article of the week
It’s funny how different people deal with reality. Some seem to think that whatever is right here and now is transcendentally important. They devote every minute they have to finding someone to disagree with, and invest immense amounts of nervous and physical energy pursuing the consequent feuds to the last possible opportunity. Elsewhere, someone else is quietly getting on with new ideas which render everything we do now backward and irrelevant. Who worries now about the quarrels of the Babylonians and the Assyrians, or the ridiculous chariots and spears they used to carry around?
We at LSS, being Whigs or Enlightenments or progressives, or whatever, are very much interested in the “someone elses” mentioned above . And with the help of the inestimable Nature Briefings, we’d like to raise your eyes from the endless disputes around the narcissism of small differences. And let you look at what’s really happening. Changes in the climate, not the weather, if you want to put it that way.
The technologies that Nature will be watching this year include protein design using algorithms similar to those underlying image-generators such as DALL-E, deepfake-detection tools and gene-editing systems that can modify DNA sequences much larger than the single-site edits possible with regular CRISPR–Cas. One advance that didn’t make the cut: ChatGPT. Its applications are “labour-saving gains rather than transformations of the research process”, says the feature.Nature | 15 min read
And imagine a child in 2124 saying to its Dad “what did they do one hundred years ago?” The answer will be in the link above. The endless, futile, indescribably stupid disputes of today will have been forgotten.
#gene editing #AI deep fakes #protein #nature briefings
Learning, Science and Society 