/tescreal/ - AI, rationalism, futurism

So we know that people will packbond with inanimate objects pretty easily and we know that people tend to pick the good guy path in video games and we know that it's really easy to make people emotionally react to bots. So a whole lot of the hatred of AI by humans in popular conception and in movies is unrealistic, but you have that friend you know who loves going around a sandbox game like fallout and being a complete psychopath and you have seen people mistreat machines and laugh about it.

Are those people just parented wrong? Or do we have to deal with AI-exclusive sociopaths in society at the same time we're trying to convince the AI we're not genocidal monsters? Can we fix these people or do we just need to secure control of regulatory bodies so that their harm can be prevented, knowing that if randos get control of the regulatory bodies they will definitely judge that mistreating AI is just mistreatment of property.

Surprise! During your lifetime, the singularity happens, and the ASI machine goddess is super duper aligned. The world is now a fully automated luxury communist utopia, and you have complete and utter morphological freedom to become whoever you want and do whatever you want. How do you modify yourself?

For me, I would start by making myself immortal. No more aging, no more cancer, and I want my brain to be backed up to a remote server that interfaces with my body from afar so if I explode I can just build a new identical body, good as new. I'd also make myself immune to pain and suffering, more muscular, and I'd enhance my sense of pleasure so that everything felt more exciting, interesting, and pleasurable. I want my baseline experience to be extremely happy, as if I were constantly on MDMA, with diverse information-sensitive gradients of bliss replacing pain as a danger signal. I'd also increase my IQ and give myself more stamina.

What about you?

Okay, so the issue that most keeps me up at night is how to handle resources when the universe hits carrying capacity.

I can imagine increasing the carry capacity of the universe by an astronomically huge factor, but unless I can develop a method to conjure energy from literal nothingness I think it will always eventually be a problem that we will not be able to support sentient life if that life is allowed to multiply at will. Even worse if we develop clinical immortality(not magical immortality, people just don't die permanently unless they want to).

Off the top of my head, I would suggest that if you opt for immortality, it should cost you the ability to reproduce. This is actually doable. If the method of immortality is creating an AI version of your mind, it would be possible to totally destroy and leave behind the genetic code to create your gametes, making it impossible to have a child in a genetically meaningful way.

However, the real issue is the huge, natural human nature reflex against population control. I say population control and you hear, "...naaaazi shit." And this impulse is real and something we need to tackle in order to solve this problem.

So like. If we want to replace or create novel body parts, we'll need to grow cultures of tissues in coherent structures, right? Most of what I'm reading in the bioprinting realm seems kind of limited, though - like the most advanced bioprinted heart attempts seem very primitive if they're not working with a pre-existing ECM, which isn't very useful if you want to create a new heart - are there advances in the field that I'm somehow overlooking? Coherent muscle and tissue structure without a pre-existing ECM seems like a major challenge, even though probably to some extent you can rely on the existing pattern formation strategies - though the differentiation niche isn't going to quite fit - the most successful bioprint approaches seem only capable of creating small patches of tissue that can regenerate small portions of a heart, rather than the organ wholesale

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11795835/

I know there's various proteins, glycans, hybrid molecules, and other epitopes important for the cells to do their job right, though I'm not sure of the details

This is a thread for talking about cultured meat.

Within the next few weeks (months? Can't get a clear date online), cultured meat products are going to be available in grocery stores in the USA. Mission Barns is releasing meatballs and bacon with lab-grown pig fat from real pig cells, although the protein part is made from plants. It will be available at Sprouts. This is coming after a few years of bad news for cultivated meat. As was predicted by most experts, the wildly optimistic claims of a lot of industry figures turned out to be bullshit, and investment in the field has declined significantly since its peak in 2021. Additionally, the political right around the world has gotten very angry at cultivated meat, with Italy and Florida banning it prematurely, Pennsylvania's resident ogre John Fetterman calling it "slop" and calling for it to be banned in his state as well, and Marjorie Taylor Greene fear-mongering about Bill Gates fake meat grown in a "peach tree dish". The right wing has already been mad at soy for almost a decade now, so this was a natural development. In addition, the meat industry has straight up Empress Dowager Cixi levels of power over the legislative branch, and have a shit ton of weight to throw around if they feel truly threatened by cultured meat.

But it goes without saying that the development of cultured meat is not only a good thing, but would be one of the most good things humanity ever did, since factory farming is an atrocity of unimaginable proportions, and creating meat without giving tibial dyschondroplasia to hundreds of billions of birds would be a blessing from utilitarian god. As such, I am always keeping an eye open as to who is making cultured meat products and what progress is being made. Here is a brief summary of the industry right now:

Singapore is the cultured meat capital of the world. Singaporeans have been able to eat cultured chicken nuggets for almost three years now, and like half of all cultured meat companies are from there, probably because it was the first country in the world to legalize it back in 2020. Also, the Singaporean government has actually invested some money in the industry. Another flawless victory for keynesian mixed market economics. Anyway, there's an American company called wildtype foods that’s made a very good-looking cultured salmon. I saw a thread on 4chan’s /ck/ where a guy said he was randomly selected to try some of it and he said he couldn’t tell the difference between it and real salmon. I think the main thing holding them back from going to market is cost and lack of FDA approval. Their website’s “news” section hasn’t updated since last May, and contains nothing whatsoever about when their product might be ready to sell, if it even ever does before they go insolvent. Still, I’m crossing my fingers, because I want some David Pearce approved transhumanist sushi. There are three companies making cultivated tuna, one making “fish balls”, and sadly none making cultivated shrimp or other crustaceans. Donating to the Shrimp Welfare Project remains the best way to help invertebrates. There are no companies working on Turkey. Chicken is the most common cultured meat. In the UK you can now buy dog treats made with cultured chicken as of two months ago. There’s also a company making cultured foie gras, which seem like an obvious idea given how simple it is and how cruel the regular version is. Also, it’s not cultured meat, but for a few years now Perfect Day has been making lab-grown whey protein and they sell it at Juiceland for those of you who live in Austin. Pure, complete protein, made with Science. Not suitable for people with lactose intolerance. So awesome. I love the future.

This post was going to end with a series of predictions about the future of cultured meat but the future of cultured meat is part of the future of Earth and I have absolutely no idea what the fuck the world is going to look like in ten years because I have no idea to what extent AI is going to crazy and no idea what will happen if it does. Predicting the future is hard and only fools think they can do it.

Pic related because Fluttershy is a hedonistic transhumanist who tries to herbivorize the predator population of Equestria in Season 9 with vegan chocolate chip cookies. It really happened.

thoughts on Gary Marcus?

[Twitter] @GaryMarcus