The nugget here is the mass-energy-information equivalence principle, where information is physically real and has a quantifiable mass. That's it. That's the article. They took an already existing theory and just said, yeah the information is dark matter, done. Case closed. But I didn't see anything "new" in this article that evidences this. Maybe someone else caught it.

The overall increase in survival rates masks somewhat the huge progress made on some kinds of cancers and very little progress on others. The more common a cancer is, the more attention and investment it gets, the more patients you have for clinical trials, the drugs are developed, studies done, etc.

But if you have an exceptionally rare cancer, then that one is not going to have the some money, patients or attention, and so survival rates don't move much.

For example, the five year survival rate for stage 3 breast cancer is between 66 and 98%! For renal small cell carcinoma (aka kidney cancer, quite rare), stage 3-4 is a death sentence. Like 12% five year survival.

What we need is a breakthrough on getting the body to kill it's particular kind of cancer. All of us have cancer at any given moment, but it never grows because our bodies see it and kill it. Cancer grows when the body doesn't recognize what's there as something to kill, and that necessarily is a person to person issue. My body (as far as I know) has no problem killing kidney cancer. But someone else's body might not.

I didn't mean to write this much so to sum up, we don't just need better screening. We need personalized medicine that can get each of our bodies to kill the particular cancer our bodies are crap at killing. And in that sense, a personalized cancer vaccine is super, super exciting. Maybe we could get to a point where there is just one figure for 5 year survival and it is 99%. I hope we do.

I'd bet every defense attorney he contacted said, "it's on video, you are fucked, you need to take a plea deal," and he said, ok then I'll defend myself.

Sometimes, sure, but I've seen so many great ideas that the PIs then try to take to market and it fails because they don't know anything about building a business. Licensing of course works too but again, for everything that gets farmed out to a manufacturer under a license, there's 100 basic research projects that never escape the lab. The list of patents available for commercialization just from NASA is enormous, and few of those are consumer available, for the same reasons.

This is only new in as much as they are publishing their research. But they came up with this nickel addition nearly 2 years ago: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/01/210118113126.htm

Good for them publishing their findings now, but I'd hardly call two year old science a "breakthrough" in the way this article suggests. If it were that transformative, a ton more cash would have been dumped into this over the last two years. Look at the funders - DOE, DOD and US Air Force. They're funding basic science research (which is not uncommon) in hopes of getting a breakthrough tech that can be commercialized and sold to the government. The breakthrough was years ago, scale is the challenge, and since it isn't scaled today I question whether it could be. Also, academic researchers are notoriously bad at commercializing their inventions, and government orgs are not in the business of commercializing tech. Maybe a third party manufacturer will swoop in and go for it.

Well that's the question though - is self awareness learned (in which case our self awareness is just linear algebra done by a meat computer) or is it a spontaneous event, like a wildfire catching hold, something more ephemeral? I suppose that's the humanities question - how are we going to define what is either contained in some component piece of the architecture or wholly distinct from it? If I take away my brain, my consciousness is gone. But if I take away my heart, it's the same result. Is a self-supervised training signal an analog for consciousness? I guess I think it will be something more than that, something uncontained but still dependent on the pieces.

To your point about a network overlaying smaller nets, we could get to a point where awareness or quasi-sentience is an emergent phenomenon, not something we can build. Thinking about human consciousness, it is evident that our self awareness is an emergent property of our biology. If we put enough of the right technology pieces together, perhaps we'll see the same thing in machines. And then we're left with a real ethical question. If we didn't create sentience but it merely occurred, do we have the moral right to shut it down?

>One of the most complex parts of the proposed architecture, the “world model module” would work to estimate the state of the world, as well as predict imagined actions and other world sequences, much like a simulator.

This is the part standing between real cognition and ML prediction. AI has no sense of the world, only the discrete things it has been optimized to compute. If there was a general purpose world module, then everything a model learns can be put in the context of the real world, making the outputs more consistently accurate/training cheaper and faster. I know the paper just sets out an architecture for the next phase of research, but if this world module became real, that would be as profound as what deep learning has done over the last 10 years.

For everyone about to make a comment "I for one welcome our AI overlords" or some trite shit, this is actually the beginning of something that could lead us there. But without a world model, we will never get there. imo.