correcthorse123

How would it scale with the number of cores? 3950x should make relatively short work of it, or wouldn't it?

I dont know the answer, but I think people will pursue sections of the labour market which cannot (yet?) be automated. Why play video games that you're frankly sick of after a few months, if you could help someone out for both a social and comparatively large financial reward?

It would also depend on the specifics of how UBI would be implemented. Where I live I could stop working and live off welfare, providing a minimal standard of living. Yet almost nobody chooses this way of life as people strive for higher living standards, and for many work plays a part in giving meaning to life.

If more and more jobs get automated this might become a problem though, assuming no new non-automatable jobs are created.

I think Libreoffice Calc supports python integration. Maybe that way one could have the best of both worlds. Unfortunately I suppose most users are stuck in the MS garden.

Agreed to some extent. "Life science" is quite broad so there's a wide range of topics with varying degrees of complexity and difficulty. I dipped my toes in various apects of life science during a biomedical engineering major. There are specialties overlapping with most traditional fields; from specialties comprising a large part of memorization like physiology, tissue engineering, and biochemistry (medicine), to hardcore organic synthesis (organic chem.), biomechanics (mechanical eng.), systems biology (control and graph theory), biosensors (physics, chem, biochem), imaging (CS::ML & physics), protein engineering/polymer science (chem, phys), bioinformatics (CS) which got me into CS/SE and programming, and many more.

Often there are multidisciplinary research teams and depending on how little a specialization already overlaps with CS/SE-ish topics, having at least someone who realizes which mundane stuff can be automated can be invaluable.

I think this because:

(a) Access for all but the smallest molecules to cells is tightly regulated by e.g. membrane transport proteins.

(b) similar to a, tissue where exchange with the outside world can occur, such as the intestine and lungs, are even more regulated and heavily guarded by the immune system. Apart from small molecules with the right lipofilicity, some minerals, potentially small peptides, or entities with other mechanisms of entry like viruses, nothing gets in (excluding endocytosis by e.g. immune cells).

(c) Anything entering the circulation will be processed by the liver eventually, where all kinds of enzymes target a broad range of structural motifs to break down molecules into 'non-foreign' building blocks to be reused.

(d) I can't think of any molecules not belonging to a particular known class. There is water, elemental ions, carbohydrates/sugars, peptides/proteins, lipids, and RNA/DNA, and small molecules (e.g. intermediate products). All of these except a subset of small molecules and heavy metals can be either broken down into 'known' parts or disposed of (not completely though; over time waste builds up which is likely part of why we age). Now if there are many inert small molecules, they would show up in all kinds of analytical tests. Inert or not, we can classify all of them chemically. There is a lot of stuff for which we don't know the exact function of course, and as these systems are highly complex and dynamic, functionality can be broad and context dependent.

By the way, the term junk DNA has various meanings in different contexts. In the context of non-codig DNA, this "junk" e.g. plays a role in epigenetic regulation as it influences physical accessibility for transcription. Also, DNA is relatively stable and unlikely to interfere with other cellular processes in the same way that random small molecules would.

I could definitely be wrong though. I'm almost done with my biomedical engineering masters, but over the years I turned to software and all the chem and bio knowledge is becoming rusty very quickly. It's also a field in which knowledge doesn't age well as it has been growing quite fast.

I think targetting tbe liver is far easier than most other tissues though, unfortunately.

I couldn't give you a ratio but I'd think it's quite a high ratio. There probably aren't many molecules that don't have either a chemical (i.e. have some function in a pathway) or physicochemical influence.

Yes. I don't think it is significantly relevant either in hindsight.

Agreed. Maybe there are ways to have a single agent and still have internal competition.

An organism (biological or otherwise) could have competing internal parts/models, and not be constrained by the mechanism by which natural selection operates now, i.e. biological reproduction.

So multiple subagents could compete within it, without posing an existential threat to the physical manifestation of the organism itself; somewhat analogous to redundant computers making decisions by consensus in e.g. spacecraft.

While I think your points are certainly plausible, one way to overcome the filter could be removal of individuals or the concept of self which we experience. It's perhaps a bit of a lame TV trope, but something like a superintelligence could have a mind concept completely unimaginable to us.

It's all in the realm of speculation of course, with any proposal having quite a risk of anthropocentric (terracentric?) biases.

Alright thanks, it sounds like being reasonably worrisome if what you say reflects what's going on. I feel like I don't have the faintest clue as to how these things actually affect geopolitical dynamics though, so I find it hard to evaluate stuff like this.

As a sidenote; Leefbaar Nederland and later Lijst Pim Fortuyn (the political parties he was with) were barely right wing compared to the utter crap we've got now though. Unless openly thinking about the problem of improving the integration process so immigrants have a better chance at a good job and happier lives (as opposed to "welcoming" them with neglect - I'd guess having mostly cheap labor in mind - under the guise of multiculturalism) is right wing. I was a bit too young to understand the political context back then, though in hindsight, AFAIK I think he really meant to help these people as opposed to the hateful unproductive stuff spouted today by PVV and the like, mainly appealing to a part of the voterbase that's into that, and furthering segregation and polarization. I guess openly addressing religious fundamentalism was considered quite right wing at the time though. Specifically the Lagerhuis broadcast with Marcel van Dam comes to mind.

(I might be misclassifying him though; I don't recall his actual policy proposals regarding these topics, but the Guardian article claiming he was a fiercely anti-immigration libertarian does not rhyme with my admittedly ill-informed recollection of his politics)

I'm so glad your government is helping to keep us safe!

To express my gratitude I'll help boost your economy with some ad revenue today and aid the good fight. The profits should trickle down to you eventually.

On a more serious note, I think (possibly in my naive ignorance) the geopolitical implications are quite different. I have the impression that American cultural influence has become increasingly prevalent throughout Europe, since of course WO2 and especially since the dawn of the internet. A non-negligible part reads and writes more English than their native language, and the majority consumes mostly US media; for entertainment at least [citation needed].

This is one of many reasons leading me to believe that US-EU interests and popular opinions are even more aligned relative to other potential geopolitical/economical US "adversaries" than is obvious already (modulo the rep hit from the last 4 years). This may be only tangentially related to what you're saying, but I wonder whether the degree of spying on European countries and vice-versa is more of a low-profile intel maintenance thing as opposed to full-blown strategic warfare. I.e. I'm not sure to what extent I should consider this to be problematic.