5 ms·
The full report is here: "Technical Report on Mirror Bacteria: Feasibility and Risks" https://purl.stanford.edu/cv716pj4036 https://purl.stanford.edu/cv716pj4
by philipkglass 2y ago
The full report is here:
"Technical Report on Mirror Bacteria: Feasibility and Risks"
https://purl.stanford.edu/cv716pj4036 https://purl.stanford.edu/cv716pj4036
The premise reminds me of the "Rifters" trilogy by biologist and science fiction author Peter Watts. In it, an archaic deep sea microorganism "ßehemoth" that outcompetes all other kingdoms of life is brought to the surface and wreaks global havoc as it spreads.
https://www.rifters.com/maelstrom/maelstrom_master.htm https://www.rifters.com/maelstrom/maelstrom_master.htm
A good premise (along with others) for a hard SF novel series, but it's bleak. As James Nicoll put it, "Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts."
https://rifters.com/real/author.htm https://rifters.com/real/author.htm
I see that a substack author has written about this "second kingdom of life" today, under the catchy heading "green goo":
https://denovo.substack.com/p/green-goo-republished https://denovo.substack.com/p/green-goo-republished
And a commenter there mentioned Rifters also.
- mattclarkdotnet 2y agoPeter Watts’ work is indeed bleak, harsh, but brilliant. I thought Blindsight was a hard read but the Rifters trilogy is another level
- megiddo 2y agoMade me stop reading for awhile.
- Symmetry 2y agoIf it makes you feel better, while someone with blindsight is able to interact with the objects in front of them through a subliminal awareness of them they can't form memories of those objects. Memory is actually very useful and consciousness[1] is necessary for its formation so you don't have to worry about non-conscious lifeforms out-competing conscious ones. [1] In the sense that is related to blindsight. Maybe someone with blindsight still has philosophical qualia of the objects they say they can't see, I don't know
- ufo 2y agoFor what it's worth the Blindsight pwoerpoint presentation is kind of funny: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEOUaJW05bU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEOUaJW05bU
- justlikereddit 2y agoWhile Blindsight and Echopraxia had some interesting world building and were both very readable books. It is worth mentioning the "science" part of them as science-fiction novels are essentially just a distillate of the most over-hyped pop-sci singularity-ism memes from the early 2000s era A combination of "humans only use 1% of the brain" mythos married to a "super cognition unlocks emergent superpowers" results in something that's more accurately described as an unofficial entry in the Marvel cinematic universe than the hard-scifi it styles itself as.
- zusammen 2y agoI got a blindsight vibe when interacting with early ChatGPT through rot13 but I can’t be sure if it was real uncanny valley (pseudo) consciousness or me anthropomorphizing. Probably the latter. It really shows how much work was put into making LLMs not scare people.
- HeatrayEnjoyer 2y agoConversing with early GPT-4 (in the first days of Bing chat) was surreal beyond any non-drug experience I know of. The infamous negative behaviors are well documented [0] but every part was so... alien. [0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jtoPawEhLNXNxvgTT/bing-chat-is-blatantly-aggressively-misaligned https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jtoPawEhLNXNxvgTT/bing-chat-...
- seizethegdgap 2y agoI want to thank you for this comment, I went out and grabbed a copy of Starfish and just finished it, what a ride!
- selimthegrim 2y agoI did mention it I think on one of the other discussions on HN that got merged here