Comments by "Alphabet Inc." (@official_alphabet_inc) on "Veritasium"
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An important aspect highlighted by Mullis' story is, in my opinion, that there really is no such thing as the lone genius who revolutionises the world, all on his own. We often romanticise myths like "without genius A, we would never have X" and "without genius B, we would never have Y", but this is ultimately a highly simplified version of a much more complex story.
In Mullis' case, there are many necessary factors outside his own brilliant discovery and subsequent work, that all played their part in the ultimate symphony that brought the Polymer Chain Reaction to the story of mankind. To me, they all seemingly boil down to CHANCE and OTHER HUMANS (and/or their work).
In Mullis’ story, I want to highlight four aspects.
1) If Tom White hadn’t met, talked with and believed in Mullis, there’s a real possibility that Mullis would’ve never even thought about DNA in a way that led to his eureka moment. Their chance meeting at the bakery where Mullis worked, and the fact that White viewed Mullis as an “excellent synthetic chemist (…) because he’d been synthesising drugs at Berklay”, was what got him in the door at Cetus.
2) Mullis’ specific role at Cetus seems necessary too, combined with his own personality traits. If he hadn’t been working at the specific station he was, he likely wouldn’t have thought about this process at all. If he wasn’t working alone, with a slow, boring and repetitive job, combined with his perhaps “eccentric ADHD-brain”, his mind would’ve been too busy focusing on other things.
3) White again proves to be an essential player, because he saw potential where seemingly everyone else were shooting down Mullis’ work and theories. From how the story is told, it’s possible that the idea would’ve ended at this point without him, but I suppose he pushed the management at Cetus to allocate some resources towards this project. In that regard, it’s also worth crediting the leader[s] who green lighted the project, not to mention the entire team, besides Mullis’ and White (Arnheim, Erilch, Faloona, Saiki, Scharf and Gelfand).
4) Additionally, essential parts to PCR’s success is the bacteria itself (Thermus aquaticus), its discoverers (Brock and Freeze), and the scientists who isolated Taq polymerase from the bacteria (Chien, Edgar and Trella).
And of course, you can go on and on and on, because there’s turtles all the way down, baby. Would Mullis have had his eureka moment in the car that night if he was constantly listening to music and podcasts to silence his non-stop thoughts (like I tend to do too much of)? What if he was never introduced to psychedelics (again, like me, and you know where I’m getting at with this: I’m the real genius here /s). What about the different institutions that facilitated all this work, and who educated these people? What about the innumerable discoveries and inventions all this works builds upon in some way or another, all the way down to the human-like chimpanzee who initially discovered that if he hit a smaller, softer rock against a hard boulder, he’d have this new, cool shaped stone that served no other purpose than for his fellow chimpanzees to laugh at?
Ultimately, are we doing ourselves a disservice by focusing too heavily on very specific persons and happenings when crediting both human greatness, and, let’s not forget, human failure and destruction? Are there really any reason to believe that we wouldn’t have discovered the theory of relativity yet if Einstein’s father never bought him that compass? Is it naive to assume that using time travel to assassinate baby Hitler would somehow prevent the Holocaust? Are figures like Trump and Putin really the cause of so many horrible outcomes, as many would like you to believe, or are they perhaps rather a symptom of a deeper issue?
In the end, I don’t know. I can’t know. However, I firmly believe we ought to shift our focus towards such questions, instead of following down the paths we’re currently refusing to diverge from.
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All of you seem to forget that there's two possible (but somewhat mutually exclusive) roles that AI might take in our future lives:
a) Lowering our quality of life: We are, in many ways, "replaced" by AI. Most of humanity is forced out of work and the economic market, and as such, we must live tragic lives as bottom feeders and/or slaves of some kind.
b) Elevating our quality of life: AI is being used as tools, enabling humans to both do their tasks more efficiently, and gives us more free time to either relax, focus on ourselves and our hobbies, and/or focus on bettering the lives of others/state of humanity in different forms.
It's easy to only perceive the pessimistic version as the only likely future, because we so often hear these warnings (and they are real concerns we should be discussing and watching out for constantly), and because as a form of media/story the alarming and terrifying dystopia sells better than the pleasant utopia.
Just think about it, when did you watch a movie about a guy chilling in the park while laying in the grass and staring at the clouds, then goes home to sit on his porch painting while sipping a bear and listening to chill music, followed by a visit from a couple of friends, whom he he have a nice dinner with, leading to deep conversations, laughter and cute moments far into the night, at which point everyone leaves, our main protagonist brushes his teeth, lays down in his bed and falls asleep with a smile on his face... and then the subtitles comes on screen? Have you seen something like this? Would you recommend that movie to your friends or would you demand your money back?
Judging purely from the historic progress of humanity though, we'll most likely have a lot of bad actors who will try to use AI for "evil" (deliberately or not), but all in all, it's going to be more along the lines of scenario b) described above.
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