Yes, if we end up in some corner-case dystopia where evolution and natural selection continue to be in charge of fitness. But evolution and natural selection bring much suffering to the unlucky. In other words, if you go to a hospital, you'll quickly learn there's far more human suffering caused by God and Nature than by the "cruelty of man". Though common sense is never assured victory, I look forward to a world where our children live healthier and longer lives due to us properly messing with God and Nature.

One of these days we will elect somebody who is corrupt and morally corrupt, incompetent and poorly educated and who'll promise to screw us over many times and in many positions, and we will let him just do so so that there are concentration camps for the brown people.

> AI can absolutely shatter that feeling in an uncomfortable way...

As a mental experiment, think how things would look like if the AIs were right more often than doctors. Then living longer and being healthier would imply living with a lot of "technical medical worries" that you don't longer get to outsource to a black-boxy human wearing whites. I know some people who are already ridding that train.

Indeed. So the winner is going to be whoever can also commoditize the rest, i.e. hardware and energy costs. In the long run, whoever has the factories to make chips, windmills and solar panels is going to be ahead. I think this is well understood by the American elites, and it can very well explain their exacerbated hawkishness.

That, in conventional meaning, means an ongoing judicial investigation. But "valid legal process" very plausibly means as well "this legal order we secretly received from a branch of the government that means we shall build a dossier of every foreigner using our service and share it with the agencies". And honestly, after other recent news from Anthropic and its "lively" relationship with the concentration-camp-building-current-administration, I dread handing over id documents to them. If I see the prompt, I'll close my account and use one of the many alternatives.

The slightly bigger picture is to prevent them, and there early warnings can help a lot.

At a yet slightly higher level, some people think that we are about to enter the age of superintelligence. That's a separate debate but it's not something I would disregard entirely. In an age of superintelligence, our goals and tools for healthcare can be different. I'm very much doubt that the medical establishment and we as a society will embrace a world where each person has some model of their metabolism running on some hardware and being updated and monitored 24/7, but this is already a reality in many industries where it is called "digital twins", so maybe this is something you'll go for if you are a trillionaire.

Zooming out and flying higher, the goal is of course to be young forever and let your body stay away in state space from most diseases. Is that something superintelligence can do?

To put it simply, the last few decades have been about glorifying the average Simpson. KISS and Marvel movies. Trump-level speech. And now along comes something that is going to take the pain of deep complicated thinking away (what a relief!), but the damn villain not only walks the talk[^1], it also unfortunately talks the talk with complicated words, correct capitalization and (gasp!) em--dashes. What's not to hate about it?

[^1]: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/192777/walk-the-...

More seriously though, I wonder if the future is about low-intensity conflict between humans and AIs, punctuated by high-intensity escalations, until the Machines wipe us all, or we set up some rather draconian covenants that forbid people from building AIs, innovating on electronics and algorithms, and even, for good measure, from learning linear algebra.

We are only five or six years into the leap LLMs represent. For reference, radio waves were discovered in 1886, Marconi used them for communications in 1895, and while telephone and radio coexisted for many decades, it wasn't until the 1995 that mobile phones and wireless technologies started picking up. It took so long not because of the physics of radio waves required time to mature and improve, but because everything else needed to profit from it did require time.

To me, LLMs are not so much AI as it is a building block. Radiowaves maybe, or the equivalent of transistors. We are already seeing that it's possible to chain LLMs into agents. Currently, price is a strict limiting factor for coding and agents.It's probably fine-ish if all you want is Claude Code or Codex, but there are many other possible compositions of LLMs that most people don't dare to experiment with. For example, LLMs to drive NPC dialog and world mechanics in games is not a thing due to cost. Were prices of inference hardware go down and inference algorithms keep improving, I'm convinced (and afraid) we would see things very difficult to imagine today.

Today, most people say "human biology is a thing of wonder" "Humans are built for longevity". And when a terrible ailment strikes, they explain it with "The meaning of life/God/The devil/We must die of something!"

In my mind, we could create a human systems biology profession where students are told during the first day at school "human biology is a mess wrought up by mindless evolution. Your job is to bring it to the exacting standards of perfection that we are able to apply to other things. In the measure we succeed, we will be able to bring dignity to billions of people."

That's the best of humanity: love for fellow human beings, and a desire to preserve life. And seeing that we live in an inconceivably vast and empty universe, I see nothing wrong with the idea.

Yeah, it feels like we need a phase transition in the speed and practicality of the process. But I don't believe we need a single concrete lab tech.

Years ago when I did research, my impression was that there was complexity galore. A researcher on Drosophila developmental signaling would have a very disjoint knowledge domain than that of a researcher in horizontal gene transfer and antibiotic resistance. Both would exist in a different planet altogether than a clinician prescribing a cancer treatment. And the three of them would generally lack the tooling that somebody doing systems biology was used to.

So, to me, the key thing we need is some sort of "domain cement", or a good way to pull operative knowledge and usable skills from everywhere.

Even with the "pseudo" in front, I'm very sorry any of my writing sounds philosophical; I didn't intend that sort of confusion :-). The "dismissive" is not exactly intended either; instead, I was aiming for "bitter".

>> enough people do not believe

Here we believe different things. First, enough people, even today, do believe. Second, the body of culture we are raised in accrued during centuries. The vast majority of it comes from people who believed. Everybody in my family was atheist and yet I was raised homophobic, and I have it from good sources I'm not an isolated case.

>> I'm a complex biological thing.

That state comes with a big wallop of misery. For millennia, we have used faith to justify that misery. Not a year ago, I was at the hospital, next to the bed of a dying girl. Can't forget the doctors saying "we do what we can, but we are not here to prevent what is going to happen." Coming from them, it was sensible resignation. Sensible because as long as we believe those things are inevitable and there's nothing we poor humans can do, we can absolve ourselves.