20 ms·

For those experiencing this type of "black swan, but good" event for the first time, it is helpful to recognize that the human tendency to believe that all futu

• icapybara 3y ago
  1) doesn't make a whole lot of sense. A perfect understanding of something doesn't mean you can fix anything wrong with it. 3) has already happened. The AI chat bots aren't very smart, but they're clearly capable of some degree of basic reasoning.
  • xvector 3y ago
    I'd go as to far as saying GPT-4 is capable of fairly complex reasoning, at least in my experience tossing complicated questions and situations at ChatGPT Plus.
    • andrewmutz 3y ago
      GPT4 is simultaneously smarter than and stupider than anyone you've ever met.
      • someplaceguy 3y ago
        I think that's a hilarious and accurate way of describing it :-)
    • CSMastermind 3y ago
      When I was tutoring people in college for their computer science classes I was struck with how some people could do reasonably well on programming assignments and then when presented with anything even slightly novel would be completely unable to reason their way to a solution. 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.
      • weard_beard 3y ago
        I predict it’s a visual/spatial form of what it already does with language. It won’t do it until it can see. There’s all kinds of other things it won’t do until it hears. And touches. Smell and taste might help too I guess!? As a byproduct it can also be taught truth is what it can verify with sensors.
      • 3y ago
    • wredue 3y ago
      Chat-GPT is not capable of any reasoning, let alone “fairly complex”.
  • a_bonobo 3y ago
    There's a wonderful paper on 1) from a few years ago: https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005268 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.
    • mxkopy 3y ago
      This is a silly argument. It presupposes that meaningful knowledge about neurons is structured similarly to knowledge about microprocessors, which does not have to be the case since neurons aren’t structured like microprocessors.
    • 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
      Nothing in biology is as regular and systematic as a microprocessor. Scientists study biology using round-about approaches because there is nothing else available.
      • zargon 3y ago
        This fact only makes the problem even worse.
    • bschne 3y ago
      Which was inspired by this, "Could a Biologist Fix a Radio?" https://www.cell.com/cancer-cell/pdf/S1535-6108(02)00133-2.pdf https://www.cell.com/cancer-cell/pdf/S1535-6108(02)00133-2.p...
    • mannykannot 3y ago
      This paper, and its precursor 'Could a Biologist Fix a Radio?' mentioned by bschne, come across as somewhat smug and wiser-than-thou. While they do a good job in showing the difficulty of gathering useful information about complex biological systems, they tend to underestimate what human ingenuity can do with just that information which can be gained experimentally. This was demonstrated recently by the rapid development of synthetic vaccines against Covid.
  • ChuckMcM 3y ago
    The "event" I was trying to describe in #1 is that DNA and cellular mechanics are decoded to the point where one could do these things (repair, customization, Etc). I was not trying to specify all of the threshold requirements for reaching that point. Hopefully describing it that way makes more sense?
  • leptons 3y ago
    Not sure that AI chat bots are actually reasoning in any basic way, so much as they are filtering out noise and presenting an output that might satisfy the input, but it's often quite wrong. It's still more of a parlor trick than it is intelligence or reason.
    • icapybara 3y ago
      > Not sure that AI chat bots are actually reasoning in any basic way, so much as they are filtering out noise and presenting an output that might satisfy the input Not sure if there is a difference, for sufficiently abstract interpretations of “satisfy the input”
    • LASR 3y ago
      There is no difference between simulated reasoning and reasoning.
      • leptons 3y ago
        Definition of Reasoning: "the action of thinking about something in a logical, sensible way." LLMs don't think, they extrapolate. They are a filter, not capable of thought or reason. You can't reason with an LLM but plenty of people have tried and it fooled them well enough.
        • xkcd1963 3y ago
          Totally! I'm aghasted of how many people think LLMs are capable of reasoning and thoughts. They would argue "but brains are just that, a big filter".LLMs don't get even close to what unicelulars can handle, and they don't have a brain.
  • irrational 3y ago
    I interpret 3 as the chat bot requires no prompt from a human. Imagine the chat bot wakes you up in the middle of the night saying, "Hey, sorry to disturb you, but I was thinking... wouldn't eliminating all humans help to reverse the climate crisis more quickly? Just a thought." That is what I think of as number 3 (not actually wanting to kill off humans, but it is thinking on its own, without any prompts and then choosing to share what it has been thinking about with a human).
    • LASR 3y ago
      Don’t we already have this? If you prompt GPT to “care” about a human and then keep sending it observations, it does a pretty good job.
      • irrational 3y ago
        But there is still an initial prompt. I think number 3 is all about no initial prompt. The AI reaches out, not because it has been programmed or prompted to do so, but because it wants to do so.
• someplaceguy 3y ago
  It would have been more convincing if you had given real past examples rather than speculative future ones :) Although I'm pretty sure there are plenty that many people can think of, so it doesn't really detract much from your point.
  • ChuckMcM 3y ago
    Fair point, I felt most people would have their own list. Powered flight, semiconductors, commercially competitive solar cells, antibiotics, sterile procedure. Etc.
    • xorbax 3y ago
      Democratization of the free internet, a more informed populace through free education, a generation of coders and computer adepts, robust journalism and investigation, a space that incentivizes knowledge rather than capital or status, society about the exchange of important ideas rather than flippant goods, ad infinitum
  • TheSpiceIsLife 3y ago
    Nuclear weapons. There hasn’t been a full scale war between major powers since.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • jchanimal 3y ago
      As long as the people with the weapons act rationally. Which might be an anomaly.
      • rurban 3y ago
        The problem with game theory is that the actors do act rationally, and the most rational scenario is still the doomsday genocide: first strike, with a submarine counterstrike.
• FriedPickles 3y ago
  I like the idea of this list. Some others: - Quantum supremacy - HIV vaccine - Synthetic life - Discovery of ET life - P vs NP solution
  • dstroot 3y ago
    Low cost carbon capture
  • p1mrx 3y ago
    Bonus points if the ET life is broadcasting useful information.
    • rnk 3y ago
      I'd settle for explaining what all these UAPs are, what are they doing?
  • zack-m 3y ago
    I like the idea of the list as well. Anyone know of resources that are on a similar theme? Only rethinkx “rethinking humanity” report comes to mind.
  • jojobas 3y ago
    Linux on desktop should be up there. /s
  • Tainnor 3y ago
    > P vs NP solution 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.
• KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago
  Not quite related to 2) but if the superconductors research pans out, portable high field desktop sized MRIs would be in the bag. Current portable MRIs are all low field (and to a certain extent, somewhat useless).
  • jojobas 3y ago
    So far this material (and pretty much all liquid nitrogen ones) can't be used to create MRI sort of fields. There's a reason they all stick with liquid helium.
    • ralfd 3y ago
      Why can’t liquid nitrogen SC used for creating MRI?
      • cthalupa 3y ago
        Superconductors also have points where they stop superconducting because of the strength of the magnetic field or amount of current. YBCO and similar have these points below the useful level for MRIs. There's research around finding ways to use them but nothing that is currently viable.
        • maccam94 3y ago
          Wait, Commonwealth Fusion Systems is already building 20T REBCO magnets, can't those meet the requirements for MRIs?
          • cthalupa 3y ago
            You're right - for whatever reason I had convinced myself YBCO had issues with both high current and high field. It's just high current - anything outside of a single grain has low current density. Doing some more research to help make up for my spreading of incorrect info, I did stumble across this - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5472374/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5472374/ - it seems like it's a variety of factors that make most HST not really commercially viable for MRI machines at current. Mitsubishi has even made a small scale MRI machine with HTS - https://www.medicaldesignandoutsourcing.com/worlds-first-3-tesla-mri-with-high-temperature-coils/ https://www.medicaldesignandoutsourcing.com/worlds-first-3-t... - though I can't find any newer details around it, despite the timeline provided in the article.
• bretpiatt 3y ago
  1) Subset breakthrough here potentially related to cancer, we'll see how the peer review and evolution to becoming an available standard of care goes. City of Hope scientists develop targeted chemotherapy able to kill all solid tumors in preclinical research https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/997141 https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/997141
  • MostlyStable 3y ago
    I've heard elsewhere that "all solid tumors" should really more accurately be conveyed as "all solid tumors with a very specific mutation". It is, apparently, a very common mutation, but also not universal, even among solid tumors. 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.
    • JieJie 3y ago
      I was interested in learning more, based on your comment. Here's what I found out. 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-targeted-chemotherapy-able-kill-all-solid-tumors-preclinical-research https://www.cityofhope.org/city-hope-scientists-develop-targ... [1]https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/understanding/what-is-cancer https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/understanding/what-is-ca... [2]https://www.cancer.gov/types https://www.cancer.gov/types [3]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6721418/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6721418/ [4]https://xkcd.com/1217/ https://xkcd.com/1217/
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• DrBenCarson 3y ago
  If my understanding is correct, 2 is nearly solved if we have a room temp ambient superconductor
  • Gud 3y ago
    Fusion power engineering has gotten a lot further than most people think! 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-physics/article/overview-of-the-sparc-tokamak/DD3C44ECD26F5EACC554811764EF9FF0 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-plasma-ph...
  • rnk 3y ago
    Please connect the dots for me. What does a room temp & atmosphere superconductor do for space travel? I am unaware of any obvious impact.
    • radicalbyte 3y ago
      Magnetic containment reactor designs become at least an order of magnitude easier if we have room temp/pressure super conductors.
    • DrBenCarson 3y ago
      I was referring to fusion
• antupis 3y ago
  I would say that RNA vaccine and chatGPT are two that have happened during my adult life 05->. Iphone and some other innovations were more kinda incremental stuff.
• fnord77 3y ago
  All of these are fantasy. 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
  • avereveard 3y ago
    0 write your proof then, rise to unending fame.
    • Apocryphon 3y ago
      If contemporary scientists cared about proving negatives, let alone assigning prestige to the task, then there wouldn’t be a replication crisis.
      • avereveard 3y ago
        ...the replication crisis is not in science
        • Apocryphon 3y ago
          When was the last time a Nobel was awarded for proving a negative? Who becomes rich and famous for being a killjoy? The entire premise of your retort was wrong. You should have challenged them to take their certainty to the prediction markets.
          • avereveard 3y ago
            [flagged]
• nosefurhairdo 3y ago
  Green Revolution; most people have never heard of Norman Borlaug, despite being responsible for saving hundreds of millions of lives.
• spaceman_2020 3y ago
  4) A cure for cancer
  • donny2018 3y ago
    Unfortunately, "cancer" is not one thing. We have to find different cures for many specific cancers.
• holtkam2 3y ago
  1. Cure for aging 2. AGI exists and ends up being somehow, unexpectedly easy to control 3. Russia / China / North Korea eventually become democratic Some of the “good” black swans at the top of my mind…
  • asadm 3y ago
    Democracy is a diversion technique honestly. “Rulers” are always a few people/corps and the fate of the people depends on them.
    • borissk 3y ago
      Honestly there's a big difference in the way people live in North Korea and Switzerland.
      • borkt 3y ago
        One provides service to the outside world broadly in trade to fulfill its needs, the other provides limited service to the outside world and trades with a highly limited subset of the world to fulfill its needs
        • chottocharaii 3y ago
          Oh you. You nailed it. That's the core difference. /s
      • Cookingboy 3y ago
        I mean there is also a big difference in the way people live in India and Switzerland, and both are democratic countries. Your examples are the result of economic disparity, not political systems. But if you compare India to China, one democratic and one not, suddenly it's not super clear which countries' citizens have "better" lives.
        • kaba0 3y ago
          There are eons of differences between different democracies. Russia is also a democracy on paper, yet it is absolutely unfathomable for someone to “shot themselves in the back of the head and jump out the window” in, say, Switzerland, while many political opponents, journalists “committed suicide” that way in Russia.
• ChicagoDave 3y ago
  1. Anti-gravity 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
  • lottin 3y ago
    > 6. World recognition to manage resources globally Do you mean communism?
    • rnk 3y ago
      Think of the sea and pirate trawlers destroying the seabeds everywhere. We need to manage it.
    • ChicagoDave 3y ago
      - Protect the Amazon - Distribute food instead of wasting it - Build more trains, turn roads into park ways and bike paths - Recognize climate change globally before it kills us all
      • kaliqt 3y ago
        The earth's climate changes naturally over the course of tens of thousands of years. The key for us is to minimally impact it and let it do what it wants. Now.... We may disagree on letting it go as it goes. Ice ages would overtake a ton of countries in glaciers entirely, so we may agree that that should be stopped? But........ Doing that would be directly trying to challenge the solar system and earth on their natural cycles. There would likely be massive unforeseen repercussions.
        • ChicagoDave 3y ago
          Yeah this is the typical response from a denier. Let’s use a true statement to undercut a greater threat to humanity. Carbon dioxide is a naturally occurring gas, yes. But humanity isn’t producing natural levels of it. We’re producing levels the planet has never seen at a speed that, at this point, is more than likely to kill off ocean life, destroying an environmental ecosystem that sustains human life. So your argument is that the planet will be fine is great, except some of us would like humanity to survive indefinitely. For that, we should do everything we can to protect the planet and it’s current occupants.
• p-e-w 3y ago
  What you're missing is the fact that in today's world, where almost every aspect of life is subject to top-down control, any "enabling" technology above all else enables oppressors to oppress more effectively. 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.
  • SanderNL 3y ago
    > in today's world, where almost every aspect of life is subject to top-down control 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
    • p-e-w 3y ago
      Top-down control was not the norm in the past. In fact, top-down control in the modern sense used to be impossible. 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.
• Gooblebrai 3y ago
  Would you mind sharing that list? 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)
• UsedToDoNuclear 3y ago
  Well conveniently, "room temperature superconductor" directly supports #2
• pupperino 3y ago
  Michael Levin [1] does brillant work on this "cellular language" space and the key point is that genetics is more like biological IaC, it only encodes proteins. Most of the actual control, anatomic and physiological homestasis happens at the higher level of bioelectricity - which works as a computational medium. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FGM33sz25k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FGM33sz25k
• lowkey 3y ago
  > Commercially viable fusion energy. Will change a lot of things. 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.
• rvcdbn 3y ago
  There is an anthropic line of reasoning over Everettian branch universes where you can actually expect these types of highly unlikely events to happen more often than chance alone would predict if they promote futures with more Born-rule weighted observer-moments.
  • thecopy 3y ago
    This sounds "right" but i have no idea what you mean.
    • rvcdbn 3y ago
      See my response to the other comment. I think I got this idea either from David Deutsch or Frank Tipler, I forget exactly which book.
  • fouronnes3 3y ago
    What on earth does this mean?
    • rvcdbn 3y ago
      Please don't take this as dismissive, but I really think ChatGPT does a better job at explaining this than I can do. Here's what I got: https://chat.openai.com/share/c1c779c7-3b5f-4ea7-a864-38561d679e93 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.
• ETH_start 3y ago
  Excellent insight and perspective. >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)?
  • XorNot 3y ago
    Mostly public perception (annoyingly): people are still going to have a go at being anti-nuclear about it, but building a fusion power reactor is going to have a lot more public cultural cachet to draw upon then fission. We've got a generation of science fiction who's core message is "fusion power solved all the problems". 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.
    • ETH_start 3y ago
      Thanks for the explanation. 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.
  • anticensor 3y ago
    Contolled fusion may give way to real alchemy (think synthesising water and steel just from hydrogen atoms).
• urinotherapist 3y ago
  Commercially viable fusion can be achieved with commercially viable source of muons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00016-009-0006-9 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00016-009-0006-9 https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.ns.39.120189.001523 https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.ns.39.... http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph241/yoon1/ http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph241/yoon1/ https://www.chemeurope.com/en/encyclopedia/Muon-catalyzed_fusion.html https://www.chemeurope.com/en/encyclopedia/Muon-catalyzed_fu...
  • ben_w 3y ago
    Slightly harder than I remembered: > 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
    • urinotherapist 3y ago
      > More recent measurements seem to point to more encouraging values for the α-sticking probability, finding the α-sticking probability to be about 0.5% (or perhaps even about 0.4% or 0.3%), which could mean as many as about 200 (or perhaps even about 250 or about 333) muon-catalyzed d-t fusions per muon.[29][30] Indeed, the team led by Steven E. Jones achieved 150 d-t fusions per muon (average) at the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility.[31] Unfortunately, 200 (or 250 or even 333) muon-catalyzed d-t fusions per muon are still not quite enough even to reach "break-even," where as much thermal energy is generated (or output) as the electrical energy that was used up (or input) to make the muon in the first place. This means, of course, that not nearly enough thermal energy is generated thereby to be able to convert the thermal energy released into more useful electrical energy, and to have any electrical energy left over to sell to the commercial electrical power "grid." The conversion efficiency from thermal energy to electrical energy is only about 40% or so. Also, some not inconsiderable fraction of that electrical energy (hopefully not all of it) would have to be "recycled" (used up in deuteron particle accelerators, for example) to make more muons to keep the muon-catalyzed d-t nuclear fusion fires burning night and day.[32] The best recent estimated guess of the electrical "energy cost" per muon is about 6 GeV (billion electron Volts), using deuterons that are accelerated to have kinetic energies of about 800 MeV per nucleon, with accelerators that are (coincidentally) about 40% efficient at taking electrical energy from the Alternating Current (AC) mains (the plugs in the wall) and accelerating the deuterons using this electrical energy. 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)
• mrtksn 3y ago
  > Commercially viable fusion energy. Will change a lot of things 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.
  • ant6n 3y ago
    Yeah. Perhaps add in some cheap battery technology to the mix of solar power and superconductor, and energy production could become co2 neutral. 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).
    • moffkalast 3y ago
      Well we'd need cheaper panels for that. Currently they last like what, 30 years and take 3 years to pay off the energy it took to make them? That gives them a roughly a 9x return on investment. You need at least 30-40x to maintain our civilization as-is. Crude oil provides about 100x return. Luckily offshore wind is almost over 30x.
      • htrp 3y ago
        Doesn't matter if you can cover all of the Sahara with panels and get near lossless transmission. Economies of scale do apply.
        • moffkalast 3y ago
          They apply to some degree, but it still takes X amount of materials to make each panel, you don't magically get more because you're making a continent worth of them. Even if you magically reduce the overhead 50% somehow, that's still only 18x which is not even close. Plus the fixed cost of making a laughably absurd amount of superconductor, and the monumenal logistics of deploying and maintaining all of it likely puts the project into net negative for a decade or two. Saharan dust will also cover those panels in like a day. Probably makes more sense to float them on some body of water instead, with automatic washing and cooling?
• hbogert 3y ago
  If you have a list of potential black swans, they're not black swans.
• musebox35 3y ago
  It seems to me that technological developments and empirical scientific breakthroughs come in cycles, technology making it cheaper to experiment, science reducing cost of new technical developments. I would be happy to hear about pointers to any source discussing such a tech/science cycle. 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.
• andbberger 3y ago
  > 1) Fully decoding the cellular mechanism of cells allowing for the curing of any disease, repairing any genetic disorder. 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
• krisoft 3y ago
  > Fully decoding the cellular mechanism of cells allowing for the curing of any disease, repairing any genetic disorder. 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.
• pjerem 3y ago
  Can you ELI5 how is this possibly a black swan event ?
• croes 3y ago
  To be fair all of your examples could go either way
• zepn 3y ago
  Interested to see your full list!
• sparrowInHand 3y ago
  If you experience dystopian events, you cease to be, preventing information pass on. All instincts and warning signals, by there very nature are accurate, until they can not be any more. How do you build a warning system for a unsurvivable event, with not wittnesses? Eternal unease and anxiety, regardless of reality.
  • bartislartfast 3y ago
    I think you're mixing up dystopian with apocalyptic. 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"
• ajmurmann 3y ago
  The cool thing is that getting high-temp superconductors makes all the things you list more likely to happen.
• sparrowInHand 3y ago
  4) Mining of a complete mental model of the human mind from collected data. Allows for hacking and social engineering as never seen before.
• jacquesm 3y ago
  I think every technology is double edged, from the humble hammer all the way to atomic energy, you can always apply tools for good and for bad.
  • bartislartfast 3y ago
    double edged hammer is certainly a useful tool but I prefer the one with the thing on the back for nails
    • jacquesm 3y ago
      That's called a double axe.
• Ford__Prefect 3y ago
  Sorry to piss on your sunny parade, but: >> 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.
  • ReptileMan 3y ago
    >so you want to cure aging then- how many billions of people you think can a planet with a 6k km radius sustain ? Doesn't seem that it would cure high speed lead poisoning. People will continue killing each other just as well.
    • Ford__Prefect 3y ago
      See my 3rd point, it applies to all inhumane activity. Normal people dont kill, mentally ill/unstable people kill. We are long past the evolutionary need for this shit.
  • bartislartfast 3y ago
    > -- 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. 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
• bartislartfast 3y ago
  4) useful bipedal robots - this one is probably just around the corner (see boston robotics). We often talk about how much AGI could benefit humanity, giving knowledge workers a digital "team" of helpers, but we gloss over the physical version. Everything from dangerous industries all the way through health services and into retail could be enhanced by having robots do all the literal heavy lifting. 5) programmable matter / nanobots - the applications of a swarm of nanobots or even microbots are pretty much endless.
• bartislartfast 3y ago
  ok full disclosure, I had not heard the term Black Swan event before and I was trying to remember what happened in the movie
• Sai_ 3y ago
  We’ve survived for a few millennia so I think your sentiment is valid - it’s more likely that “good black swan” events happens more often that “disastrous black swan” events.
• ekianjo 3y ago
  Black swan is just called hindsight. There is no insight in Taleb's book. He just gave a name to stuff that changes things in an irreversible way.
• jurgenaut23 3y ago
  Unpopular opinion of mine: I think that viable fusion energy would be the final nudge to our demise. 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.
  • penjelly 3y ago
    how exactly is oil distillation or its results "burning down our house" and how is that applicable to fusion tech?
    • htrp 3y ago
      > how exactly is oil distillation or its results "burning down our house" 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).
      • jurgenaut23 3y ago
        There are many more planetary limits than just climate change, and many of them are governed by how much natural resources we consume and, incidentally, how much waste we produce. Cheap unlimited energy will just make us push these boundaries even further. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_boundaries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_boundaries
        • eagerpace 3y ago
          We aren't bound to just this planet though. Not everyone has to live here. Not every industry has to operate here. Power doesn't have to be generated, or consumed, here.
• great_psy 3y ago
  It feels like humanity is walking the very thin line separating utter utopia and absolute hell. And as technology is getting better, both of those outcomes become more probable.