A lengthy overview of the implications of ML/AI to biology and drug discovery came out yesterday, and while I appreciate its enthusiasm and breadth, the answer to the question posed in the summary — What if this time is different? — is, sadly, no, probably not.
So let me see if I have this straight:
If artificial general intelligence is possible, [Note: For an explanation for how AI differs from AGI I recommend this short interview with David Deutsch. ] odds are that it will emerge in this decade. Determining whether that is good or bad I will leave as an excercise to the reader.
P.S. While getting the links for this post I came upon a WaPo article which came out today and devotes a single paragraph to the potential harms of AI:
Some AI ethicists fear that Big Tech’s rush to market could expose billions of people to potential harms — such as sharing inaccurate information, generating fake photos or giving students the ability to cheat on school tests — before trust and safety experts have been able to study the risks. Others in the field share OpenAI’s philosophy that releasing the tools to the public, often nominally in a “beta” phase after mitigating some predictable risks, is the only way to assess real world harms.
This is true, as things stand now. Wouldn’t it be nice if it stayed that way.
…and the scary/great thing about middle age is that you forget that you have, in fact, made a blogroll not two years ago, listing amongst others the two blogs included in your lamentation about not having a blogroll.
In other news: the old blog is now transferred to micro.
From my inbox, regarding enterprise software with enterprise price:
The Zoom link is now in the meeting workspace and you will need to copy and paste it into your web browser. Company name redacted is working on a hyperlink but that functionality is not yet available.
!?!
The great/scary thing about the internet is that for any fleeting thought I have, there is somone who has ruminated on the matter long and hard and made their ruminations available online. Gwern comes to mind, but also Gellman on statistics, and many others. Time for a blogroll?
If you are giving a pre-recorded talk at a “hybrid” scientific conference, you can count on the number of people listening to you being functionally zero. Some may take photos of your slides, your face included.
Among the few Latin phrases I listed yesterday, I’ve somehow managed to miss my favorite: Ars longa, vita brevis.
Comes to mind each time I glance at my bookshelf.
I am sure that Sofa is a fine, artisanal app, lovingly crafted by the best designers and software engineers, and I would never ever fault anyone for using it…
…but I get an allergic reaction when someone suggests I “organize my downtime”, and a strong urge to say Organize this!
Serbian educational system in the 1990s and early 2000s did not get many things right, but the one thing it did was to introduce Latin in high school [Note: The gymnasium, to be more precise, or what is a lycée in France and I guess prep school in the US. And while I don’t think it has the same negative connotations in Serbia and France as it does in America — lycées and gymnasiums being as public as the other high schools — that may just be cluelessness on my part. ] and continue it in medical school. In retrospect not nearly enough, but what little of it we had seems to have stuck. I am therefore always surprised by my American colleagues not having a clue about what some or any of the bellow mean.
Some of these have been repeated so often that they are part of the popular culture. I would expect gamers and fans of sci-fi to be familiar with Deus ex machina, and connoisseurs of expensive watches should have heard about Festina lente. To be clear, I’ve maybe heard of… 30% of what’s on this Wikipedia list. Looking at it, American lawyers should know more Latin that the doctors, but is that actually the case?
The beginning of the year was busy enough for a short commentary I co-athored to come out without my noticing.
Briefly, the US government spent $10 billion procuring the anti-Covid drug Paxlovid after a study confirmed its efficacy in unvaccinated people exposed to the delta strain. It then proceeded to hand it out to everyone, including the vaccinated and boosted during the omicron wave, with no data on whether it is actually needed in that setting. A similar drug, molnupiravir, ended up not having any meaningful effect in those who received the vaccine despite preventing hospitalization and death in the unvaccinated.
Could those $10 billion have been better spent? We believe the answer is: yes. For a fraction of the cost, using the same network of local pharmacies as in the Test-to-Treat initiative, the federal government could have randomized the first 100,000–250,000 patients to Paxlovid, Molnupiravir, or usual care — an order of magnitude more than PANORAMIC as many in the American health care system would have been lost to follow-up. The study would have taken mere months to accrue and would have provided valuable information on the efficacy of these treatments in the U.S. population. As importantly, it would have provided an important precedent and infrastructure for more federally funded pragmatic randomized controlled trials of agents under EUA or accelerated approval. The precedent set instead was for government’s full support for use of drugs far outside of the tested indication.
You can read the whole thing here, without a paywall.