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Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

Dec 12

A new article in Science voices concern about a line of biological research which, if successful long-term, could create a grave threat to humanity and to most life on Earth.

Fortunately, the threat is distant, and avoidable—but only if we have common knowledge of it.

The risk is from “mirror bacteria.”

Mirror bacteria are bacteria whose biomolecules all have the opposite chirality to that of normal organisms: all left-handed molecules replaced by right-handed ones, and vice versa.

(Below: normal glucose, and its mirror twin.)

Mirror life does not exist—all life on Earth has matching chirality.

But some mirror biomolecules exist in nature, and larger ones have been created in the lab. Creating full mirror life is even a long-term goal of some research.

Read 15 tweets

Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

Oct 24

The steam engine was invented in 1712. An observer at the time might have said: “The engine will power everything: factories, ships, carriages. Horses will become obsolete!”

And they would have been right—but two hundred years later, we were still using horses to plow fields.

In fact, it took about a hundred years for engines to be used for transportation, in steamboats and locomotives, both invented in the early 1800s. It took more than fifty years just for engines to be widely used in factories.

What happened? Many factors, including:

1. The capabilities of the engines needed to be improved. The Newcomen engine created reciprocal motion, good for pumping but not for turning (e.g., grindstones or sawmills). Improvements from inventors like James Watt allowed steam engines to generate smooth rotary motion.

Read 16 tweets

Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

Sep 19

This is a prescription for re-enslaving women to domestic service, and ensuring that only the wealthy can live with the basic dignity of cleanliness.

What is described here is exactly how we used to do laundry, and it was terrible. Laundry was difficult manual labor that took up an entire day of the week, and was part of why being a housewife was a full-time job.

To quote a scholar who actually knows this topic (Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother):

“For most women, for most of the year, the labor of doing laundry meant carrying heavy buckets of water from tap to stove and from stove to tub, repeatedly overturning the tubs and refilling them, as well as carrying, scrubbing, wringing, and hanging the heavy fabrics that were the only ones cheap enough for poor people to buy. The labor of getting the family bathed was similar, lacking only the carrying, scrubbing, wringing, and hanging of the wash.…

“Even if a dwelling contained a sink, it was usually not deep enough for doing laundry and may not have had a drain. Public laundries were few and far between; and so, for that matter, were public bath houses…

“The net result of the profound difficulty that washing and bathing presented was that precious little of it got done; underclothing might be changed only once a week, or even once a season; sheets likewise (if they were used at all, since featherbeds did not require them); outerclothes might do with just a brushing; shirts or shirtwaists might go for weeks without benefit of soap; faces and hands might get splashed with water once a day; full body bathing might occur only on Saturday nights (and then with a sponge and a wooden tub and water that was used and reused) or only when underwear was changed—or never at all.

“‘Some women have a feeling that cleanliness is a condition only for the rich,’ one home economist remarked of the immigrant women with whom she worked…”

Cowan also quotes an early 20th-century writer as saying:

“Many people do not sufficiently realize the extent to which the increase in cleanliness of home and person contributes toward the growth of democracy. So long as the upper classes felt the necessity of using smelling salts whenever approached by one of the common people, just so long would they despise the vile-smelling yokels. Cleanliness is not only next to Godliness, but it is essential to the establishment of the Brotherhood of Man.”

https://x.com/_alice_evans/status/1836797985658957859

If you don't believe history, maybe you'll believe someone who's lived this.

“Routine tasks, like scrubbing clothes, are such a waste of humans' capacity for creativity and innovation”

Listen to @_alice_evans:

https://x.com/_alice_evans/status/1836797985658957859

https://x.com/lydialaurenson/status/1836946319262498876

@_alice_evans Some more “lived experience” of hand-washing laundry, for your consideration:

https://x.com/lydialaurenson/status/1836946319262498876

Read 4 tweets

Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

Feb 2

Academia cares whether an idea is new. It doesn't really have to work

Industry only cares if an idea works. Doesn't matter if it's new

This creates a gap. Actually a few gaps:

https://twitter.com/jasoncrawford/status/1752891641566781942

1. It creates a culture gap

Academics look at industry people trying to get an idea to work, and complain, “they aren't doing anything new!”

https://twitter.com/jasoncrawford/status/1752891641566781942

2. It creates a gap in the path from idea to reality, aka the Valley of Death

Academics are done once a concept is demonstrated. Industry doesn't want to fund an idea before it is working/viable.

In between is the idea that is no longer new but does not yet work

Read 20 tweets

Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

Dec 18, 2023

If “low-hanging fruit” or “ideas getting harder to find” was the main factor in the rate of technological progress, then the fastest progress would have been in the Stone Age.

Ideas were *very easy to find* in the Stone Age! There was *so much* low-hanging fruit!

Instead, the pattern we see is the opposite: progress accelerates over time. (Note that the chart below is *already on a log scale*)

Clearly, there is some positive factor that more than makes up for ideas getting harder to find / low-hanging fruit getting picked.

“Ideas getting harder to find” is ambiguous, let me clarify.

In the econ literature it refers to a specific phenomenon, which is that it takes exponentially increasing R&D investment to sustain exponential growth. This is basically all the low-hanging fruit getting picked.

Read 11 tweets

Jason Crawford

@jasoncrawford

Jul 5, 2023

Suppose you give an AI an innocuous-seeming goal, like playing chess, fetching coffee, or calculating digits of π. What could go wrong?

Well, there is an argument that even “safe” goals for AI could be very dangerous.

I'm going to give the argument—and then push back on it.

This thread is adapted from an essay here, in case you prefer that format: rootsofprogress.org/power-seeking-…

So the argument goes like this. For any goal:

• The AI can do better at the goal if it can upgrade itself
• It will fail at the goal if it is shut down or destroyed (“you can’t get the coffee if you’re dead”)
• Less obviously, it will fail if anyone ever *modifies* its goals

Read 38 tweets

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