“Penicillin?! A poison from fungus that kills living cells?! Haven’t you played the sci fi game The Last of Us?”
Stories are stories, man. Story-logic is biased towards interesting tales. And “discovery from the natural world turned to human aims with great results” is uninteresting because we do amazing things these days.
Also known as the fallacy of “generalizing from fictional evidence”.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rHBdcHGLJ7KvLJQPk/the-logica...
I don't spend any time on LW but perhaps that is because I'll have to face that all my ideas have already been explored more eloquently by him and the communities he's part of.
Thank you for sharing your site as well :)
It would be a lot easier to set those warnings aside if we didn't have so many examples of the very things they warn about happening in real life.
We currently have a system where private individuals can fund private science and then deploy the results globally to their own profit with very few mechanisms for enforcing restraint and caution. And we've seen this backfire with horrific consequences over and over again.
Lead in the gasoline. Microplastics in the water. Pesticides widely applied to the biosphere. In my area PCBs are a massive risk due to past soil contamination. In other areas fracking biproducts make the water undrinkable.
Hell the AI rush in the face of climate change. We literally have heatwaves killing massive numbers of people while a tiny handful of investors and the companies they control are drastically increasing our carbon emissions in the race for AI.
It's easy to imagine all the ways in which synthetic life could go horribly wrong, even with out those sci-fi stories, especially since all but the youngest of us have been through a brutal pandemic in living memory.
It's very, very hard to imagine our current system showing proper restraint with this technology.
Someone doesn't have to talk about the climate impacts of cars every time they talk about the climate impacts of AI. Both have climate impacts, independently of each other, and we should be dealing with the climate impacts of both simultaneously.
Regardless, don't assume the person you are talking to isn't consistent. Peruse my personal blog and you will see that I, in fact, ran a whole city council campaign on a platform of "to fight climate change we should not be driving".
Actually they do, because the best way to get cars off the road is to replace many if not most of their occupants with AI.
Private ownership of cars is not the problem. The assumption that people have to drive all over the place to get stuff done is the problem. Let's work on that.
I'm so confused by this. Instead of one person driving a car to the store and parking, now the car is driving itself to the store with one person in it, dropping them off, and then either parking, or driving itself around more, back to the house or to a distant parking facility. In crowded cities, the car is just going to drive around the block empty for an hour instead of paying $12 for parking. Single-occupancy vehicles are a big problem now; I don't understand how introducing a bunch of zero-occupancy vehicles are an improvement on that? It seems very obvious to me self-driving cars are going to significantly increase the total number of miles driven every day in the world.
You don't need to go to the office. Neither does your car.
WTF? cars are less than 7% and even including trucks we are barely around 11%. when you look at greenhouse effect instead of "just carbon", the percentages are even tinier.
If you are looking for leading sources of climate change look at electricity/heat, industry and agriculture.
just because (bad) politicians are always talking about cars when talking about climate it doesn't mean the are actually a meaningful component. it is smoke and mirros…
Of course most people who commute to work don't need to be doing that now, but that's the other big elephant in the room with AI. We don't use the intelligence we already have, so what makes us think the emergence of ASI/AGI will change anything?
Its really easy now to engineer novel deadly viruses thanks to alphafold3
Natural life tends to evolve, which may have consequences for production.
For example, quorn production has to be restarted from a seed population after ~1000 hours because it tends to evolve colonial variants that break the product standards: https://www.davidmoore.org.uk/21st_century_guidebook_to_fung...
Their "minimal" cell is not quite a minimum product because it depends on prebuilt ribosomes and can't reproduce on it's own. No danger of gray goo!
This is more like it
https://www.jcvi.org/research/first-minimal-synthetic-bacter...
but those guys could probably add components to their cell to make it truly self-supporting although in biology there is a big difference between "barely works" and "high performance"
At one end we're creating artificial life, the other we are creating artificial intelligence.
We're coming at everything we as the human race have known for millennia from both ends, simultaneously. We're recreating that, from scratch.
That is absolutely fucking wild.
Ironically this "holy" grail will end up being the thing that finally puts religious creation myths in their place (i.e. as bullshit) since we will be able to answer with 100% certainty that we are not alone or unique in the universe since we recreated life in the fucking petri dish so why not across the billions and trillions of other planets out there?
What a time to be alive.
I don't think we are alone, but this is not logically sound. The conditions in the petri dish might be easily so special that their natural prevalence is < 1 per universe.
How does it affect religious ideas per se? its something many religious people long to find https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/06/disclosure-day-a...
We thought evolutionary theory would do the same, now we got people who believe god directed evolution. Some believe everything evolved from a common ancestor except Humans.
So the believers will adapt to believe that Genesis was talking about exactly this.
Mainstream Christianity was not biblical literalist anyway. Read what Augustine or Origen had to say about interpreting Genesis.
Some terribly ill-informed people have. Plus ca change. Sadly, the experience of "Christianity" of many Americans is either caricature or some kind of novel and vulgar fundamentalism they grew up around that sprouted on American soil in the last century or two. Add to that the black legends supplied by the Enlightenment and others and you have a perfect storm of malicious ignorance.
> This startling idea first appeared in scientific form in 1931, in a paper by Georges Lemaître, a Belgian cosmologist and Catholic priest.
excerpt from https://www.amnh.org/learn-teach/curriculum-collections/cosm...
That depends on which religion, doesn't it. The categorical claim doesn't make any sense, because the general notion of "religion" doesn't entail anything that is inherently at odds with science. And if there is a normative sense of what is or isn't religion, then this is even more true, because normativity means there is a correct religion or most correct religion, and you can't be correct without being true.
Some religious traditions, however, do make claims that are wide open to scientific discreditation (like the "Lamanite hypothesis" of Mormonism).
The way I see this is that science cannot disprove any particular religion, but it can probably offer more compelling explanations for the state of the world than religion can offer. People haven't flocked away from religion because explanations for the state of the world aren't really what people want from religion. They want a sop for their anxieties. they want community, etc. I think believing in nonsense is a real shitty way to get these things, but I'm not most people.
You can’t win
I’m no 7 day creationist but haha my guy…
> Ironically this "holy" grail will end up being the thing that finally puts religious creation myths in their place
I think you're way out of your depth here and making things up. The first tell is that you use "religion" as a blanket term as if all religious traditions make the same claims, which they absolutely do not. You can discredit, say, Mormonism much more easily than, say, Islam (though, ironically, there is a strange structural similarity between the two).
> we will be able to answer with 100% certainty that we are not alone or unique in the universe since we recreated life [..] so why not across the billions and trillions of other planets out there?
Who exactly claims that human beings or, generally, life on earth is the only life in the universe? None of the major religions do. I'm also going to assume that Christianity (or some caricature of it) is for you the paradigmatic reference point of what constitutes "religion", in which case there is nothing in Christian theology that excludes the possibility of life - even embodied intelligent life - elsewhere in the universe. (The latter is actually interesting from an ontological perspective. If the definition of "human" is "rational animal", then by definition, all rational animals are human. So, from an ontological perspective, even if an intelligent, phylogenetically distinct species were to be found on another planet, ontologically, they would also be human.)
Kurzweil puts it between 2029-2032 and that seems right to me
The thing that they made is more alive than a crystal, which when placed in a suitable solution will grow and reproduce its own structure, but much less alive than even the simplest known living cells.
Its "life" is similar to that of a brain-dead human, whose body is not left to die by a bunch of machines that pump air into its lungs and nutrients through its blood vessels.
The techniques developed to make this pseudo-cell might evolve eventually into techniques able to make a true cell and it is likely that valuable information can be extracted from experiments with it, but it is very unlikely that any of the ancestors of the living beings has ever had even a remote resemblance with this (because it is far too dependent on continuously receiving complex cellular components and nutrients from outside; simplified parasitic living beings could appear only when there already existed sufficiently complex living hosts for the parasites).
Some components of this thing are growing by reproducing themselves, but like I have said, so does any crystal, thus it is difficult to choose a criterion that will distinguish with certainty what is living from what is non-living.
The growth is followed by a kind of division into 2 vesicles, but that happens by a mechanism very different from any living cell. Many inorganic things will split when growing over a certain size, so again it is hard to decide whether this can be called living.
A brain-dead human is alive, but just facing systemic collapse, aka death. That's not to imply that what the scientists here have created is alive, but the comparison isn't so apt.
OK, what I have said above is not generally true, as some brain-dead humans may be more alive than others, e.g. some integrative functions, like some feedback loops that function through the endocrine system or through the autonomous nervous system, may still be working, connecting some organs with each other.
My comparison was with a very dead brain-dead human, who was reduced to the equivalent of a tissue culture.
These artificial cells also have some components that continue to work like in a living cell, doing some nucleic acid replication and some protein and lipid synthesis from precursors provided from outside, but they lack the capability to perform many of the chemical reactions that would be needed to close the complex network of feedback loops that enable a true living cell to live autonomously.
If you can disassemble and reassemble a thing, you can say you understand it. Not perfectly. But understand it. I’d imagine properly understanding rudimentary cellular biology will come with perks.
(Also, does the Holy Grail imply both a boon and a cost? Or is that just Indian Jones.)
Custom metabolic pathways to manufacture materials could be more easily implemented with cells that are fully synthetic.
If the entire cell is synthetic its more easy to simulate it's full behavior and then it's faster to iterate on it during development.
Anytime you do something interesting or useful someone accuses you of trying to build the apocalypse.