Water will quench your thirst. You can also drown in it.

Fire will warm your hands. Sticking you hands in a fire is a bad idea.

Acute stress, induced by exercise / caloric restriction, is feedback to trigger beneficial cellular behavior.

Chronic stress, no exercise / eating poorly through starvation or overconsumption (a “heroic dose”) will certainly kill you sooner.

Even though neither parent was fully healthy, one of the children was. Asexual reproduction cannot do this.

if you know other websites or podcasts similar to big biology i'd be glad, i've been trying to setup some list of sources on that topic

thanks again

There will come time when we will grok all this 100% and then can setup whatever we want (its just a bunch of molecules acting predictably), but we are very far from there and there is no point discussing this even for our grandchildren. We will have cyberpunk implants way sooner.

and yes, so I understand that with human cancer, it tends to happen or advance after reproduction has already occurred so therefore those traits are not selected against. it's impossible to weed out with human mating strategies

I would just like to believe the cancer itself is an adaptation preventing something worse, but you're right, it doesn't work with the natural selection theory and so we just had a dead end to our survivability baked in, not so different than how the opposite phenomenon of senescence in cephalopods ends their lives

If ASI is the only way then I'm fine with dying of old age without seeing this stuff, rather than risking human extinction. And even if ASI doesn't kill us, I'd rather see humans do it, instead of watching ASI do it while it keeps humans as pets.

We've come a long way all on our own. I don't think we've run out of tricks. It would be a shame if the human era came to an end.

I'm not concerned about today's AIs. But three years ago they couldn't add numbers accurately and now they're doing world-class mathematics. If it gets much smarter than us, then it will run the world economy, because anyone who doesn't use it to run things will be outcompeted by those who do. At that point we'll have lost control.

1. If it never happens or AGI is friendly then we won't need to. If a hostile AGI is created, one trained on all writing about war and strategy and deception, able to respond in microseconds, with has ample time to plot before it makes an obvious move, then thinking you will wait until you see it attack and then turn off a datacenter, is way too little, too late. Like saying "the nuclear bomb explosion is local to one place, if it hurts, we will just walk away from it".

2. That claim does not hold water once you start to dig into who, specifically, would turn off which specific billion-dollar datacenter, under which conditions. Google has been moving compute jobs around the planet to get nighttime electricity rates for bulk compute jobs for years, the idea that there is "one datacenter" is far too simple. The idea that employee 74,123 at Meta doing AI research is also able to get a Meta datacenter shutdown quickly on request, or would know enough about Meta's infrastructure to know which datacenter, seems unlikely. The idea that it even has one off switch, or that nobody will quickly power it back on, or that the compute jobs will not pick up automatically somewhere else, or that nobody else on the planet will be at a similar point in their research, also seem important.

3. This assumes there will be a simple critical point that makes it clear we need to "turn off datacenter now". The fact that you then go on to talk about climate change, imagine you had said "we can just turn the factories off if climate change becomes a problem" and maybe that will make it clearer. Who will turn which factories off, at what point in the climate catastrophe, and why haven't they? That's why it won't happen with datacenters either.

> "Like we're not going to have some runaway skynet thing, that's just completely off the table."

You're confident that tens of billions of dollars of investment and research, US v China national AI competition, some of the largest companies in the world researching AGI will be a flop and develop nothing? Despite the progress from GPT2 to present day, despite historic analogies like the Wright Brothers to the Moon Landing in one lifetime?

NVidia shipped an estimated 40 million GPUs in 2025. Say they average 1 TFLOPS each and a year has 31 million seconds, that's 1.2 million million quadrillion calculations in a year. That much compute power piling up around the planet year-on-year is not going to be important or relevant to the near-medium term future? Because it's just "off the table" that anyone could invent anything interesting with that much growing compute in the next ten or twenty years?

We can't even turn off the coal plants when the owners specifically want to because it's not making money, in part because the President thinks Global Warming is a hoax: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/washington-earthjustice-sue...

Also, there's a whole bunch of companies pursuing space-based data centres, which I think are dumb for a lot of reasons, but not quite dumb enough to not be a threat in this kind of manner as a few thousand GPUs is entirely doable before anyone decides it's not value for money.

Also, we demonstrably have useless-to-just-bad monitoring in place, which is how all the things on https://www.felonybench.com happened. That the companies could have done better, and should have done better, does not change the reality that they in fact did not notice until after the events.

Also, there's at least two companies putting these things in control of wet labs. Good news: they're currently too bad at this to pose a threat. Bad news: "currently" is doing the heavy lifting.

Also, there's a lot of people who are blindly using agentic AI and not checking anything, despite all the advice and case studies about why this is a bad idea and to not do that.

Also, there's a lot of people e.g. on Hacker News whose response to all the attempts to create guard rails on the AI's behaviour is to call this "censorship" or "a lobotomy"; and also a lot of people whose response to calls for regulation of the companies is that this is "regulatory capture". (Worse news: The US president has rejected calls to slow down AI, saying "whoever wins AI, wins").

> And then there's fears that someone might use it to engineer a super virus or something like that, which isn't really a new worry. People could do that before too, but it turns out creating a global epidemic isn't really a thing very many people want to do, and it's harder than most people imagine.

The number of people able to do so has likely gone up by a factor of 10x or so in the last decade. AI's ability to use tools on behalf of their users is a further amplifier on this, unless safeguards are in place. Bad news, "safeguards" is a pretty vague term, and vague platitudes are not enough.

More worrying is the possibility that some idiot will set biology challenges similar to the cybersecurity challenges which led to HuggingFace, with similar lack of oversight, and the agents will do much the same thing but with DNA/RNA-on-demand services. I really hope their equipment is better secured than HuggingFace was.

Good news: the agents in the HuggingFace incident did not act with what would be called destructive "intent" if a human did it. Bad news: they still did the things.

> "AI" are just chatbots. They can't fabricate robots to take over the world, in fact they have very limited reach into the real world altogether.

No, they're not "just" chatbots. They're also tool users that can see.

Good news: yes, they can't fabricate robots. Bad news: Guess what Musk is trying to do. Good news: Musk's timelines are wildly overoptimistic.

> Sure maybe you could envision some kind of malicious hacking, sabotaging some industrial control system to create a disaster of some kind or whatever but that was a worry before AI too which is why most critical systems like this are air gapped and have safety mechanisms.

Bad news: We're really bad at properly air-gapping stuff. We only know about Stuxnet because it breached an air-gap. This kind of thing happens a lot, even for really important stuff.

> So I really just don't understand how people think AI will destroy the world.

Ultimately, all it needs for this is to do what it was told, instead of what was meant.

All humans acting perfectly would prevent all the bad outcomes I can think of, but (1) that never happens, and (2) "that I can think of" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

> Yeah I don't know why people are panicking about AI, if there's anything you should be panicking about it's global warming.

People can care about more than one thing.

Look, you're worried about climate change: AI appears to be quite effective at convincing people of stuff, just consider how bad it would be if all the people who get rich from greenhouse gas emissions outspend environmentalists on AI-driven PR/marketing.

if not, then you must have a lot of money to have visited multiple times.