To be fair, Rodriques IS a scientist (PhD with Ed Boyden at MIT, did solid doctoral work, and was faculty at the Crick before starting Future House), but he is also a True Believer.

I’ve been reading a lot of what I can only describe as “biotech evangelism” over the last few years, and I’ve noticed that “theoretically possible” is usually conflated with “practically inevitable,” even by accomplished researchers…

It’s that #vibephysics we’ve been hearing so much about.

I wouldn’t call the people scooped up by Operation Paperclip “refugees.” It was more “we need to collect them before the Soviets do, war crimes be damned.”

OTOH, first to the Moon thanks to importing a bunch of barely reformed Nazis from Pennemunde…

DoE has problems of its own…

(It’s intellectually provocative and well researched, but as Henry Farrell puts it, probably best considered as “speculative non-fiction.”)

The economist Jeff Sachs would be another example. Definitely not right wing, but super into the lab leak idea.

I don’t know, there’s a certain class of centrist who believes intelligence reports are superior to scientific evidence (eg, the former obama national security staffer and author Jaime Metzl), and Stewart is one of those.

Know the differences between the various tools, they just find “AI” a useful general label.

And unfortunately ARE referred to as AI by practitioners using them. I am a cell/molecular biologist, and have computational biologist colleagues who refer to all kinds of AI tools in exactly the kind of undifferentiated way critics find so problematic. These are sophisticated professionals who

Ok, but what about systems that propose de novo proteins, a la David Baker’s work? That is also considered generative AI, and a class of language model. Or the use of LLMs for annotating large sequencing datasets, often done with tools like GPT-4? Even the “bad” tools have narrow use cases,

Had to stop listening to him once he went full lab leak…

Oh, and @annaleen.bsky.social and @charliejane.bsky.social have a great podcast about the intersection of pop culture and tech, but you’re probably aware of that already.

I think @adambecker.bsky.social does a great job of exploring the cultural influences on the same iteration of Silicon Valley that Daub discusses, and if Disney was an influence, I don’t think any of the tech titans are going to admit to that…

Which Silicon Valley? The pre-internet one of semiconductor manufacturing, or the post-internet one of “there’s an app for that” that Daub is critiquing? Aren’t Silicon Valley and EPCOT/Imagineering coming out of the same modernist aesthetic of the mid-20th century?

What kind of monster uses marble armrests?

Going for “If we don’t hang together, we all hang separately” energy, but didn’t workshop it ahead of time.