I just finished listening to it on audible. It is certainly thought provoking, but full of contradictions as others have mentioned. Namely that this technology cannot be contained, and yet that it must be contained is pretty doom and gloom. The prognostications about artificial intelligence are hardly as scary as the ones made around genetic sequencing — that you can buy a device for 30k that will print pathogens and viruses for you out of your garage. That’s some scary stuff.
You can buy plasmids and make whatever bacteria you want for a few decades now. AI may help, but it certainly doesn't cost $30k to cause mischief.Pretty sure I learned that in Bio 102
I just want to echo this here and in a bit different wording: AI will provide step-by-step guides on how to make viruses that just about any idiot can follow, for very cheap, and in under a year time frame.
I really really hope I'm missing something big here.
Having a step-by-step guide and actually being able to follow it are two very different things. If you follow YouTube channels like The Thought Emporium you'll see how hard it is just to duplicate existing lab results from published sources in biology. To go a step further and create new dangerous things without also getting yourself killed in the process is a pretty tall order.
We should be talking about the more abstract problem of asymmetric defense and offense.
Imagine that nukes were easy to make with household items. That would be a scenario where offense is easy but defense is hard. And we would not exist as a species anymore.
Once a hypothetical technology like this is discovered one time, it's not possible to put the genie back in the bottle without extreme levels of surveillance.
We got lucky that nukes were hard to make. We had no idea that would be the case before nuclear physics was discovered, but we played Russian Roulette and survived.
So put a hundred more in series and you get bigger voltage. If 10 of them lit a LED, which needs something like 1.5V then 100 of them would give you 15V. Car batteries are 12V or 24V, depending on the car model/size, so 100 or 200 in series and you get that covered.
It's a beautiful thing if it can bring humanity together towards a common aim.
But if it leads to the collapse of monetary systems, the collapse of civil society, looting, rioting, the rise of nationalism, and WWIII that's most certainly going to lead more death and destruction than the virus itself.
Way to escalate the situation. Let's see how well quarantine measures work and how the next 4 weeks pan out with the economy in hibernation.
It will cost us dearly but I wouldn't say it's going to lead to rioting and WW3. If anything, this is a global problem for which we need global solutions and not fucking nationalism merely 100 years after it already screwed our societies.
Let's hope that China will enforce prohibition of wild animal trade/use as much as possible. It's not in the CCPs interest to let that kind of instability rain down on it.
Introduction to Computer Science followed by Data Structures and Algorithms should give you a healthy start.
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Learning these fundamentals is useful, but not necessarily immediately practical. Building and doing is the best way to learn. This is a good start, and the fundamentals will certainly give you an edge against most people graduating from a bootcamp, but after this I'd recommend finding a good tutorial, whatever the language that teaches you step by step how to build XYZ... I learned ruby/rails by doing Michael Hartl's tutorial building a microblogging platform like twitter.
You have one of the best universities in the world sharing their material for free. That's what's valuable, not the forums that can be attached to the platform or the certificate that no employer cares about.
I mean the professor or university could be the best in the world in terms of scientific discovery or university rankings criteria and this does not mean these materials are necessarily the best learning experience.
Did you even take courses there? Have a different experience?
The best part is, that unlike medical or law you can also do it from virtually anywhere.
I have been doing some semblance of programming since I was 8 years old (now 39). I think it’s one of those things you kind of have to have a passion for or you can easily get burned out.
But I also think it’s one of those things that are more in demand than ever. If I was laid off I’d have to question why I was working for the company in the first place and didn’t see it coming. There are quite literally 7-8 LinkedIn messages from recruiters almost daily. I’m not sure many attorneys or physicians can say that. And when you are in demand like that you’re constantly leveling up your salary every few years.
Finally, I know or very few professions where every 3-5 years you need to completely have learned something new to stay ahead of the game. When I was 8 I was doing q-basic. I’ve had to learn over 12 languages since then.
> I'm not sure many attorneys or physicians can say that
As someone who worked as a lawyer for 6 years before switching careers to software (after 4 years of self-teaching, mind), I can say that in the one year I've been professionally employed as a dev, I have already received several multiples of the number of recruiter messages during the totality of my time practicing law.
As someone who has lived out of AirBnB for almost 3 years traveling all around the world and never once being scammed, I find the title of this article to be a bit alarmist.
AirBnB has host and guest verification options. If Becky and Andrew don't have their identities verified via drivers license but manage over 90 properties that is your first red flag right there.
Second, if the host can't accommodate you you reach out to AirBnb and put the onus on them to find you an acceptable property that meets your standards. You don't let the host offer up some random place that happens to be available, that's suspicious.
I've had a number of hosts cancel on me at the last minute recently, I didn't immediately jump to the conclusion that it must be a scam. I simply assumed that their property is also listed on VRBO and other sites and someone either beat me to the punch or they got more money, or they didn't realize that they can't list the unit and forgot to take down the listing.
Mistakes happen. Sure, there are scammers out there on every platform, but in my 3 years and over 100 successful stays, I really find this article's title tough to swallow.
I really enjoyed reading this article as a way of reevaluating my approach to gender inequality, but I have a problem with the title and main premise.
Why do you need to have a daughter to support gender equality? Aren't these values equally as important to instill in your sons? Aren't they values we should embrace regardless of whether or not we have children?
While this seems promising it seems like it will be a short lived phenomenon. Missles will just become obsolete and then you have to come up with a deterrent for lasers.
Is anyone actively working on laser deflector shields?
Even taking out a small area in today's modern combat fighters would do serious damage, and travelling at the speed of light there isn't much that maneuverability or current defensive countermeasure can do to deter a laser.
Perhaps the catch being that if you have LOS to half the planet then half the planet has LOS to you and presumably its a lot easier to build and operate a high energy laser on the ground rather than in high orbit.
That said, I'm thinking pumped-laser-tipped missiles could be very effective as e.g. anti-ship weapons. You could launch one straight up from your territory, and have it snipe the enemy ship from far away. The enemy would have to monitor a large portion of the sky for relatively small objects and react instantly with lasers of their own to counter that.
EDIT: I suspect these could be made into pumped-laser shells; good luck countering one that's launched from beyond the horizon.
Water is also a good RF screen, so such shield would also effectively blind and cripple the ship. Even discounting the energy use, no way they could keep that up continuously. Ramp-up time is probably large enough too (on the order of seconds), making surprise attacks very feasible. Not an ideal countermeasure, though I'm not sure what would be, beyond packing more ablative armor.
If you're in a position to be aware of an imminent attack, ramp-time is probably within reason. Power reqirements are fairly modest by military standards -- a small fireboat can pump impresive quantities of water, and since the goal in defence / obscuring is to blind (and absorb energy), a finer atomised mist would be more effective. Filter and system fouling is likely a bigger concern.
True bolt-from-the-blue attacks are rare, though possible.
The spray profile could be modified to enable sensor detection, or alternative (off-ship, buoy, balloon, drone, ...) sensor placement could enable both eyes and shields.
Might be that lasers will start showing up on missiles. Hard sci-fi has its missiles carrying nuclear-pumped X-ray lasers, but I suppose smaller, non-nuclear versions could do well enough for terrestrial use.
As for "laser deflector shields", we haven't cracked the "deflector shield" part yet. The closest thing we have to force fields is actual matter - in this case, probably kicking up a dense dust cloud to scatter the laser.
Missiles are an offensive weapon; these are defensive weapons (for shooting down missiles).
The lasers will probably remain, and missiles will get better and better penetration aids (stealth, reflective/ablative/insulating coatings, etc) to get past the lasers.
At even higher powers, lasers may outclass missiles as anti-aircraft weapons, but we're not nearly there yet. In the surface-to-surface realm missiles are more likely to be obsoleted by railguns than lasers.
Not necessarily. One of the more dangerous missions of the USAF is SEAD[1]. During Vietnam, the "Wild Weasels"[2] flew these daring missions where the gist was to get all enemy air defense to fire at them, so they could find them, and destroy them. Airborne based anti-missile lasers, such as this, would be utterly devastating for this. It would improve survivability of aircraft flying SEAD missions. SEAD is generally the first step (in US military doctrine) before total domination of the skys. I'd consider that a pretty offensive use of this technology.
Sure, in the sense that power is generally fungible, these can be offensive. But they don't obsolete the weapons actually used to destroy the targets exposed during that SEADS mission.
I find this topic fascinating. As a defensive measure these could have immense value. I'm sceptical of any present long range value however.
The ballistic nature of artillery, missiles, and other projectiles allows hitting targets beyond the horizon. Lasers are uni-directional so whilst they would be great against targets in line of sight, I doubt you'll see laser weapon systems employed as long range weapons for a very long time.
Of course, you could deploy them from a platform like a satellite, or aircraft, but the power requirements are immense and any current day aircraft would probably be so large as to be a sitting duck. I recall they've carried out testing of this nature using a 747 as a test platform. Until they can make planes of that size more survivable, I guess we're stuck with defensive applications.
Maybe I'm reading too much into your comment, but I really dislike the implication of the words "exploits his popularity".
This is a 14yo which was gratuitously accused of being a terrorist by his teachers - the very people that we as a society tell kids to trust and look up to.
He was handcuffed and arrested, he went through a detention intake process, mugshot and all.
the kid assembled a "suitcase bomb" prop and kept showing it off to his friends during class. His teacher told him to stop, he didn't and kept being disruptive. Obviously calling the cops on his bad behaviour is overkill, but the he is no wunderkind as portrayed by the media (and even the WH).
he literally said something like 'that's nice but it looks like a bomb. don't show anyone else.' -- it doesn't seem to me to be unsupportive, just worried. I don't think a teacher would say something like that in confidence with a student unless that student had a certain rapport with the teacher.
The kid is good at constructing mechanical toys. But let's be clear, this is hands-on mechanics of very simple mechanisms. He is also, as far as the video shows, imitating mechanisms that he has already seen in full scale machinery. It's a feel good story, but do not nominate this guy as a future game-changer just yet. Precociousness is not an indicator of future potential.
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