AGI Significance Paradox: As progress accelerates towards AGI, the number of people who realize the significance of each new breakthrough decreases.
More from Carlos E. Perez
It's a very different perspective when we realize that our bodies consist of an entire ecology of bacteria and viruses that are also passed to our ancestors. Mammals rear their young and as a consequence transfer the microbiome and virome to their offspring.
What does it mean to treat our individuality as ecologies? We are all ecologies existing in other ecologies. Nature is constantly performing a balancing act across multiple scales of existence.
There are bacteria and viruses that are unique to your ancestry as that of your own DNA. They have lived in symbiosis with your ancestor and will do so for your descendants.
It is an empirical fact that the microbiome in our stomach can influence not only our own moods but also our metabolism and thus our weight and health.
It is also intriguing to know that brains evolved out of stomachs and that our stomachs contain hundreds of millions of neurons. Humans can literally think with their gut.
What is the nature of our (evolved) relationship with viruses? We are literally flooded by them. Welcome to the human virome, with harmful but also beneficial members. Great paper in @sciam "The Viruses Inside You" https://t.co/aWszsNq61d pic.twitter.com/eFsoxV4M9K
— Ricard Sol\xe9 (@ricard_sole) December 12, 2020
What does it mean to treat our individuality as ecologies? We are all ecologies existing in other ecologies. Nature is constantly performing a balancing act across multiple scales of existence.
There are bacteria and viruses that are unique to your ancestry as that of your own DNA. They have lived in symbiosis with your ancestor and will do so for your descendants.
It is an empirical fact that the microbiome in our stomach can influence not only our own moods but also our metabolism and thus our weight and health.
It is also intriguing to know that brains evolved out of stomachs and that our stomachs contain hundreds of millions of neurons. Humans can literally think with their gut.
More from Science
Ever since @JesseJenkins and colleagues work on a zero carbon US and this work by @DrChrisClack and colleagues on incorporating DER, I've been having the following set of thoughts about how to reduce the risk of failure in a US clean energy buildout. Bottom line is much more DER.
Typically, when we see zero-carbon electricity coupled to electrification of transport and buildings, implicitly standing behind that is totally unprecedented buildout of the transmission system. The team from Princeton's modeling work has this in spades for example.
But that, more even than the new generation required, runs straight into a thicket/woodchipper of environmental laws and public objections that currently (and for the last 50y) limit new transmission in the US. We built most transmission prior to the advent of environmental law.
So what these studies are really (implicitly) saying is that NEPA, CEQA, ESA, §404 permitting, eminent domain law, etc, - and the public and democratic objections that drive them - will have to change in order to accommodate the necessary transmission buildout.
I live in a D supermajority state that has, for at least the last 20 years, been in the midst of a housing crisis that creates punishing impacts for people's lives in the here-and-now and is arguably mostly caused by the same issues that create the transmission bottlenecks.
Rooftop solar can play a key role in a transition to 100% renewable energy - and it can help American's pocketbooks #GoSolarhttps://t.co/6p9jb62EGW
— Environment America (@EnvAm) January 14, 2021
Typically, when we see zero-carbon electricity coupled to electrification of transport and buildings, implicitly standing behind that is totally unprecedented buildout of the transmission system. The team from Princeton's modeling work has this in spades for example.
But that, more even than the new generation required, runs straight into a thicket/woodchipper of environmental laws and public objections that currently (and for the last 50y) limit new transmission in the US. We built most transmission prior to the advent of environmental law.
So what these studies are really (implicitly) saying is that NEPA, CEQA, ESA, §404 permitting, eminent domain law, etc, - and the public and democratic objections that drive them - will have to change in order to accommodate the necessary transmission buildout.
I live in a D supermajority state that has, for at least the last 20 years, been in the midst of a housing crisis that creates punishing impacts for people's lives in the here-and-now and is arguably mostly caused by the same issues that create the transmission bottlenecks.