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Now imagine the code arose originally by random chance, happened to be self replicating and evolved over billions of generations to include mechanisms that both

Now imagine the code arose originally by random chance, happened to be self replicating and evolved over billions of generations to include mechanisms that both allow it to viable after small changes and allow those small changes to have large effects (due to selective pressure since diversity from mutations is advantageous to a point, especially in single celled organisms). As an example, Some bacterial genomes are circular, code in both directions and have overlapping coding regions, and occasionally trade genetic material between species because why wouldn't they? I've worked applying machine learning and statistics to genetics and I generally think it's pretty hilarious that many self declared rationalists think we need to worry about AI safety but declare scepticism of genetic engineering anti-scientific.

hinkley 10y ago
Now imagine the code arose originally by random chance I could introduce you to some former coworkers, but I hoped never to encounter them again.
naasking 10y ago
> many self declared rationalists think we need to worry about AI safety but declare scepticism of genetic engineering anti-scientific. It is because we've already done genetic engineering. Certainly there are tractability problems with the scope of a change and predicting it's full success, but the fact that changes can be made seems undeniable, even if all we do is stick to direct engineering and exclude the engineering we've been doing for thousands of years. Protein folding is a computationally hard problem, so fully predicting a change's effect will remain imprecise, unless we find some new shortcuts, which is entirely possible.
- micro_cam 10y ago
  My point is there are all sorts of hidden complexities and 2nd order interaction between things we don't yet understand. I'd argue that this goes beyond computational tractability and is still an issue of statistical power. There are millions of common variants in the human genome and we've only sequenced thousands of people so it's not exactly controversial to say genetics is poorly understood. Which as the AI-safety people say, isn't to say we should be researching it just that we should be devoting more energy to doing it safely as the potential consequences are so high even if the chances of things going wrong is low.
  - AbrahamParangi 10y ago
    I think this is because while we've been messing around creating novel human genomes for at least two-hundred-thousand years, we've been creating non-human thought processes for only 40 years. And it's really only picked up in the last 10. Our butts are at least partly covered that we do anything particularly awful on the genetic engineering front because genomes have been scrambling around in all kinds of different configurations for billions of years now and nothing too awful has happened. Except, arguably, us. Although I like to think we're the best result so far rather than the worst.
    - micro_cam 10y ago
      I don't buy the genetic engineering is natural argument for a couple of key reasons The first thing is that with natural selection of cross breeding new strains start small and ramp up providing a natural provisional test period. With genetic engineering the goal is often something like a blockbuster new type of corn which sees global adoption quickly. So if something unexpected happens there is a non zero risk of lots of people's food supplies not working out. Further if we're making analogies to nature, it's important to note that terrible things happen in nature. The key part of natural selection is that only some organisms get to reproduce and the rest often live miserable short lives. I mean, to be flippant, our butts are covered in the sense we probably won't see anything worse than zinka, sickle cell anemia or ebola?
      - AbrahamParangi 10y ago
        While it's not difficult to imagine scenarios where we create bioweapons of unprecedented ferocity, state actors have probably already done this to some degree. I argue that outside of engineered diseases it's difficult to imagine existential risks that could be posed by genetic engineering. Except, of course, making a better human which would almost certainly and immediately pose an existential risk to old Homo sapiens sapiens.
        onestepatime 10y ago
stephenboyd 10y ago
Genetic engineering and super-AI will eventually overlap. We'll use the new AI to be more capable in genetic engineering. And the new AI may use genetic engineering to empower itself in a more capable physical form than the hardware we know today.
winter_blue 10y ago
> imagine the code arose originally by random chance If you said this in any other context, it would sound laughably ludicrous. Imagine billions of lines of code for an incredibly advanced, complex and self-replicating system appearing out of the thin air (over 2 bil. yrs) by mere chance. Even with the long time period, it sounds facetious, prima facie. For some reason people decide to switch off their common sense and rationality when it comes to this.
- gipp 10y ago
  You don't understand how evolution works (not that the parent you're responding to stated it well). It is most certainly not "random chance". Frankly I'm surprised to see that kind of sentiment coming out of such a CS-heavy audience, since genetic algorithms demonstrably work, and function on the same mathematical principles minus the biological substrate.
  - tps5 10y ago
    Don't basically all genetic algorithms rely on "random chance," or some simulation of random chance, to simulate a mutation rate? And haven't biologists, in recent years, emphasized the degree to which evolution relies on mutations and genetic drift? That was my understanding of the way the field has been going, anyway. Saying that evolution as a whole is just "random chance" seems reductionist, but randomness does appear to be involved.
    - gipp 10y ago
      Certainly randomness is _involved_, but it is randomness governed by a decidedly non-random fitness function. Without fitness there is no evolution. The problem arises because when biologists, statisticians etc say "random process," they mean something very specific that can actually contain many different kinds of mathematical structure, but your average layman hears that term to mean "¯\_(ツ)_/¯"
    - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
      Consider throwing 20 dice. It is certainly a random process. And we know the odds for throwing 20 sixes is about one to 30 000 trillion, so you'd have to keep throwing dice for about as long as the Earth has existed to get that result. But if you start throwing the dice and you keep all the sixes you get along the way, Yahtzee-style, we expect you'll have 20 sixes in about 25-30 throws. In the latter case, external selection has turned an incredibly implausible result into a certainty.
dogma1138 10y ago
Your genetic code was not constructed by chance this is contradictory to everything we know about how cells and molecular biology works.
- micro_cam 10y ago
  How do you mean? It's not random in the "uniform random distribution" sense but it's certainly the product of a stochastic process (evolution)?
  - dogma1138 10y ago
    Evolution is not a stochastic process, even without newer models like CRISPR where we know bacteria and other organisms seek very specific genetic material and integrate it into their own genome; evolution is governed by natural selection and your DNA has a lot of tricks under it's belt. Your DNA was meticulously constructed by billions of years of evolution and that is not by chance since there are processes that construct DNA which are not based on "random mutation", you can take in foreign DNA, activate and deactivate genes put in spacers move base pairs from coding and non-coding DNA, modify gene expression and repetition and tons of other tricks and this all happens through a process not by chance. If you think about evolution only in terms of random mutations which are filtered out through natural selection you throw away most of what we've learned about biology in the past 50 or so years, in fact random mutation is likely not have been workhorse of evolution especially in rapidly reproducing organisms. Microorganisms edit their DNA and they do it at a very fast pace, this is why you can have bacteria developing resistance to drugs without even reproducing since they start seeking out resistive genes in their non-coding DNA and in their environment (plasmids and phages) as soon as they are exposed to antibiotics, they can integrate them into their coding DNA activate those genes and begin making the needed proteins and even rebuild their cell membranes if needed.
sebleon 10y ago
This comment and the parent comment are some of the most insightful things I've read on HN, thanks! Haven't considered genetic engineering's risk from a computational perspective, but this is absolutely spot on! Unlike other experiments, genetic engineering can be incredibly disastrous to humanity. There's very real risks of destroying our food supply, the environment, and our health. And so far, we're taking these risks in the name of GMO crops, which are either resistant to toxic chemicals like glyphosate (Round-Up ready soybeans), or worse, plants that produce toxic chemicals to ward off pests (bt corn).

hinkley 10y ago

Now imagine the code arose originally by random chance I could introduce you to some former coworkers, but I hoped never to encounter them again.

naasking 10y ago

> many self declared rationalists think we need to worry about AI safety but declare scepticism of genetic engineering anti-scientific. It is because we've already done genetic engineering. Certainly there are tractability problems with the scope of a change and predicting it's full success, but the fact that changes can be made seems undeniable, even if all we do is stick to direct engineering and exclude the engineering we've been doing for thousands of years. Protein folding is a computationally hard problem, so fully predicting a change's effect will remain imprecise, unless we find some new shortcuts, which is entirely possible.

micro_cam 10y ago
My point is there are all sorts of hidden complexities and 2nd order interaction between things we don't yet understand. I'd argue that this goes beyond computational tractability and is still an issue of statistical power. There are millions of common variants in the human genome and we've only sequenced thousands of people so it's not exactly controversial to say genetics is poorly understood. Which as the AI-safety people say, isn't to say we should be researching it just that we should be devoting more energy to doing it safely as the potential consequences are so high even if the chances of things going wrong is low.
- AbrahamParangi 10y ago
  I think this is because while we've been messing around creating novel human genomes for at least two-hundred-thousand years, we've been creating non-human thought processes for only 40 years. And it's really only picked up in the last 10. Our butts are at least partly covered that we do anything particularly awful on the genetic engineering front because genomes have been scrambling around in all kinds of different configurations for billions of years now and nothing too awful has happened. Except, arguably, us. Although I like to think we're the best result so far rather than the worst.
  - micro_cam 10y ago
    I don't buy the genetic engineering is natural argument for a couple of key reasons The first thing is that with natural selection of cross breeding new strains start small and ramp up providing a natural provisional test period. With genetic engineering the goal is often something like a blockbuster new type of corn which sees global adoption quickly. So if something unexpected happens there is a non zero risk of lots of people's food supplies not working out. Further if we're making analogies to nature, it's important to note that terrible things happen in nature. The key part of natural selection is that only some organisms get to reproduce and the rest often live miserable short lives. I mean, to be flippant, our butts are covered in the sense we probably won't see anything worse than zinka, sickle cell anemia or ebola?
    - AbrahamParangi 10y ago
      While it's not difficult to imagine scenarios where we create bioweapons of unprecedented ferocity, state actors have probably already done this to some degree. I argue that outside of engineered diseases it's difficult to imagine existential risks that could be posed by genetic engineering. Except, of course, making a better human which would almost certainly and immediately pose an existential risk to old Homo sapiens sapiens.
      - onestepatime 10y ago

stephenboyd 10y ago

Genetic engineering and super-AI will eventually overlap. We'll use the new AI to be more capable in genetic engineering. And the new AI may use genetic engineering to empower itself in a more capable physical form than the hardware we know today.

winter_blue 10y ago

> imagine the code arose originally by random chance If you said this in any other context, it would sound laughably ludicrous. Imagine billions of lines of code for an incredibly advanced, complex and self-replicating system appearing out of the thin air (over 2 bil. yrs) by mere chance. Even with the long time period, it sounds facetious, prima facie. For some reason people decide to switch off their common sense and rationality when it comes to this.

gipp 10y ago
You don't understand how evolution works (not that the parent you're responding to stated it well). It is most certainly not "random chance". Frankly I'm surprised to see that kind of sentiment coming out of such a CS-heavy audience, since genetic algorithms demonstrably work, and function on the same mathematical principles minus the biological substrate.
- tps5 10y ago
  Don't basically all genetic algorithms rely on "random chance," or some simulation of random chance, to simulate a mutation rate? And haven't biologists, in recent years, emphasized the degree to which evolution relies on mutations and genetic drift? That was my understanding of the way the field has been going, anyway. Saying that evolution as a whole is just "random chance" seems reductionist, but randomness does appear to be involved.
  - gipp 10y ago
    Certainly randomness is _involved_, but it is randomness governed by a decidedly non-random fitness function. Without fitness there is no evolution. The problem arises because when biologists, statisticians etc say "random process," they mean something very specific that can actually contain many different kinds of mathematical structure, but your average layman hears that term to mean "¯\_(ツ)_/¯"
  - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
    Consider throwing 20 dice. It is certainly a random process. And we know the odds for throwing 20 sixes is about one to 30 000 trillion, so you'd have to keep throwing dice for about as long as the Earth has existed to get that result. But if you start throwing the dice and you keep all the sixes you get along the way, Yahtzee-style, we expect you'll have 20 sixes in about 25-30 throws. In the latter case, external selection has turned an incredibly implausible result into a certainty.

dogma1138 10y ago

Your genetic code was not constructed by chance this is contradictory to everything we know about how cells and molecular biology works.

micro_cam 10y ago
How do you mean? It's not random in the "uniform random distribution" sense but it's certainly the product of a stochastic process (evolution)?
- dogma1138 10y ago
  Evolution is not a stochastic process, even without newer models like CRISPR where we know bacteria and other organisms seek very specific genetic material and integrate it into their own genome; evolution is governed by natural selection and your DNA has a lot of tricks under it's belt. Your DNA was meticulously constructed by billions of years of evolution and that is not by chance since there are processes that construct DNA which are not based on "random mutation", you can take in foreign DNA, activate and deactivate genes put in spacers move base pairs from coding and non-coding DNA, modify gene expression and repetition and tons of other tricks and this all happens through a process not by chance. If you think about evolution only in terms of random mutations which are filtered out through natural selection you throw away most of what we've learned about biology in the past 50 or so years, in fact random mutation is likely not have been workhorse of evolution especially in rapidly reproducing organisms. Microorganisms edit their DNA and they do it at a very fast pace, this is why you can have bacteria developing resistance to drugs without even reproducing since they start seeking out resistive genes in their non-coding DNA and in their environment (plasmids and phages) as soon as they are exposed to antibiotics, they can integrate them into their coding DNA activate those genes and begin making the needed proteins and even rebuild their cell membranes if needed.

sebleon 10y ago

This comment and the parent comment are some of the most insightful things I've read on HN, thanks! Haven't considered genetic engineering's risk from a computational perspective, but this is absolutely spot on! Unlike other experiments, genetic engineering can be incredibly disastrous to humanity. There's very real risks of destroying our food supply, the environment, and our health. And so far, we're taking these risks in the name of GMO crops, which are either resistant to toxic chemicals like glyphosate (Round-Up ready soybeans), or worse, plants that produce toxic chemicals to ward off pests (bt corn).