Randomly dipping into this thread, I find this message from Matt completely sensible and in accordance w/ my own conclusions/perspective ...
On Tue, Nov 23, 2021 at 9:23 AM Matt Mahoney <[email protected]> wrote: > > Covid-19 might very well be an accidental release from the level 4 > biosecurity lab in Wuhan where they just happened to be working on bat > coronaviruses. It might have been caused by employees illegally selling used > lab animals to the nearby wet market where the first cases were detected. > That's one theory. We also know that some workers there had an unspecified > illness a couple months earlier, which isn't that unusual. We might never > know. > > But even if that's the case, it surely wasn't a weapon. If it was, they > surely would not release it in their own country and they could have easily > released something far more lethal like smallpox, ebola, Marburg, or anthrax. > With some engineering they could have designed a contagious variant of > rabies, botulinum, or some completely new toxin carried by a common cold or > flu vector. > > China's response was swift. They were the first to identify and characterize > the new disease, sequence it, and develop tests. Their extreme lockdown, > confining a city of 10 million to their home for months, seemed entirely > appropriate, given their experience with SARS (10% fatality rate) and MERS > (30%), based on an initial estimate of 5%. We now know it is 0.4% varying by > age and health, such that the risk of dying is the same as from 4 to 6 months > of ordinary living. The error was caused by the scarcity of tests, so they > were only used on the sickest patients. > > In hindsight, the best course of action at that point would have been to do > nothing. The average fatality had 12 years of life expectancy before > infection. The overall effect on life expectancy is 0.4% of 12 years, about 2 > weeks. This amounts to a 10 week delay in global progress in increasing life > expectancy, now 73 and increasing at a rate of 0.2 years per year. > > Life expectancy is strongly correlated with income and education. Doubling > income or GDP increases life expectancy by 5 years, both within and between > countries, and over time. Each year of higher education adds 1.5 years of > life. You kill just as many people by freezing economic growth for 10 weeks > or closing schools for 10 days. We did far worse than that, and really have > nothing to show for it, as all the masks, lockdowns, quarantines, and border > closures led to protests and destabilized governments (especially Myanmar, > Belarus, Hungary, and the USA) while utterly failing to contain the virus. > > The one bright spot is the vaccines. I just have a hard time believing that > this is a massive conspiracy between thousands of scientists all over the > world (USA, Europe, China, Russia, India, even Cuba) to track us or kill us > or whatever, and not a sincere attempt to protect us. > > I get that censorship on social media to get that message across backfired, > and only made the conspiracy theorists more credible. It's probably too late > to fix that now. But use your head. If you don't think you need the vaccine > because you are young and healthy, or you already had covid, or you're scared > of needles or a sore arm or feeling blah for a day, I get it. I realize that > every medical procedure has risk and you can't do long term testing in the > short term. > > But try to get out of your news bubble. I found that in every political issue > that both sides have legitimate arguments, whether or not I agree with them. > > AGI connection: when cheap nanoscale printing and DNA computing become widely > available, somebody WILL create something more deadly. This was a test. We > failed. > > On Tue, Nov 23, 2021, 6:25 AM John Rose <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> An AGI should be able to model cells, quite easily actually, better than AI: >> https://www.brighteon.com/4c2922ea-7239-478d-8780-6fb80d4df3f4 > > Artificial General Intelligence List / AGI / see discussions + participants + > delivery options Permalink -- Ben Goertzel, PhD [email protected] "My humanity is a constant self-overcoming" -- Friedrich Nietzsche ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/Tfc4d42f7fb128a4f-M8b37bae6f0b7ecfe8ca77837 Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
