🚀 Faster, Please! Week in Review+ #16
Google and AI, top 5 pro-progress shows on TV, why recessions are bad; 5 Quick Questions about biodiversity, 'For All Mankind,' and advanced geothermal energy. And much more!
My free and paid Faster, Please! subscribers: Welcome to Week in Review+. No paywall! Thank you all for your support! For my free subscribers, please become a paying subscriber today. (Expense a corporate subscription perhaps?)
Once again, lots and lots of spectacular Substack content this week (IMHO), as you will see below. I covered a wide range of subjects in the essays, Q&As, and micro reads on Monday and Friday, as well as the paywall-free issue on Wednesday. Enjoy the Saturday summaries, recaps, as well as a bit of new content (usually)!
Melior Mundus
In This Issue
Essay Highlights
— What if Google really did just invent human-level AI? (June 13, 2022)
— The 5 most future-optimistic sci-fi shows on television (June 15, 2022)
— Why recessions are bad (June 17, 2022)
Best of 5 Quick Questions
— Our World in Data’s Hannah Ritchie on the state of the global environment
— Ronald D. Moore, creator of 'For All Mankind' and 'Battlestar Galactica'
— Policy analyst Eli Dourado on the potential and challenges of geothermal energy
Classic Q&A: 5 Questions for Kevin Davies on CRISPR and the new era of genetic editing
Essay Highlights
🤖 What if Google really did just invent human-level AI? | If Google engineer Blake Lemoine is right, the company has developed a thinking chatbot. But he’s probably not right. (Almost certainly not right.) He’s probably just anthropomorphizing the Language Model for Dialogue Applications, or LaMDA. Occam’s Razor and all that. Yet over at Metaculus, a prediction community, the probability of machine intelligence matching human intelligence within a generation did surge to 59 percent from 43 percent. Also: even big improvements in AI that still fall far short of Artificial General Intelligence are nothing to dismiss. One reason to be bullish about faster economic growth this decade is because of existing advances in machine learning and their diffusion throughout the economy, from biotech to energy to finance. But human-level AI would be a different ball game altogether. Another Metaculus forecast gives a 67 percent chance of world GDP growth exceeding 30 percent within 15 years after such an invention.
🚀 The 5 most future-optimistic sci-fi shows on television | Underlying the rapid advance of human progress over the past quarter-millennium has been a powerful optimism about tomorrow combined with what sociologist Elise Boulding has described as a “utopian sense of human empowerment.” We have to believe that the inevitable disruption caused by progress will be worth it — if we make the right decisions. We also need to believe that we can invent, broadly, the future we want. Right now, however, it’s seems we think that we’ve carelessly created a future that our kids and grandkids won’t want — a future of rising temperatures and rising inequality. And since the early 1970s, Hollywood has both reflected and encouraged that gloomy belief. But sci-fi could again be pro-progress and future-optimistic (what I call “Up Wing”). It could have plenty of dramatic tension while also showing a path toward a better, although still imperfect, world. Check out the full essay for my top five television shows, either ongoing or just ended, that depict such a future world.
📉 Why recessions are bad | The obvious answer to the headline question is that people lose their jobs during downturns, and along with that job loss comes financial hardship and emotional anguish. But a recession and resulting job loss don’t just disrupt a person’s life. No one would use the word “boom” to describe the steady-but-slow US economic expansion that followed the Global Financial Crisis. Yet its length eventually worked wonders on the job market, driving down jobless rates and raising demand for workers. While median real wages started rising in 2012, that tighter job market eventually led to real wage gains for lower-income workers, too. Well, until the pandemic and shutdown. The best labor market policy is running a hot economy with tight labor markets. Then there’s this: Long expansions, uninterrupted by recessions, aren’t just good for jobs and wages. Considerable economic research suggests economic growth makes us better people and a better nation. In the 2005 book The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, Harvard University economist Benjamin Friedman makes a historical connection between economic growth and social justice, as well as between economic hardship and a retreat from tolerance. Perhaps it was no accident that the Great Society and civil rights movement coincided with the rapid economic and productivity growth of the 1960s.
Best of 5QQ
▶ Hannah Ritchie is head of research at Our World In Data, an invaluable organization that provides an evidence-based corrective to the gloom-and-doom narrative that permeates so many of our public debates.
In recent decades, conservation efforts have dramatically increased the populations of endangered mammals. What should we learn from this success?
Most biodiversity indicators are moving in the wrong direction, which is a massive concern. But there are a number of success stories from across the world where we’ve brought species back from the brink of extinction; these give us exemplars of how this can be achieved — through reducing agricultural land use; creating protected areas; and investing in reintroduction programs. As always, success stories can give us examples to adapt and replicate.
▶ Ronald D. Moore, co-creator of For All Mankind, has worked on a wide variety of TV shows over the past few decades, including Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager. He’s also the creator of Outlander and, of course, co-creator of 2004’s Battlestar Galactica. Back in October 2020, just before the second season of For All Mankind, we had a long podcast chat. This is from that delightful conversation:
Do you think our culture produces too many dystopian stories? If so, do you think it matters?
I agree with both questions. I think we do have too many dystopian future worlds, and I think it does matter. It’s a little easier to write a dystopian piece, in all honesty. It’s easier to make things really crappy and show people at their worst. You know, “What if this disaster had happened and all the people are dead except for… .” It’s really easy to go to those places because it’s a natural place of drama. … When I was working at Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, people were constantly coming to us who worked at NASA or worked in Silicon Valley. They had gotten into those professions because they were inspired by Star Trek because they either wanted to be astronauts or they wanted to be engineers or wanted to make a transporter. They just were so inspired and excited by the ideas that they saw in that vision of the future that they literally dedicated themselves to doing it. We need to provide that for people. We need to give people that kind of hope and that kind of inspiration if we want them to achieve those things because I think culture is very powerful. It does influence how we think and how we behave and what we achieve.
▶ Eli Dourado is a senior research fellow at the Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State University, where his work centers on infrastructure, innovation, and economic growth. He’s also a leading analyst and evangelist on the potential of advanced geothermal energy.
What is the level of investor/Wall Street interest in advanced geothermal? I get a lot of Wall Street research, and even nuclear fusion gets more coverage. Geothermal very rarely gets a mention.
I don’t get the sense that there is much Wall Street interest in geothermal yet. Wall Street usually gets involved once there is a successful private company to take public. With fusion companies like Commonwealth and Helion raising such enormous rounds, it makes sense for Wall Street to pay attention. The big geothermal investment rounds to date have been two orders of magnitude smaller. In that sense, geothermal is “behind” fusion.
Yet I believe geothermal will quickly catch up. My prediction is that we will see profitable advanced geothermal companies long before profitable fusion companies. Indeed, I doubt D-T fusion (one of the dominant approaches) will ever be profitable. There are dozens (!) of advanced geothermal companies that have started in the last year because they smell the profit opportunity, and it won’t take billions of dollars of R&D to get them in the black.
Classic Q&A: 5 Questions for Kevin Davies on CRISPR and the new era of genetic editing
Back in October 2020, I had a great podcast chat with Kevin Davies, executive editor of The CRISPR Journal and the founding editor of Nature Genetics. He is also the author of several books, including released “Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing.” Here’s a bit from that conversation.
1/ Your book’s title refers to the “CRISPR revolution.” How far along are we in this revolution?
CRISPR has only been around as a technology for editing DNA and genomes since 2012 or 2013, which was when a series of seminal papers were published in Science. These papers put in the hands of researchers a widely available and easy-to-use tool which allows us to edit the DNA of any organism, including bacteria and viruses, plants, animals, and human beings.
We already see the positive impacts in engineering crops to make them more nutritious or drought-resistant, but the area that I focus most on in the book is its medical potential. This is the next version of gene therapy, where we’re actually going into cells and fixing and stitching in the appropriate gene sequence to hopefully restore health to patients with cancer, sickle cell disease, and a growing list of other disorders.
2/ What would you say that you think is more likely than not to be possible in 10-20 years down the road?
I hope and think that in 10 years, we’re going to see some of this true medical potential, where trials are beginning for hereditary blindness, liver diseases, and heart disease. For example, a recently launched company called Verve Therapeutics plans on applying CRISPR to tackle heart disease. However, the list of diseases we are talking about does not consist of just ultra-rare, obscure genetic diseases either. We’re talking about sickle cell disease, diabetes, and maybe mental illness.
Another exciting application involves engineering the DNA of pigs to provide a safe vehicle for organ transplantation. Pigs and humans, physiologically — believe it or not — are incredibly similar. If we could render pig organs safe from some of the hidden sequences in their DNA, they could be a wonderfully abundant source of organ transplants. So a company called eGenesis has been working to make the pig genome safe to exploit this possibility.
3/ You write about the accessibility of CRISPR with enthusiasm, but couldn’t this also allow bad actors to create terrible diseases or to alter people permanently in ways that would actually affect the future of humanity?
Yes, one reason people are so excited about CRISPR is that labs around the world in South America, Southeast Asia, and Africa are using this. CRISPR is a democratizing technology. CRISPR can be done literally by a high schooler with an internet connection. There are all kinds of software programs online where you can type in the gene or the sequence you’re interested in targeting and order the primers and the reagents you need to begin and do those experiments. However, as you say, this also potentially makes it easier for scientists to recreate smallpox or worse for nefarious purposes, though I’m not overly concerned about that risk.
As for editing permanent changes into the human genome, this is something we need to discuss. In 2018, I was in the front row in Hong Kong at a conference when a Chinese scientist named He Jiankui made the shocking announcement that he had edited the DNA of two babies born a few weeks earlier named Lulu and Nana.
This was so significant because he edited the DNA of human embryos, meaning those babies, if they have children, will pass on that edited gene. That was an ethical red line that 99.9 percent of the world’s scientists did not think should be crossed. We just don’t know yet enough about CRISPR — because the technology is still so young — to say it is 100 percent safe and accurate. I think we’ll get there soon, but we’re not there yet.
4/ We’ve mostly been talking about fixing problems with gene therapy, but what about enhancement? It seems highly unlikely that this is going to stop at therapy.
Trying to enhance individuals or huge groups of individuals to enhance intelligence, at least based on our current understanding of science and genetics, is just doomed to fail. There is no on-off switch for intelligence — if you wanted to alter it, you would have to potentially tweak the genes of hundreds or thousands of genes.
Many companies and many philanthropists are very interested in understanding and exploring the genetics of extended lifespan. I’m not aware of any magic gene that would allow this. That said, if you want to extend lifespan, one thing you want to do is to remove the risks of falling off the wagon and succumbing to Alzheimer’s disease or heart disease or cancer. So if CRISPR provides us ways to tackle genetic diseases, certain types of cancer, and things like Alzheimer’s disease, then genome editing will help us extend the lifespan.
5/ To what degree is CRISPR a result of funding for basic science research?
Yes, this is a point I bring out in the early stages of the book. This technology arose from a handful of obscure microbiologists in far places studying some of the most obscure questions you could possibly imagine. Studying bacterial immunity to viruses? Most people would scratch their heads and say, “Please, I don’t care about that.” But that was the origin of the basic fundamental biology behind CRISPR: Investigator-driven research funded by organizations like NIH led to this spectacular breakthrough.
We did this 30 years ago with the birth of the biotech industry. We took another family of enzymes in bacteria and said, “These have fantastic properties for manipulating DNA. We can use them to give rise to recombinant DNA.” And that was the birth of genetic engineering. So we have to continue to impress upon governments worldwide to fund basic research. Applied research is great. Big biology projects like The Human Genome Project are great. Still, there’s no substitute for smart, driven investigators following their heart, because you cannot predict the discoveries that they will make.
Thanks for reading this far! Just a quick note for first-time visitors and free subscribers. In my twice-weekly issues for paid subscribers, I typically also include a short, sharp Q&A with an interesting thinker, in addition to a long-read essay. Here are some recent examples of those interviewees:
Economist Tyler Cowen on innovation, China, talent, and Elon Musk
Existential risk expert Toby Ord on humanity’s precarious future
Silicon Valley historian Margaret O’Mara on the rise of Silicon Valley
Innovation expert Matt Ridley on rational optimism and how innovation works
More From Less author Andrew McAfee on economic growth and the environment
A Culture of Growth author and economic historian Joel Mokyr on the origins of economic growth
Physicist and The Star Builders author Arthur Turrell on the state of nuclear fusion
Economist Stan Veuger on the social and political impact of the China trade shock
AI expert Avi Goldfarb on machine learning as a general purpose technology
Researcher Alec Stapp on accelerating progress through public policy