You might be surprised at how little of the body still functions without brain function, well, some bits of the brain, including basic homeostasis and immune system function.
Yeah, sure. There are probably going to be only a few tens of thousands "unknown unknowns" side-effects but hey, who cares? We will figure them out, we are out of the stone age cave now!
I often find my self conflicted over Gattaca, because I much prefer Ian banks vision of the future, “beauty and intelligence should be a basic human right through technology” yet Gattacas dystopian vision is much more likely what we are going to get thanks to capitalism.
Also with imperfect technology, options like these will also do a lot of damage to human genetic variability, till some fun pathogen comes and has words with us over the matter.
Humanity is getting better at combating pathogens to the point we wouldn't have to rely on genetic diversity for resilience, additionally such treatments could be given to those already born.
It's not like human variability would be lost forever, we can make and keep copies.
Gattaca's core message is that there is no gene for the human spirit, but in reality there probably is, behavior is highly genetic. Also consider that Vincent could have had a heart attack during the mission, that would put his actions into a rather selfish light.
My optimistic view is that an improved understanding of the mechanisms would lead to direct medical interventions, in such a world Vincent would have been able to have his heart properly treated.
I have ME/CFS from a genetic condition and I treat it by suppressing IL-1B cytokines with diet and medication. I was lucky enough to be able to figure this out and I would like more people to have this knowledge.
I don’t disagree, and I also have some unique genetic conditions that I won’t get into, they are depressing. However I will say that humanity is peppered with radical choices that did a lot of damage because we “thought” we understood, and we are barely scratching the surface of how life really works, epigenetics alone is barely explored. There likely is no gene for the human soul, there likely is an incredibly complex systemic interaction…
Think of how complex LLMs are and yet their emergent behavior is based on a few very simple rules and an easy to understand loss function. Due to the emergent behavior things can have the appearance of being far more complicated than they actually are. It is hyper-dimensional and granted humans are not good at that but computers are and some humans are capable of using computers as a tool in that way.
>> The Fourth Law of Behavior Genetics, as proposed by Chabris, Turkheimer, and others, states that a typical human behavioral trait is associated with many genetic variants, each accounting for a very small percentage of the behavioral variability.
I think a big part of this assumption is the use of Linear Regression in GWAS studies, the problem is that SNPs have a multicollinearity problem where the inputs are not independent from each other. That the results of these studies reflect that assumption should be of no surprise. I think using better math this stuff is more easy to detect.
So… I hope your version of trying to understand life is a fruitful path, however my understanding of the underlying biomechanics, messy, deeply “physics” based and 3d, leaves me with confused more often than not. The behaviour is emergent but not out of simplicity.
In a similar analog to machine learning there are fundamentalists approaches and there are empiricists approaches. Most medical researchers need to be able to defend their work and it’s easier to defend fundamentalist ideas - but they spend so much time arguing over minutia that they often miss the forest from the trees. Not to say that such work is unimportant but the academic environment is rather suboptimal in driving research direction. It’s hard to navigate uncertainty when deviations from what is formally known are heavily punished.
Take for example that we can read DNA and therefore have a list of every bioactive peptide that the body produces, we also have WGS so we can identify people with changes to these peptides. By using algorithms on these populations we can understand quite a lot about what these peptides do without understanding the mechanism by which they do it.
I'm thinking it will be a vaguely more Hyperion vision with different groups and different strategies. After a few centuries some humans which are barely recognizable and some humans who are highly conservative and probably a lot in between.
Basically I think humans taking our genetic code into our own hands intentionally is inevitable and the question shouldn't be whether it should be allowed or not but instead how do we do this wisely and when are we ready for which steps.
It interacts nearly like a human, can and does interrupt me once it has enough context in many situations, and has exceedingly low levels of latency, using for the first time was a fairly shocking experience for me.
I don’t mean to say Islam is perfect, very little is, but it does have a lot of due process and it hardly started as a death cult…
I’d spend some time researching due process in shariah and try to remember that in many ways Islam was highly innovative for its era in combining a legal code with its religion in a very integral manner. Now later Islam in particular othoman Islam was indeed somewhat warped and coupled with an expansionist empire, kinda like Christianity, and is another game altogether.
Being someone who has paid a lot of attention to Ghibli, I wouldn’t say their style was well established 35-40 years ago…
There is considerable evolution and refinement to their style from Naushika, to later works, both in the artistic style and the philosophical content it presents.
I think allowing it to be fair game would have destroyed something quite beautiful that I’ve watched evolve across 40 years and which I was hoping to see the natural conclusion of without him being bothered by the AI-fication of his work.
Yeah, of course their style isn't static, but I was taking Kiki's Delivery Service (1989) as a point where much of their visual style was pretty well-established.
I agree that some of his main elements were relatively set by then but others continue to evolve.
Personally I feel that his work is entirely fair game after his death, by which I mean to say after the end of his journey that he has poured his entirety into, in terms of value to humanity and respect to him for that value I think it’s reasonable to respect his wishes during his lifespan.
It often surprises me that people think Tesla's sensor suite is sufficient for safe self driving, with quotes like "well humans rely on vision."
Human vision is nothing like the cameras on a Tesla. Our eyes have far more advanced systems including the ability to microscan, pivot, capture polarisation, and a much more sophisticated field of depth. Frankly, current generation cameras are in many ways far more primitive than human eyes. And that's not even considering the over 20% of our brain mass dedicated to post processing.
All because Musk wants to pad his profits and keep the hype without paying for a lidar.
Usually when someone brings up the laws of robotics I like to point out that they were mostly designed as an interesting example as to how direct instructions that seem clear to people would mostly result in perverse instantiation of AI especially if the AI lacked an emotional/contextual subsystem. They were also written to make for interesting scifi books.
I adore the lights by your company, though they seem to be incredibly hard to source in general except for high end architectural projects. I wish there was an easier way to order them directly for DYI inclined engineers willing to pay the price.
its tricky to compare because ours are designed to be integrated into a space and create the appearance of window with a big focus on high CCTs (2200k-40,000k) which relocates the color and spectrum of a blue sky using up to 180W. This lamp seems to be focused on lower CCTs (1800k-5000k) at high powers (750w is a lot of heat to dissipate). Both have similar Rf and CRI but we maintain great Rg and CRI across the whole range.
The one you linked is a stand alone lamp and they seem to focus on red light which I don’t quite understand. Red light (or very low CCTs) is used for skin therapy but typically requires direct exposure to the skin because irradiance levels need to be super high for that - from my understanding you wouldn’t have any benefit from a red lamp even at 750w. But blue light does can have lots of health benefits at low levels (search for ipRGCs).
So much of the conversation is about profit and economic viability of landing raw materials on Earth under current market conditions... While I don't begrudge that, I think the true game changer for orbital mining is how greater material availability can open brand new frontiers, in other words, make the pie larger, not just compete and change the balance of the existing pie.
I long for arcologies, orbital elevators, orbital habitats. Things that only become truly possible with automated manufacturing and a plunging of energy and material costs by orders of magnitude.
https://www.theverge.com/news/646797/nhtsa-staffers-office-v...
When regular in theory bipartisan mechanisms fail, protest is all you have left.
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