Links and tweets, 2023-05-03

by Jason Crawford · May 3, 2023 · 2 min read

The Progress Forum

• Reflections from seeing the Starship launch firsthand
• When America received a message from the future: the 1939 World’s Fair

Announcements

• Speculative Technologies recruiting “field strategists.” “Come design a research program to unlock powerful materials or manufacturing technology that is too research-y to be a startup but too coordination- or engineering- heavy for a single academic lab” (via @Spec__Tech)
• Sam Arbseman is writing a new book: The Magic of Code: How Digital Language Built Our Modern World—and Shapes Our Future
• Nuclear Now: Time to Look Again, a new documentary from Oliver Stone

Links

• “Tales of Edison’s Lab,” the first episode of Eric Gilliam’s new podcast, with a “format similar to Hardcore History” (via @eric_is_weird)
• We should have air sanitation for disease, like water sanitation (by @finmoorhouse)
• Pro-nuclear opinion piece in NYT (!) on the waste issue (via @atrembath). “Every cask of spent nuclear fuel represents about 2.2 million tons of carbon that weren’t emitted”
• There is no climate tipping point (by @wang_seaver)
• “Capitalism has plenty of agency relationships… but so do all other systems”

AI

• AI as a complex adaptive system and implications for risk (via @JacobSteinhardt; see also my lenses on AI risk)
• Scott Aaronson podcast interview on AI safety (or just see this key excerpt)
• Chad Jones paper on AI, economic growth, and existential risk (PDF) (via @ChadJonesEcon, see my thread)
• Movie trailer made with text-to-video AI
• A programming language for generative protein design using AI (via @BrianHie)

• Five possible scenarios for how AI will evolve in the future

• ChatGPT vs. doctors answering medical questions on Reddit (via @TamarHaspel)

Queries

• Why is it that in the past it was not uncommon for people to live in hotels? (turns out the answer is probably building codes, zoning laws, rent control, urban renewal, etc.)
• What are the best new space tech companies/projects in the making? (@allisondman)
• Who should Dwarkesh have on the podcast to discuss human evolution?
• Anybody know much about 17th–18th century land tenancy rules? (@antonhowes)
• Explanation of the differences between LLMs and chess AIs / AlphaFold?
• An overview on the impact of modern tech on archaeology?
• Reference for the idea that CASP disabused researchers of the notion that protein folding was near-solved? (@michael_nielsen)

Quotes

• “There is no great invention… which has not been hailed as an insult to some god”
• The spirit of progress, as experienced by Edward Teller in his youth
• The reaction to the Wright Brothers’ first public demonstration
• The first refrigerators weighed several tons and were powered by steam
• Child labor was once seen as a good thing

Tweets & retweets

• Elon Musk is optimistic Starship will launch again in 4-6 weeks
• White House advisor outlines a vision for the new world economic order
• Without AI, each of us is assuredly doomed as an individual
• Over 15,000 people have participated in human challenge trials, with no deaths
• Palmer Luckey says the future of energy is… steam?
• Sales, marketing, tech support, management, etc. are real jobs (@Scholars_Stage)
• Wanted: a comparison between modern complaints about regulation and mistakes/near-misses in the history of technology (@michael_nielsen)
• Things with the word “innovation” in their name tend to have little effect (@paulg)
• A remake of Sneakers (1992) but centered on cryptocurrency
• “Bowling pin setter” used to be a real job

• “When I was a kid, I believed this was where we’d all be living by now” (@paulg)

Charts

• “Cruise AVs perform more safely on average than human drivers” (@kvogt)

Comment: Progress Forum, LessWrong, Reddit