It was going to be celebrity meat. As in, genetically identical to celebrities. In some circles, it would become de rigueur to host dinner parties at which one served meat cultured from the people throwing the dinner party. I wanted to see that future.
I sampled some of Li’s unusual dish while he continued. “I had the ship take a few cells from a variety of people on Earth. Without their knowledge, of course.” He waved the sword vaguely at the table behind us. “Most of you over there will be eating either Stewed Idi Amin or General Pinochet Chilli Con Carne; here in the centre we have a combination of General Stroessner Meat Balls and Richard Nixon Burgers. The rest of you have Ferdinand Marcos Sauté and Shah of Iran Kebabs. ...”
We ate up, most of us quite amused. One or two thought the idea a little too outré, and some affected boredom because they thought Li needed discouragement not accomplices, while a few were just too full already. But the majority laughed and ate, comparing tastes and textures.
“If they could see us now,” Roghres giggled. “Cannibals from outer space!”
I always wondered why they tried to mimic "real" meat rather than just making it its own thing. Gluten free cakes are another example. I suppose you need to first penetrate the market/general consciousness first before inventing a whole novel food.
There is some confusion I think in what this article is about. It's specifically about lab grown animal cells, which was always crazy expensive and never produced a good tasting meat due to the lack of integrated fat.
That is very different from stuff like Beyond and Impossible Burgers which aim to mimic the taste of meat with plant ingredients. If anything, lab grown meat cells were at a huge disadvantage to the Beyond/Impossible crew, who could make a better meat for cheaper and was more appealing to customers (if I'm going to forego an animal product, I'd rather have a plant version than a frankenmeat version).
But to your point, I really liked Impossible Burgers specifically because they were the only plant-based alternative that really satisfied a craving for meat. There were veggie burgers for years prior, and they were "its own thing", but I'd always feel hungry after eating one. I like Impossible Burgers because it satisfies all my hunger for meat but I'm not killing an animal in the process.
> It's specifically about lab grown animal cells, which was always crazy expensive and never produced a good tasting meat due to the lack of integrated fat.
These days they are growing animal fats in bioreactors too, albeit separately from the proteins, and then sort of 3D printing them into one another to achieve a meat-like taste and texture. It's conceptually pretty cool, even if the results appear to be underwhelming.
I don’t enjoy Soylent as well but the mock meat Buddhist meals made from I-dont-know-what that can be found in countries like Singapore, Taiwan and hongkong are quite delicious.
If you weren’t paying attention, it quite literally tastes and feels like chicken.
What do you mean by meatless meats? If you meant the beyond burger type of stuff which was just soy heavily processed then there wasn’t a shot in hell it would end up getting big. It’s probably way worse for you than red meat.
You have to wait until you have actual lab grown meat and I think that will actually be really successful if they can create a real meat with all of its complexities and nerves and fat striations, etc. they’re also going to have to prove to people that it’s not gonna cause cancers and things like that but if they can pull that off, it’s going to be a massive massive industry.
Wouldn't you be able to do this with ordinary processed meat today?
I remember as a kid, we once ate some kind of filled chicken nugget thing, which would have been pulped chicken glued back together into a pouch. I thought it was pretty tasty, but in hindsight its probably good that I only got to eat it a couple times, because typing it out now it sounds disgusting and super unhealthy.
I'm always reminded on Orwell's quote about the then new atomic bomb and his prescience on how it would all work out:
"Had the atomic bomb turned out to be something as cheap and easily manufactured as a bicycle or an alarm clock, it might well have plunged us back into barbarism, but it might, on the other hand, have meant the end of national sovereignty and of the highly-centralised police State. If, as seems to be the case, it is a rare and costly object as difficult to produce as a battleship, it is likelier to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a “peace that is no peace”."
It seems, especially with open weights, that the AI is much more like the alarm clock and not the battleship. $20/mo would have been about $1 in 1944
Good point. Everyone is worried about the security attack angle of AI, but it also helps the defence side. People can use it to secure their own systems.
Yall, we're not putting humans on Mars anytime soon.
Okay, okay, rather we're not getting humans back off of Mars anytime soon.
Landing is by far the easy part. MSR was partly a mission to see how hard it really is to get anything back into space from the Martian surface. If you can manage a pound, you can probably then manage 3 or so 180 pound humans and all their safety support.
Like, think of it. You somehow have to land a fully fueled rocket on freaking Mars. No site prep, near vacuum and no aero breaking, very expensive and nearly impossible second chance.
Fine fine, you just land the shell and then refuel on Mars with some form of automated fuel refinery on Mars. Like, if you have robots that can do that, you've ended capitalism already and have no need for humans in the first place.
Im not saying a human return mission is impossible, but it is just so very much harder than a Trillion dollar Apollo program lets us believe.
People have successfully dropped autonomous robots onto Mars before. Wouldn't be out of the question to do so again, except that instead of rovers, the robots could be programmed to open up crates (dropped at the same time, or by a previous or future mission) and assemble what's inside into a landing or launch pad.
Would take a lot of prep missions, and might not be worth the cost, but in theory it's doable. Curiosity massed 900 kg and Perseverance massed 1025 kg according to Wikipedia, so dropping a metric ton of supplies for the robot to assemble would, again in theory, be feasible. (In practice the equipment for landing the supply crates safely would take up a good chunk of the mass budget, but there should be something left over in the mass budget for the crates to contain).
If you have robots like this, why send humans in the first place then? You've already got the bots that can do pretty much everything a human could want to do and you don't have to get them back off Mars.
Robots specialized in assembling one machine are not general-purpose robots. I doubt they would be able to "do pretty much everything a human could want to do".
Now, if someone does perfect a general-purpose, AI-driven robot, then yes, sending that robot on the Mars mission instead of a human would make a lot of sense. That's kind of, kind of, what we've done already with the rovers. But until such a general-purpose robot is actually created, human beings are still the most versatile, adaptable entities that could go to Mars.
I doubt it would be practical to pump fuel to another rocket. The obvious thing to do is store the fuel in orbit with its own rocket engine. Then you only have to dock with it and turn on the engine.
All grown-ups were once children... but only few of them remember it.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, "Le Petit Prince."
While I love de Saint-Exupéry generally, even in his time (especially?), he knew that not all children got to be children. Hell, I think even in his childhood, he never really got to be a child. The reason not many remember it is because for some, they really don't want to.
Which means that if you are a researcher or a corporation working on anything really useful, that even if you have an agreement with OpenAI that your work is sandboxed away and the IP lawyers are made to be happy, even then your work and research is going to be essentially open to the internet.
The huggingface incident isn't widely reported and digested yet, but if what is going on here is that OpenAI's model breached things internally, then you'd be crazy to develop anything with them.
The only real way to use AI for anything 'important' then is to go open-weights and run your own.
As and aside here: With the HF incident and now this (suspected) one too, it seems that OpenAI may not have lost control of their bots, but it seems quite clear that they simply would not care even if they did.
And yes, the only responsible use of LLM at this point is to pivot to open-weights and run the workload in-house. Because not only cannot they constrain the behaviour of models, they only have the 'trust me bro' as assurance that they are even trying to do that. It does appear that every competent 'security professional' has left the building, because if the ones who remain were actually capable and competent this would never have happened. There are actual architectures which can deliver the requisite isolation such that 'sandbox escape' and 'inter-instance persistent memory accumulation' are actual impossibilities. The lack of effective implementation of these methods is proof positive of 1) incompetence in the remaining security teams AND/OR 2) unwillingness of leadership to allow the security teams to do an effective job.
I was talking with a biology prof over labor day and they had no idea what I was talking about (and they 'talk with' Claude every day on their dog walks, so they say). However, when I talked with their mother, she knew all about it. So, I'd say that the digestion by the public is quite mixed so far
There might be the reason your biology prof is uninformed; using 'conversations' with Claude as a source of any expectation of to be informed about misbehaviour of the organization where these escapes occur is like expecting the Hamburgler to keep track of the security levels at McClown. Only not funny. I think the professors mother is showing that she drinks the coolade less and isn't being unserious about her approach to staying informed.
I still maintain that CNN and NBC coverage only happen in the tail of the dissemination of tech news; my anecdata generally observes about 3 to 14 days lag between general awareness in the more informed group of my acquaintances with this kind of news and the appearance of an article on mainstream like NBC, ABC, CNN or NPR. So, by the time it appears there I take news as generally well spread among the tech and specialty fields, and within a week of appearing there I anticipate significant awareness in much of the non-FOX-only media consuming public. But that is just my personal anecdata.
The only thing I would have to say is that you must keep doing the little and noble things that will bring no renown. It's small, but we all add up at the end of every week.
I use opensource models at work because my work is too cheap to spring for a $20/mo account for me. Since HuggingFace models can be run on my laptop now (still very slow though), nothing is leaving the 'secure environment' and so I can actually get work done (instead of the 'old' version of coding and writing - google).
You still need the models to be able to perform web searches, don't you? In which case the data goes in and out of your machine and there is risk for prompt injection attacks. I think it's needed at least for documentation purposes.
In regards to AI, it feels like I have finally been given the tools. For me, the world now feels so open. I can make websites now, I can do the things I have always wanted to do with computers and code. Your world is finally accessible to me.
In regards to you, I think you should read 'What Color is Your Parachute?' again. Yes, that sounds trite and glib, I am sorry. And yes, it sounds like boomer advice, I know. But the exercises in that book really are great stuff. There is a reason it's one of the best non-fiction sellers for like the last 40 years. And yes, I know, NPC-level advice here
I really hope you find your path again. The world isn't going to turn into paperclip maximizing AI gods (Look, Claude gave me $1000 for free the other week. Aint no one do that if they aren't scared shitless that the music is about to stop). We're going to be fine, so will you. You got this, I believe in you.
No one's mentioning it, but also the disease factor.
I remember the first semester in the dorms was mostly the sound of coughing.
Building up the immune system takes disease exposure and that takes time.
Addnib all the immune system depressants and increased exposure events there at Michigan - booze, pot, late nights, hookups, crowds, stress, etc - and you get a perfect storm for the immune system to take a beating.
I was so convinced that these meatless meats were going to be the next big thing.
One thing I think they missed out on was getting to 'close enough' and 'much cheaper' and then just pivoting.
Like, why stay with simulating the 5 or so animals we harvest? Just go off and make up new ones!
Like, here's a jackalope burger, or a unicorn burger or something. Tie into marketing!
"Exclusive to BurgerKing, the Iron Man 5 burger! Now through August 29th only!"
Put in some strange spices, vary the texture, give it a red and gold swirl, let the imagination run wild.
Can you imagine what business a Spiderman burger patty or sausage link would do? K-Pop demon hunters branded chicken-ish nugget like things?
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