Almost every organic molecule has a mirrored counterpart, like a normal screw and a left-handed screw.

Almost none of them occur in the nature.

So we have the technology to synthesize them now, and synthesize a bacteria out of them.

But if you do that, and the bacteria escapes, all your existing medicine will be useless, so you need to re-synthesize all your antibiotics in left-hand configuration.

That typically does not happen with regular bacteria experiments, because most of what you can synthesize in the lab will be a descendant of some other well-known bacteria, which already have an appropriate medicine to treat it, and in most cases it will be effective against your new strain.

Others have already answered, but yeah it's a bit of a Pandora's box. We almost certainly wouldn't be able to contain it, and there's no way of knowing what it would do the the world or even universe. It's some supremely scary shit.

So much of the white collar work is frankly a bit performative in general, and doing it well versus doing it badly versus not even doing it at all is sometimes not at all possible to tell.

Thanks to mismanagement, people are brought in "in case they might be useful" a bunch of material is produced that is beyond the ken of the management who just smiles and nods because they have no idea.

Witnessed a group manage to coast on doing effectively nothing for over a year on "we are going to do analytics in the cloud" as executive after executive sagely nodded. New executive came into the fold and got the same pitch and said "ok, fine, but what analytics, with what data sources, what do you expect to get out of it?" In a rare moment of competence an executive actually dared to figure out something instead of just smiling over the buzzwords. That same executive was gone within 3 months, because broadly speaking this was a problem for his peers that mostly operated by buzzword alignment.

There's a mountain of internal project document material that must be created, but is never used, because of processes where non-technical executives imagine they can review a technical design as long as it isn't "code", or that they can fire their coders and replace with new coders if they can reference some 'non-code' document to help.

GenAI may be pretty bad, but depressingly it might not matter given how much pretty bad stuff is already out there.

"An evil man will burn his own nation to the ground to rule over the ashes." ~ Sun Tzu

"AI Slop" is not mutually exclusive with "AI fascism". Billionaires are already burning down the planet. Clearly they don't care about killing humanity on the way.

In addition to what the other reply says, the current state of AI isn't necessarily the best AI could be. Even with the iterative changes on the LLM-based model, things are improving so fast that it might be safe to shrink the workforce for technical tasks soon.

But I'm sure I'm not the only one that thinks the LLM-focused approach itself is just a local minimum the industry is stuck trying to optimize while another approach that isn't just a big data "throw everything we can at it and hope it spits out useful results" but something more methodological that encodes our knowledge from experts to give it a head start as well as robust reasoning strategies and logic to let it improve on that starting point as it seeks and adds relevant data in ways similar to how we do science and engineering.

I believe that it's a race between an AI that truly can outcompete us and societal collapse, because the real reason AI is more difficult to stop than those other three is how easy it is to hide development. The massive data centers are required for the current approach being scaled up for the world to use it. AI research and development can be done on home PCs, especially if you're more interested in results than speed (in which case you aren't limited by cores or memory but just by storage and time).

I just want to say the hair in your "blank" profile picture got me

kudos

Came here to say this, but with one lol.

Some of them genuinely do believe that they're making a nuGod and want to be the profit, I'm sorry. I mean Prophet of that nuGod.

Jaron Lanier shed some like on the techbros he's had to work with and their mindset.

Heed my warning science: If we start making flying purple babies, we will bring upon the wrath of the one eyed, one horned, flying purple people eater.

That's incorrect. What is allowed is DNA screening, however there is no editing of DNA.

Human fucking is already doing that.

Human cloning (media) and human cloning (real life) are two completely different processes that don't have anything to do with each other. Human cloning in real life is a way to spend too much money to get something that is worse than just two people fucking.

Human cloning could be used to harvest organs and blood. I can imagine a lot of money could be made offering perfectly compatible transplant organs harvested from cloned people with O-negative blood.