Ashutosh Jogalekar at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:
For those contemplating mass casualties, biotoxins like ricin are easy to produce. But delivering them effectively is difficult, requiring specialized techniques like aerosolization. Conversely for chemical warfare agents like sarin, synthesis (because of restricted precursors) has traditionally been the hard part, even if delivering them does not require specialized methods.
However, that balance is tipping because of advances in artificial intelligence. Generative AI and off-the-shelf computational tools are collapsing the precursor barrier, making DIY sarin analogs (compounds that resemble the molecular structure of sarin) as attractive as castor-bean mash for rogue individuals. These applications can make the synthesis and use of nerve agents for nefarious purposes marginally but consequentially more probable.
More here.
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Recent assaults on DEI from the right have caused people who care about a diverse, inclusive America to circle the wagons against
Consider Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the first thinkers of the
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Born in 1720, White was educated at the University of Oxford, UK, before settling at The Wakes — his family home in Selborne, UK — in around 1757. Then, from 1768, he worked for 25 years on his Naturalist’s Journal, a columnar diary in which each page covered a week of observations on fruit and vegetable experiments, local creatures and weather conditions. White’s daily entries in Selborne were often haiku-like in their simplicity. He described “vast rocklike, distant clouds” or simply stated “Bees swarm much. Sheep are shorn.”
When I was a girl in the 1950s women, for the most part, got married, gave birth, and stayed home; if necessary, they went to work as schoolteachers or secretaries or salesgirls. They did not enter the professions, start a business, serve in government, or become university professors; nor did they climb a telephone pole, go down in the mines, or compete in a marathon. Today a girl is born with the knowledge that not only can she do any or all of the above, it is even assumed that she will pursue a working life as well as a domestic one. The change in social expectations for women, nothing short of monumental, is due to the Second Wave of American feminism (otherwise known as the Women’s Liberation Movement), a political and social development characterized by the twin efforts of liberals who worked throughout the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s to achieve equality for women under the law and radicals who worked to eradicate deep-dyed, historic sexism through a change in cultural consciousness. Among the leading figures in this second group was Shulamith Firestone, of whom it was said, “I think of her as a shooting star. She flashed brightly across the midnight sky, and then she disappeared.” That’s exactly how I remember her.
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When democracy seems everywhere in crisis, it may sound paradoxical, to say the least, that the solution to our troubles is to scrap elections altogether. But that is precisely what political philosopher Alexander Guerrero proposes in his bold and illuminating book, Lottocracy: Democracy Without Elections. We should select political officials not by voting, he contends, but by lottery from among the entire adult citizenry.
My main conclusion is no different from my initial post: individual usage of ChatGPT and other LLMs for most people is a small part of their carbon and energy footprint.