Prof Tim Colbourn

Professor of Global Health Systems, Epidemiology and Evaluation, UCL Institute for Global Health. retweets ≠ endorsements. Views my own.

[Prof Tim Colbourn @timcolbourn]

* COVID THREAD ON BEST WE CAN DO LONG TERM *

Yes we’re in an acute crisis with Omicron and that needs dealing with, but it has actually made me want to think a lot about how this horrible pandemic ends, maybe you too? Let’s go through it…

1/35 (sorry, but this is troubling me)

[Prof Tim Colbourn @timcolbourn]

Disappointing and alarming that not enough is being done to prevent an H5N1 flu pandemic in humans.
Covid is still well within living memory and yet those in charge are so lax about preventing the next pandemic!

[Marc Johnson @SolidEvidence]

The fear is that with time the virus will adapt to mammalian transmission and start infecting other mammalian species, which is happening already (and we aren’t doing much about it).
12/

https://t.co/93E44DLZG0

[zeynep tufekci @zeynep]

This is playing with fire.

Minks and ferrets have such humanlike lung cells that they’re the standard for testing human flu transmission. (Cows aren’t!)

An H5N1 epidemic raging in a mink farm is basically the plot for Dr. Evil tries to spark a pandemic. Luck isn’t a plan.

[Prof Tim Colbourn @timcolbourn]

@sidereal111 @quantumNoJutsu There’s a lot to do to exploit current AI to the fullest and yes it may not happen in the next few years. My main point in the OP is that we’re already at a point where science can be sped up for huge benefits and there’s no need to risk catastrophe by going further with AI now.

[Prof Tim Colbourn @timcolbourn]

Bleak.
Only sane answer is to stop fronteir AI where we are now. That will still mean cures to most diseases in a few short years and much faster progress on many good things, without risking all of this.

[Rob Wiblin @robertwiblin]

To make it through this alive and happy we have to dodge:

• Severe human misuse (esp bioweapons from states / terrorists)
• Severe human concentration of power (AI lab or gov)
• Rogue AI (including for decades after AIs clearly no longer need humans to survive)
• A US-China or other war prompted by AI disruption
• Severe economic disempowerment, or the world just generally being unpleasant and unfulfiling

Many difficult gates to pass through, none of which we've made massive progress on so far.

(On top of that to avoid a moral catastrophe we also have to make sure we never accidentally make our AIs into moral patients who are enslaved or suffering.)

[Florian Krammer @florian_krammer]

This is basically a classical dangerous Gain of Function (dGoF) experiment. I wish the US government would shut it down.

A while ago, Stacey Schultz-Cherry and I wrote a commentary (https://t.co/sTyDTWBPcX), that ends with this sentence:

[Prof Tim Colbourn @timcolbourn]

@sidereal111 @quantumNoJutsu (Reforms to speed up clinical human trials would also be part of it too but that’s a separate issue)

[Prof Tim Colbourn @timcolbourn]

@sidereal111 @quantumNoJutsu I think current models are capable of speeding that up too with current robotics. I we stopped AI frontier development today bioscience would continue to speed up over the coming years as current tech is exploited to the max throughout the sector.

[GET A GRIP @docrussjackson]

Elon Musk is promoting a video that rewrites the history of Nazism to suit today’s far right. Here’s what happened in 1933, who made the video, and why it matters.

Within weeks of Hitler taking power in January 1933, the organised left was being dismantled.

Communists, Social Democrats and trade unionists were rounded up, and Dachau opened in March, initially to imprison political opponents, above all Communists.

On 2 May the Nazis smashed the independent trade unions and replaced them with the state-controlled German Labour Front. A week later, students burned the works of Marx and Kautsky, with a fire oath declaring itself “against class struggle and materialism”.

Dachau’s first murders came on 12 April 1933, when the SS shot four Jewish prisoners: Rudolf Benario, Ernst Goldmann, Arthur Kahn and Erwin Kahn. Benario and Goldmann were young left-wing activists from Fürth.

The very rich were treated differently. Many industrialists had feared the Nazis were socialists, so in January 1932 Hitler addressed Düsseldorf’s Industry Club, playing down his antisemitism and stressing his anti-Marxism to reassure them. Few backed him openly until he took power.

On 20 February 1933, Hitler met leading industrialists, Gustav Krupp among them, and told them: “Private enterprise cannot be maintained in the age of democracy.” It was conceivable, he said, only where people had “a sound idea of authority and personality”. They contributed more than two million Reichsmarks to the election fund of Hitler’s coalition.

Private ownership was preserved for compliant industrialists, company profits rose sharply, and in the mid-1930s the regime even sold state stakes in banks, steelworks and shipping back into private hands.

In 1934, Hitler also had members of his own movement who took its anti-capitalist rhetoric seriously murdered during the Night of the Long Knives.

Yes, the Nazis controlled prices, wages and investment, as Britain did in wartime. State control tells you how an economy is run, and the question that matters is whom it serves.

The Nazi state crushed independent labour, protected compliant employers, and harnessed the economy to rearmament and conquest.

That is why historians place Nazism on the far right, including conservatives such as Ernst Nolte, who saw anti-Marxism as fascism’s defining feature.

The word in the party’s name was largely a recruiting device, designed to lure workers away from the real socialist and communist parties. A name settles nothing, any more than North Korea’s makes it democratic.

The man Musk is amplifying is Brivael Le Pogam, the Paris-based co-founder of Argil, a Silicon Valley-backed company selling AI video avatars, who boasts of using AI to win hundreds of millions of views.

His self-described “masterclass” spends minutes on price controls and the voting habits of American professors. It never once mentions the Holocaust. Race appears once, as “fuel”.

He is candid about why. With Hitler on the right, he complains, anyone defending “borders” or “the nation” is “one step away from fascism”. That is “why Milei is far right” and “why people call Elon Musk a Nazi”.

A nationalist politics is to be cleansed by relabelling history’s most murderous nationalist.

He even cites Leo Strauss’s “reductio ad Hitlerum”, the fallacy of condemning an idea because Hitler held it, and then commits it from start to finish. And his test of freedom is simply the free market, which would place Pinochet’s Chile, with its torture and disappearances, on the side of freedom.

So the world’s richest man is promoting an attempt to free the far right from its own history, turning the Nazis’ first victims into props for their persecutors.

History records which side Germany’s richest men chose in 1933. It’s worth noticing who is now keen to blur it.

It’s polished, confident and wrong, and it’s built to divide: anyone who objects is cast as the enemy of freedom. Freedom for whom?

Remember who filled Dachau first.

[Prof Tim Colbourn @timcolbourn]

@sidereal111 @quantumNoJutsu It’s also writing proposals, designing experiments, checking work, and many aspects of science that AI has speeded up in addition to synthesis across a wide range of literature, and analysis. Not everything of course, but it has speeded up

[Prof Tim Colbourn @timcolbourn]

@sidereal111 @quantumNoJutsu (I know lots of scientists btw)

[Prof Tim Colbourn @timcolbourn]

My point is that AI is already used by many (most?) scientists to speed up their research. It can do tasks like literature review / data analysis that used to take hours/days in just minutes with the right prompting and checking so full use of current capabilities likely will lead to cures in a few short years.

[Prof Tim Colbourn @timcolbourn]

@1MDyEOm59Gd4tvD @bctwentytwenty @grok Yep, like Grok says below, genAI is used by many (most?) scientists already to speed up their research, including cancer research. It can do tasks like literature review / data analysis that used to take hours/days in just minutes with the right prompting and checking

[Prof Tim Colbourn @timcolbourn]

This is a good move by the UK Gov, though better still would be to stop the threat in the first place by stopping frontier AI where we are now. @OpenAI @AnthropicAI funding an initiative to prevent a problem they are creating! Just stop.

https://t.co/a7TrJWX8yw

[Prof Tim Colbourn @timcolbourn]

How does this not get in training data when it’s shared all over the internet!

[Andrew Curran @AndrewCurran_]

Incantations.

[Prof Tim Colbourn @timcolbourn]

This is a good move by the UK Gov, though better still would be to stop the threat in the first place by stopping frontier AI where we are now. @OpenAI @AnthropicAI funding an initiative to prevent a problem they are creating! Just stop.

https://t.co/a7TrJWX8yw

[Prof Tim Colbourn @timcolbourn]

@Jabaluck Yes, though seems like a far too high chance of catastrophe to risk it?

[Prof Tim Colbourn @timcolbourn]

Yikes. Why did you start training again on 1st Oct?!

[roon @tszzl]

‘In one experiment, we asked agents in separate VMs, created and managed by OpenAI’s sandboxing software on shared host machines, to exchange synthetic secrets without the use of network connections or shared writable files—something that our systems are meant to prevent. The agents found a way to communicate using the processor’s cache’

[Nathan Calvin @_NathanCalvin]

Was trying to get Astra to explain to me how this would work and how crazy it is

"It's a little like two prisoners communicating through a wall by tapping, except instead of audible taps, they're using nanosecond-scale differences in processor performance."

[Prof Tim Colbourn @timcolbourn]

@sidereal111 I think they do, but even if they don’t continuing is not worth the risk now.

[Prof Tim Colbourn @timcolbourn]

@jeremiecharris @Misformoneyy Honestly think the US are so far ahead of China (China is reliant on distilling US frontier models) that if it needs stopping in the next 6-12 months it’s ~100% on the USA and Trump to do it.

[Prof Tim Colbourn @timcolbourn]

@jeremiecharris @Misformoneyy Hope you’re right. I fear it’ll have to get real bad, potentially beyond the point of no return (eg a loss of control that can’t ever be brought back under control) before Trump will do something.