There are a lot of risks with retroviral genetic therapy. However, there are a lot of upsides. I think what we need most, is to gain as much knowledge as possible, to ensure we can treat anything untoward as a result.
In terms of 'leaving the local area', there was a recent treatment intended to be done on one eye first, just in case it did not go as planned. It spread to the other eye:
Viral vector DNA was detected in the anterior segment, retina and optic nerve of the untreated eye. The unexpected visual improvement observed in the untreated eyes could therefore reflect the interocular diffusion of rAAV2/2-ND4. Further investigations are needed to confirm these findings and whether other mechanisms are contributing to this bilateral improvement.
Seeing as the eye was directly injected, it's unclear how it spread. Blood, likely.
I don’t see why they would bother with physical tokens nor would they be popular - things like passports are really quite expensive to manage and largely unecessary these days.
OK. I'll bite. Why are they unnecessary?
Passports have two things. They have information on them, which can be read by looking at them. And they have information on them in chip form, which can be scanned, and is also cryptographically signed by the issuing authority (eg, a government).
To verify a passport you can look at it visually, but you can also scan and validate the info, including photo, in digital form. All you need is the CSCA, the 'country signing certificate' to do so, and there aren't may of those. Small readers exist which are updated with these certs, and so even in the middle of a war zone, with RF jamming, you can verify a country signed what you're looking at.
Relying upon the Internet being there for ID purposes is a massive fail. You'd don't need a networked reachable database to validate that your ID is valid, in a digital way, which can be really helpful with 1M refugees show up at your door during a war, or when the capital city of the issuing nation has been bombed.
You may think this unimportant, but the edge cases are what 99.999% uptime is all about. And the edge cases with ID really need 100% uptime. The last thing you need during a natural disaster is an inability to ... well, do anything.
So even if you have biometric methods to identify someone, you'll also want a local, on person method which has those on chip, and signed by a government saying who you are.
Having ID network connected is also a massive, huge, immense fail. There should be no network connected databases of anything about anyone, in any form. Why? It'll be hacked. This will never, ever, ever change. Never. Paper records can't be hacked en masse, and you can get the same protections by storing records on individual chips with other associated info in paper form.
Dismantling this infrastructure and replacing it with buggy, hackable, online databases just to get digital ID verification is a complete move in the wrong direction. Verifying digitally signed information is not.
And passports can be scanned by phones.
Which means that the info, cryptographically signed, can be verified by anyone in the world too.
Really, what we need is to have everyone chipped, like a pet. Because that's where this ends up, and that's also the only way to always have your ID with you.
As a snarky aside, I've spent my entire life interacting with society all the time, yet only in the last decade has it been necessary to be "carded" constantly to do so. We've literally taken a privacy conscious society, and turned it into a nightmare. I'm identified when I go buy a loaf of bread, the most dystopian, totalitarian government anyone could ever conceive of, is a joke compared to the amount of control and tracking now exercised over people's lives.
So I guess my point is...
If it's annoying and difficult to have to carry around a physical identifier of who you are? And use it regularly?
Why is the solution to make it easier to submit to slavery?
Think that's an over the top statement?
We all know how the US government has pivoted on many things during the current administration. We also know it has had, and continues to have (via private enterprise) a robust degree of information about every fiscal transaction made.
If you look at the McCarthy hearings, they literally went so far as to find documents from decades prior, paper records of course, of people joining socialist clubs in university. Eg, simply sign-in sheets, or their names listed in the minutes of such orgs.
Decades later, that information was used to blacklist careers, destroy lives, not for any proof of malfeasance by those accused, but simply because they were curious in college about socialism.
Those same accused were then used to "name names".
My point is, from the financial data currently being stored about people, anything that makes you stand out in any way could be turned into a problem 10 years down the road. Not to mention, how credit card usage, and digital tracking, and location tracking might hit some pattern.
No one who lived through the McCarthy hearings, just watching them, or lived through how Germany or Russia controlled the lives of their citizens, would ever think any of this increased fingerprint of people is a good idea.
It's all just very dumb. And it will not end well at all.
If CBP's systems go down, they will not process (foreign, they'll process US citizens still) arrivals [1], even with physical passports in front of them. I assume the EU ESS works the same.
"If the internet goes down, your border checkpoint is down" is not some terrifying future we need to protect against, it's the reality of the world as you live in right now.
[1]: I've had to wait for an hour, at SFO of all places, because of exactly that happening.
TBF given that a temporary outage is abnormal it makes a certain amount of sense to default to shutting down. Whereas during an extended outage you can pick back up as long as the key parts of your system are capable of operating without the network.
> Relying upon the Internet being there for ID purposes is a massive fail.
Why would you need internet? Document holder smartphone can cache the document for years and present it over NFC (including photo, signature, etc). Just like existing biometric passports work, but replace the physical passport with smartphone app.
System checking it just verifies the signature is valid and thus all data presented is valid? Your browser doesn't need to query any Root CAs to trust SSL certificate, https works without internet.
History of entry and visas/etc could be stored on device as well
If you want to argue for a theoretical system that is self-contained, only relies on the data that is present on either the physical (or the theoretical cryptographically signed digital) passport, you're free to do that.
But in the real world, the systems that deal with processing people's entries already cross-reference multiple other existing databases, require internet connectivity to do so, and I think you'll have hard time convincing anyone to stop doing that.
You are a chipmunk. Every second is met with immense risk of predation, whether cat or hawk. Yet you must still seek food, mate, and water. You must "live in the moment", ignore future hypothetical dangers, and simply live.
You must be in your territory, defending it daily from others. You must live knowing the cat sleeps 50 feet away.
Future dangers must be misty, put out of mind, lest you become paralyized with fear and inaction. To be concerned for unimmediate danger, is impossible.
We are descended from such.
Humans have a very limited capacity to be concerned too far in the future. And think, if we were, how the probabilities expand that danger the further out you go.
Then also understand that the average IQ is 100, and consider how many are below that.
So, as a chipmunk do you work diligently collecting nuts for your winter, and your family? Or do you give up some nuts for a future that is misty, distant, opaque?
Don't be too hard on people, they're only human. They're only, really, chipmunks with bigger brains. And many are trying.
I get you but I think most people are really very selfish when the negative externalities of their actions are diffuse. You don’t see an individual your actions harm, but the harm is real.
Sure, and that's just another form of distant danger.
And the premise is the same. If you could empathize with every person, very directly, you'd be immensely depressed. Imagine if you could literally feel the pain of every human in agony. Heck, imagine if you could feel the pain of every being in the universe. How would you not sink into a deep depression? How would you not fear every move you make?
If you felt every person dying this minute in a car crash, would you ever climb in a car? Would you even leave your house, if you felt every person who tripped and fell on stairs?
Danger must be diffuse. Empathy must exist, but also must have bounds. Just as we must be aware of the future (store food for the winter), and cannot let that drive be interfered with by distant, non-crystallized danger from the future, we cannot let empathy overwhelm our capacity to empathize beings in our immediate mental space.
By the way, this isn't saying we don't need to act. We do. However, understanding the motives behind how people behave, why they do so, and what drives them is important.
And this behaviour is quite important still. We have a massive industry around farming, for example, canning, this sort of thing. However with the further and further collapse of international shipping, and with the US withdrawing (over the last 20 years) from patrolling the world's waterways for free, shipping danger is slowly increasing as time goes on.
And of course shipping is a larger and larger concern in terms of environmental impact. Ships currently use the dirtiest, foulest, most horrid oil you can find. We've already switched to cleaning that up a bit (with perhaps unforeseen outcomes), but the entire concept of shipping massive quantities of "stuff" around is somewhat silly from an energy and environmental concern.
So we're going to slowly be moving back to local first, and that means canned food. Frozen food, such as vegetables, isn't tenable if you have to freeze them in August, and keep them frozen until June next year, at first crop.
We already have a lot of canned food, but my point is, the concept of 'manage your own food supply' is going to be a growing concern. And there was a time, a mere 100+ years ago, where most of the planet had to can their own food, and if a community ran out? Well, that was it, there was nothing to eat.
My point is, the concept of immediate danger must always supersede distant/diffuse danger.
Keep that in mind, and a lot more traction can be had.
Does it solve all the problems? No. But if you know the why of a thing, you're closer to solving the thing.
As a Canadian I love the US, think of them as family, but also view them as some sort of relative which has lost their senses. Before most recent times, we'd sadly shake our heads, as this relative does weird things, yet still hope for the best for them. Yet while rambling blathers about invading Canada and compelling 51st statehood would be fondly tolerated in grandpa, not so much for a nation with a massive army and a joy in using it.
So I purpose we strengthen another aspect of American "democracy" that Canadians find amusing, the concept of "hiring people for popularity not competency". Americans, especially at the local level, vote for judges, police chiefs, even dog-catchers, so why not a local scientist! Rather than 1 or 2, we can conjoin this concept with your third option, yet with the officiousness that only a vote can provide!
Each municipality can have a local head scientist, which will proclaim what scientific fact is correct. People can vote on such candidates, and their platform of scientifically correct "things" during election time.
It will all work out very well for them I'm sure, and hopefully, with science thus democratized, perhaps they will be less of a threat over time.
(Sorry, I don't know why your comment made this pop into my head)
Consensus in science has nothing to do with voting. It's a consequence, not a cause, and arises when the accumulated evidence is clear enough and unambiguous enough that there is general agreement among experts in the field--that is, those who are intimately involved in the production and tracking of that evidence.
I think the use of 'most' and carte-blanch "things they do" to be overreaching. "Some things", and "some people" perhaps.
Yet that has no relevance to an LLM, which is not a human, and does not think. You're basically calling a record playing birdsong, a bird, because one mimics the other.
Go back to 1910, and more than 50% of the population lived in rural areas. And rural doesn't mean "suburbs". As this trend continues further back in time, I'd expect that people in their 30s may be living in cities in 1910, but we often not born there. They migrated from rural areas to the city.
Which means that city people even into the 50s had a very, very rural background.
So people who grew up on farms miles from any town or neighbours or stores, who had to rely upon themselves entirely, were the ones buying machines. But if you look at today, many people are apartment dwellers, or live in townhomes. They don't even have a place to fix something, let alone the tools or background.
I could fix any small engine before I was 10, work on cars before I could drive, and it's because you just picked up this stuff in a rural area. I guess my point is, if you don't know how to fix anything, and no one around you does except for specialists?
Then you probably won't care about owner repairability as much.
Sad, but probably a likely reason why we're where we are.
It doesn't have to be China or Russia. As others have mentioned, the current political climate in the US is... "weird". At least, as an outsider, I just don't know how else to describe it. It's like watching/listening to gibberish.
So I can imagine American allies recruiting scientists en-mass, to protect themselves from America. The US has currently demonstrated a desire to take over allies completely (Canada, Greenland), and I'm sure few know who may be next. Some scientists may have simply wished to move abroad, and also, have quite valuable skills which are restricted in some way, hence them "disappearing".
not necessarily from America. The goal #1 of the US dominated NATO for example was to prevent Germany from getting nuclear weapons in exchange for protection by US. Now with US de-facto withdrawing, Germany would have to quickly get nukes (as well as missiles to carry them) - i don't see other option for Germany here giving the environment in Europe and MidEast. So they would also need such scientists. South Korea, Japan, Australia seem to be in the similar situation too. (and everybody understands that a nuclear weapons program can't be a long multi-year endeavor - somebody will try to stop you - and so it must be very fast once started, and thus you have to have ready-to-use skills and knowledge)
Keeping the FRG from getting nukes wasn't part of NATO strategy. The succinct reason for NATO was to keep the Soviets from marching to the Atlantic. The more pragmatic was expressed as "Keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down."
No shit? Why would they have to? Is someone ready to nuke them if it turns out they’re no longer under the U.S. nuclear umbrella, or are they some special snowflakes who should have them while Iran (and most other countries) shouldn’t?
No. The nukes prevent the aggression even by a conventionally armed aggressor. Nukes ins't to win a war, it is to prevent one. Lets say Germany has successfully repelled Russian tank-and-soldiers invasion - it would still be a devastating thing for Germany which the nukes would help prevent from starting at all.
>are they some special snowflakes who should have them while Iran (and most other countries) shouldn’t?
Yes, i listed those several special snowflakes who were kept safe by the US nukes, and would need their own umbrella with US no longer providing the one. Iran's situation is obviously very different.
Yes, very different as in 'Our blessed homeland vs their barbarous wastes' meme.
We (and our allies) should have nukes because we want to prevent wars. But no one else should have them, since the situation is obviously very different (we wouldn’t want them to be able to prevent wars).
And I used to think that Little Rocketman was a crazy bastard, but it looks like I was wrong.
>Yes, very different as in 'Our blessed homeland vs their barbarous wastes' meme.
exactly. Iran's policy declaration of destroying whole countries (US and Israel in this case) and conducting of actual proxy-wars in order to achieve those goals make them barbarians from whom the civilization must be defended.
>we wouldn’t want them to be able to prevent wars
they don't even try. They want nukes to be able to conduct wars.
>And I used to think that Little Rocketman was a crazy bastard, but it looks like I was wrong.
absolutely. For all their tremendous faults, NK uses their nukes for deterrence as they want to genocide their own people in the comfort of personal safety. Whereis ayatollahs are hellbent on waging wars and destruction in order to spread their Islamic Revolution.
I’ve heard that lower and middle education aren’t exactly the US’s strong suits, but still? The US organized a coup in Iran over 70 years ago and has never really stopped meddling in Iran’s internal affairs. The US runs proxy wars around the world on a daily basis, and when we’re talking about barbarians, they’re certainly near the top - almost a GOAT.
Or the scientists and engineers themselves are wanting out of the US and were offered secret offers to "dissapear" and live elsewhere under a new identity
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