Most important century

The “most important century” series of blog posts argues that the 21st century could be the most important century ever for humanity, via the development of advanced AI systems that could dramatically speed up scientific and technological advancement, getting us more quickly than most people imagine to a deeply unfamiliar future.

  • The long-run future is radically unfamiliar. Enough advances in technology could lead to a long-lasting, galaxy-wide civilization that could be a radical utopia, dystopia, or anything in between.
  • The long-run future could come much faster than we think, due to a possible AI-driven productivity explosion.
  • The relevant kind of AI looks like it will be developed this century – making this century the one that will initiate, and have the opportunity to shape, a future galaxy-wide civilization.
  • These claims seem too “wild” to take seriously. But there are a lot of reasons to think that we live in a wild time, and should be ready for anything.
  • We, the people living in this century, have the chance to have a huge impact on huge numbers of people to come – if we can make sense of the situation enough to find helpful actions. But right now we aren’t ready for this.

Radioactivity & deep time

Radium forever transformed attitudes to time and where we may be within history – creating the first efflorescence of truly long-term thinking. Until that point, we knew the Earth was old, but hadn’t fully embraced how many more millions – or even billions – of years could lie ahead for humanity and the planet. In Europe, Christians assumed they were much closer to time’s end than its beginning. Judgement Day was anticipated soon. Then, the 1900s dawned, and radioactivity was discovered. This changed everything. From thinking they lived near history’s end, people now recognized they could be living during its very beginning. Humanity’s universe, no longer decrepit, now seemed positively youthful.

Glasses history

In his book Kitāb al-Manāẓir (Book of Optics), written in 1021, the Arab mathematician Ibn al-Haytham, also known as Alhazen, was the first to recognize and describe the magnifying property of curved glass surfaces and to put it to practical use by making reading globes. Despite the groundbreaking significance of this discovery, it remained unknown in the West for a long time because it was published in a treatise written in Arabic. It was not until the end of the 12th century that Alhazen’s treatise was translated into Latin by Franciscan monks in Italy, revealing to the Western world that an object was magnified when viewed through a transparent spherical element. The translation of the Book of Optics provided not only a physical explanation but a practical insight: convex polished hemispheres made of certain semiprecious stones magnified letters when placed on them. These reading stones were the first vision aids to be used systematically.

Astrocytes

The star-shaped cells usually help clear away toxic particles that build up in the brain naturally or after head trauma, and are supposed to nourish neurons. But laboratory tests on mice show astrocytes also release toxic fatty acids to kill off damaged neurons, confirming a suspicion many neurologists have had for years. “Our findings show the toxic fatty acids produced by astrocytes play a critical role in brain cell death. The results provide a promising new target for treating, and perhaps even preventing, many neurodegenerative diseases”.

Astrocytes regulate the response of the central nervous system to disease and injury and have been hypothesized to actively kill neurons in neurodegenerative disease. Here we report an approach to isolate one component of the long-sought astrocyte-derived toxic factor. Notably, instead of a protein, saturated lipids contained in APOE and APOJ lipoparticles mediate astrocyte-induced toxicity. Eliminating the formation of long-chain saturated lipids by astrocyte-specific knockout of the saturated lipid synthesis enzyme ELOVL1 mitigates astrocyte-mediated toxicity in vitro as well as in a model of acute axonal injury in vivo. These results suggest a mechanism by which astrocytes kill cells in the central nervous system.

Differences in differences

The Nobel Prize goes to David Card, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens. If you seek their monuments look around you. Almost all of the empirical work in economics that you read in the popular press is due to analyzing natural experiments using techniques such as difference in differences, instrumental variables and regression discontinuity. The obvious way to estimate the effect of the minimum wage is to look at the difference in employment in fast food restaurants before and after the law went into effect. But other things are changing through time so circa 1992 the standard approach was to “control for” other variables by also including in the statistical analysis factors such as the state of the economy. Include enough control variables, so the reasoning went, and you would uncover the true effect of the minimum wage. Card and Krueger did something different, they turned to a control group. Pennsylvania didn’t pass a minimum wage law in 1992 but it’s close to New Jersey so Card and Kruger reasoned that whatever other factors were affecting New Jersey fast food restaurants would very likely also influence Pennsylvania fast food restaurants. The state of the economy, for example, would likely have a similar effect on demand for fast food in NJ as in PA as would say the weather. In fact, the argument extends to just about any other factor that one might imagine including demographics, changes in tastes, changes in supply costs. The standard approach circa 1992 of “controlling for” other variables requires, at the very least, that we know what variables are important. But by using a control group, we don’t need to know what the other variables are only that whatever they are they are likely to influence NJ and PA fast food restaurants similarly. Put differently NJ and PA are similar so what happened in PA is a good estimate of what would have happened in NJ had NJ not passed the minimum wage. Thus what Card and Kruger estimated the effect of the minimum wage in New Jersey by calculating the difference in employment in NJ before and after the law and then subtracting the difference in employment in PA before and after the law. Hence the term difference in differences. By subtracting the PA difference (i.e. what would have happened in NJ if the law had not been passed) from the NJ difference (what actually happened) we are left with the effect of the minimum wage. Brilliant!

Transforming Civilization

We’re on the cusp of the fastest deepest most consequential transformation not just of any 1 sector yes but also of civilization. Over the next 10 years we’re going to have a convergence that is going to disrupt the 5 foundational sectors of the economy.

Disruption happens when there is a convergence of technologies. That convergence opens up a new possibility space. 11 years ago Tesla and other companies came into the ev space and solar companies and so on. That’s when the opportunity space opened up.

In 2014 I projected the cost of lithium-ion batteries out to 2030. I’m told that that looked insane: $150 per kWh by 2021 is not going to happen. I was told that 100s of times. Guess what, it ended up being a little conservative, it’s actually below that.

In 2014 I said that by 2020 there would be 300 km electric vehicles that would be cheaper than the median new car in America, which of course at the time sounded insane, not going to happen. Folks were predicting 2040s, 2050s before that would happen. Guess what, it did happen.

Internal combustion engine automobiles are going to be wiped out in the 2020s. 95% of passenger km will be electric by about 2030.

If we start today and we finished by 2030 in America it would cost less than $2t to build a 100% solar wind and battery system. Over 10 years that’s less than 1% of GDP.

Milk is 3% solid proteins. All you need is to disrupt that 3% to disrupt the dairy industry. By 2030 the cost of proteins which are brewed locally will be 80% lower than animal proteins so we expect the dairy industry to be pretty much bankrupt by 2030 and livestock meat will follow.

If we put together 3 disruptions, there are dramatic implications. Because the cost of all of these foundational sectors are going down by up to 10x over the next 10-15 years. The cost of the “American dream” in terms of what we consume for energy, transport, food and so on will be $250 a month. This will give us an opportunity to end poverty, inequality, environmental degradation and so on.

Multicellular Emergence

Environments favoring clumpy growth are all that’s needed to quickly transform single-celled yeast into complex multicellular organisms.

During the first 100 days, the clusters in all 15 of the tubes 2x in size. Then they mostly plateaued until the 250th day, when the sizes in 2 of the tubes that didn’t use oxygen started to creep upward again. Around day 350, Bozdağ noticed something in 1 of those tubes. There were clusters he could see with the naked eye. “As an evolutionary biologist … you think it’s a chance event. Somehow they got big, but they are going to lose out against the small ones in the long run — that is my thinking. I didn’t really talk about this with Will at the time.” But then clusters showed up in the 2nd tube. And around day 400, the 3 other tubes of mutants that couldn’t use oxygen kicked into gear, and soon all 5 tubes had massive structures in them, topping out at about 20000X their initial size. “I wasn’t honestly sure if this was a system that would saturate at 1000 cells. We have to continue evolving them and see what they can do. We need to see, if we push these guys as far as we can for decades, for 10000s of generations. If we don’t do that, I will always regret not having taken the opportunity. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, to try to push a nascent multicellular critter to become more complex and see how far we can take them.”


2022-11-05: Multicellularity has metabolic benefits

the hollow spheres were Vibrio’s solution to the complicated challenge of eating at sea. An individual bacterium can produce only so much enzyme; breaking down alginate goes much more quickly when Vibrio can cluster together. It’s a winning strategy — up to a point. If there are too many Vibrio, the number of bacteria outstrips the available alginate.

The bacteria resolved the conundrum by developing a more complex life cycle. The bacteria live in 3 distinct phases. At first, an individual cell divides repeatedly and the daughter cells huddle in growing clumps. In the second phase, the clumped cells rearrange themselves into a hollow sphere. The outermost cells glue themselves together, forming something rather like a microscopic snow globe. The cells inside become more mobile, swimming about as they consume the trapped alginate. In the third phase, the brittle outer layer ruptures, releasing the well-fed inner cells to start the cycle anew.
By altering their life cycle to include a multicellular stage, the bacteria can digest the alginate efficiently: Their numbers increase, and the hollow shell helps to concentrate the enzymes. Meanwhile, the structure of the community prevents too many cells from being born. The cells in the shell lose the opportunity to reproduce, but their DNA lives on in the next generation anyway, since all the cells in the orb are clones.

Sodom Air Burst

people may have passed down accounts of the spectacular disaster as oral history over generations, providing the basis for the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah—which, like Tall el-Hammam, were supposedly located near the Dead Sea.

The proposed airburst was larger than the 1908 explosion over Tunguska, Russia, where a ~ 50-m-wide bolide detonated with ~ 1000× more energy than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. A city-wide ~ 1.5-m-thick carbon-and-ash-rich destruction layer contains peak concentrations of shocked quartz (~ 5–10 GPa); melted pottery and mudbricks; diamond-like carbon; soot; Fe- and Si-rich spherules; CaCO3 spherules from melted plaster; and melted platinum, iridium, nickel, gold, silver, zircon, chromite, and quartz. Heating experiments indicate temperatures exceeded 2000 °C. Amid city-side devastation, the airburst demolished 12+ m of the 4-to-5-story palace complex and the massive 4-m-thick mudbrick rampart, while causing extreme disarticulation and skeletal fragmentation in nearby humans. An airburst-related influx of salt (~ 4 wt.%) produced hypersalinity, inhibited agriculture, and caused a ~ 300–600-year-long abandonment of ~ 120 regional settlements within a > 25-km radius. Tall el-Hammam may be the second oldest city/town destroyed by a cosmic airburst/impact, after Abu Hureyra, Syria, and possibly the earliest site with an oral tradition that was written down (Genesis). Tunguska-scale airbursts can devastate entire cities/regions and thus, pose a severe modern-day hazard.

2022-02-01: while the Sodom Air burst has been debunked, there’s other interesting meteorites in history:

Combinatorial Cell Signaling

In particular, in systems where ligands bind uniquely to receptors, the number of types of ligands limits how many different cell types or targets can be uniquely addressed. In a combinatorial system, different pairings between a small number of ligands and receptors can specify a much larger number of targets. The differences between the pairings also permit graded effects rather than an all-or-nothing response.