case that P = NP, we haven't found any polynomial reductions yet, so we're effectively living in a P != NP world). Of course, for mathematics and CS, this would be huge, because the techniques used in a proof would likely be very interesting and novel.
If it's proven to be the case that P = NP, then it remains to be seen whether this knowledge can be turned into actually efficient algorithms (polynomial algorithms are not all efficient in practice). If that is the case, I think it might have more downsides than upsides, since all of cryptography would collapse.
>> 1) Fully decoding the cellular mechanism of cells allowing for the curing of any disease, repairing any genetic disorder.
-- so you want to cure aging then- how many billions of people you think can a planet with a 6k km radius sustain ?
You think Claus Schwabs of the world wont buy it out to keep it to themselves ?
>> 2) Commercially viable fusion energy. Will change a lot of things.
-- That will eventually happen, and electricity will be just as "expensive" as it is now, simply because the price of a product has nothing to do with its cost and everything to do with the purchasing power of its intended audience.
>> 3) An AI subsystem with some reasoning ability (yeah, could go either way)
-- No, its cant go either way, the power insatiable psychopaths in power will use it to maximize their power. Period. Its psychopath nature- for them its natural and perfectly normal. Until psychopathy is recognized as a disease and sick people are disallowed from positions of power, the world will continue to be an abusive place.
100%
If we had fusion tomorrow it would help decarbonise our grids, which is a great thing, but the consumer would see zero financial benefit. Companies would charge the same and make record profits.
This is literally happening right now! The market price of energy in Europe has dropped after a huge hike when Russia invaded Ukraine, but customer bills are still extortionately high
Doesn't seem that it would cure high speed lead poisoning. People will continue killing each other just as well.
0. LK99 is so obviously a fraud. They've been dicking around with this substance for 24 years.
1. some diseases will be possible to fix, like metabolic problems, but where structures are already formed in an adult organism this will be impossible. Like Autism. Go ahead, change every chromosome in every cell, the malformed brain structures will remain.
2. Sure there will be ignition, but the facilities will be wildly too expensive for commercial power.
3. will never happen with conventional computing hardware. Maybe if someone figures out how to grow actual neurons
