I was going to comment to complain about those two as well!
Do you mean electrofixation of nitrogen? What level of biological involvement are you imagining? More like biology producing (some?) of the catalysts, or more like the entire reaction happening inside of cells?
Oh, interesting, thanks. I got curious a while back about the whole "how do you attach wires to a bacteria?" thing, but didn't look into it too deeply. Do you have any takes?
There are bacteria which naturally use wires. For example to strip electrons off of metal nodules (the videos are amazing, you can see the bacteria attach to the nodule, the metal shrinks, and you see the Schlieren effect of the high concentration of dissolved ions).
AIUI the biggest obstacle is likely the fact that bacteria want to operate in a high current, low voltage regime and everything we do with bulk power wants to operate in a low current high voltage regime.
I believe that OpenAI & Anthropic have tried to make it so that models don't have such access. Whether or not they actually don't depends on the security of rather a lot of software. One thing we've learned is that if there are security holes, we can't rely on the AIs missing them.
The situation described in The Egg replaces morality with a direct reason not to harm others, because you are the person who will suffer because of it. So if you're complaining that the story's premise kinda eliminates our usual ideas about morality, my response is: Yes. That's part of what makes it an interesting story.
As for the meta-time thing, functional decision theory [1] solves this. The application is particularly clean because your memories are erased between lives. There's no factor of 2 free lunch from temporal ordering.
> The situation described in The Egg replaces morality with a direct reason not to harm others, because you are the person who will suffer because of it.
Or you've already been said person, in which case it won't harm you anymore. Not to mention that it's inevitable that you will hurt the victim because it already happened from the victim's POV, who you've already been. The egg is in a fundamentally contradictory realm anyway because it's asserting free will and same-universe time travel at the same time.
> the story's premise kinda eliminates our usual ideas about morality
Allowing for psycho maxxing, yes. You can take "I should be a good person" from it, but so far you haven't made a compelling case. There's no reason why you shouldn't be an exploiter in 1-10% of your lives, living off the direct and indirect suffering of the 90%. Kind of like within a modern life you can choose to suffer 90% of the time (work, gym, studying,...) to get a halfway decent 10%.
Every day I grow more sympathetic to the PauseAI movement, despite the weird hippy vibes. At least they have some ability to rally people together and put boots on the ground in numbers.
> Implement a temporary pause on the training of the most powerful general AI systems, until we know how to build them safely and keep them under democratic control.
I mean, I guess the answer there would be to build the usual kind of Haber-Brosch process plants that run continuously, and feed them with hydrogen derived from natural gas. But just build them in the US.
Sorry, that's not going to work out for myself, the 8.5+ million hectares of grain growing about my location, nor for the billion+ tonne per annum of mineral resource shifted in my state.
We're interested in producing fertilisers and fuel from non fossil sources.
The laws of physics don't like your politics. Also, last time you played around with this stuff, the outcome was very very bad and lots of people died. So before you start trying to mess around with industrial infrastructure, maybe learn physics and chemistry first. Because you keep trying to do things that simply don't work.
Do you mean electrofixation of nitrogen? What level of biological involvement are you imagining? More like biology producing (some?) of the catalysts, or more like the entire reaction happening inside of cells?