I’m extremely skeptical that it would be possible to ‘simulate biology from first principles’ in any computationally feasible way, given the hierarchical complexity of biology across huge range of scales—both spatial (from biomolecules to organelles to cells, tissues, organs, and organism) and temporal (from femtoseconds to decades). We just don’t have any ‘first principles’ in biology that are analogous to physical laws that could be used to simulate planet formation or weather.
We also don’t have the data required to ‘run trillions of lab-on-a-chip experiments’.
And I cannot imagine any situations in which ‘nano bots that could remove cancer cells’ could be deployed in living humans without the first several thousands patients dying in surprising and gruesome ways.
I just don’t see any of these suggestions connecting to the reality of human biomedical research.
I’m extremely skeptical that it would be possible to ‘simulate biology from first principles’ in any computationally feasible way, given the hierarchical complexity of biology across huge range of scales—both spatial (from biomolecules to organelles to cells, tissues, organs, and organism) and temporal (from femtoseconds to decades). We just don’t have any ‘first principles’ in biology that are analogous to physical laws that could be used to simulate planet formation or weather.
It could simulate individual atoms, and work up from there. Yes, that is prohibitively computationally expensive now, but the ASI could scale up computation many OOMs and could probably model it much more efficiently than we could. It probably wouldn’t need to model all the atoms because of sub modeling the different scales you note (like we do with weather). I’m not confident that it could do this in a few years, but I think it’s generally a risky bet to say that ASI can’t figure out something quickly.
We also don’t have the data required to ‘run trillions of lab-on-a-chip experiments’.
I was saying it could gather data with those experiments, e.g. testing out many different nanobots/drugs on many different types of tissue. Why would it need to have data in order to run the experiments?
And I cannot imagine any situations in which ‘nano bots that could remove cancer cells’ could be deployed in living humans without the first several thousands patients dying in surprising and gruesome ways.
It could experiment on living cancer tissue in vitro. It looks like transgenic Zebrafish get cancer in 2-4 weeks. And as I commented below, it could wait until after death to try to fix—more than 20k people donate their body to science a year.
You do realize, I hope, that this all sounds wildly speculative to anyone who works in biomedical research?
It builds assumption on top of assumption.
Basically you’re saying ‘trust us, ASI can do ANYTHING it needs to do to gather ALL the data it needs, by any means necessary, to solve all diseases quickly, reliably, with no side-effects, no tradeoffs, and no catastrophic tragedies that would turn public opinion against the whole enterprise’.
That is not a compelling argument to me at all, and I think its implausibility undercuts the common talking point among e/accs and pro-AI lobbyists that ‘ASI would cure death quickly and easily’
You do realize, I hope, that this all sounds wildly speculative to anyone who works in biomedical research?
Well, not Aubrey de Grey. :) But seriously, let’s say that one asked biomedical researchers, “Imagine a scenario where you had billions of researchers much more capable than the best scientists who ever lived thinking for centuries of subjective time and running trillions of in vitro experiments and billions of in vivo experiments on small animals and could create nano bots (e.g. white blood cells) and could experiment on thousands of recently deceased people, do you think they could solve aging?” I would be interested in the percentage of them who would describe this as wildly speculative.
It builds assumption on top of assumption.
Basically you’re saying ‘trust us, ASI can do ANYTHING it needs to do to gather ALL the data it needs, by any means necessary, to solve all diseases quickly, reliably, with no side-effects, no tradeoffs, and no catastrophic tragedies that would turn public opinion against the whole enterprise’.
That is not a compelling argument to me at all, and I think its implausibility undercuts the common talking point among e/accs and pro-AI lobbyists that ‘ASI would cure death quickly and easily’
To be clear, I disagree with high confidence that ASI would cure death quickly and easily, especially if that means death is actually cured, rather than we have a cure available. Indeed, catastrophic tragedies could turn public opinion against the whole enterprise. And I’m not claiming there would be no trade-offs, especially because many people say now they don’t want to live forever. I’m also not claiming no side effects, but that the alternative of dying would be worse. I think we should pause at AGI because ASI would be dangerous. But if ASI were aligned, I do think it is plausible that it could quickly develop a cure for aging.
I’m extremely skeptical that it would be possible to ‘simulate biology from first principles’ in any computationally feasible way, given the hierarchical complexity of biology across huge range of scales—both spatial (from biomolecules to organelles to cells, tissues, organs, and organism) and temporal (from femtoseconds to decades). We just don’t have any ‘first principles’ in biology that are analogous to physical laws that could be used to simulate planet formation or weather.
We also don’t have the data required to ‘run trillions of lab-on-a-chip experiments’.
And I cannot imagine any situations in which ‘nano bots that could remove cancer cells’ could be deployed in living humans without the first several thousands patients dying in surprising and gruesome ways.
I just don’t see any of these suggestions connecting to the reality of human biomedical research.
It could simulate individual atoms, and work up from there. Yes, that is prohibitively computationally expensive now, but the ASI could scale up computation many OOMs and could probably model it much more efficiently than we could. It probably wouldn’t need to model all the atoms because of sub modeling the different scales you note (like we do with weather). I’m not confident that it could do this in a few years, but I think it’s generally a risky bet to say that ASI can’t figure out something quickly.
I was saying it could gather data with those experiments, e.g. testing out many different nanobots/drugs on many different types of tissue. Why would it need to have data in order to run the experiments?
It could experiment on living cancer tissue in vitro. It looks like transgenic Zebrafish get cancer in 2-4 weeks. And as I commented below, it could wait until after death to try to fix—more than 20k people donate their body to science a year.
You do realize, I hope, that this all sounds wildly speculative to anyone who works in biomedical research?
It builds assumption on top of assumption.
Basically you’re saying ‘trust us, ASI can do ANYTHING it needs to do to gather ALL the data it needs, by any means necessary, to solve all diseases quickly, reliably, with no side-effects, no tradeoffs, and no catastrophic tragedies that would turn public opinion against the whole enterprise’.
That is not a compelling argument to me at all, and I think its implausibility undercuts the common talking point among e/accs and pro-AI lobbyists that ‘ASI would cure death quickly and easily’
Well, not Aubrey de Grey. :) But seriously, let’s say that one asked biomedical researchers, “Imagine a scenario where you had billions of researchers much more capable than the best scientists who ever lived thinking for centuries of subjective time and running trillions of in vitro experiments and billions of in vivo experiments on small animals and could create nano bots (e.g. white blood cells) and could experiment on thousands of recently deceased people, do you think they could solve aging?” I would be interested in the percentage of them who would describe this as wildly speculative.
To be clear, I disagree with high confidence that ASI would cure death quickly and easily, especially if that means death is actually cured, rather than we have a cure available. Indeed, catastrophic tragedies could turn public opinion against the whole enterprise. And I’m not claiming there would be no trade-offs, especially because many people say now they don’t want to live forever. I’m also not claiming no side effects, but that the alternative of dying would be worse. I think we should pause at AGI because ASI would be dangerous. But if ASI were aligned, I do think it is plausible that it could quickly develop a cure for aging.