Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• Unveiling the surprising impact of exercise on longevity

  There is no single thing that can compare to exercise when it comes to protecting against age-related diseases and helping people get more out of their later years, no matter what it is whether it is regular cold plunges, off-label drugs and supplements like metformin, rapamycin or taurine.

  The muscle and bone growth stimulated by exercise can help older adults maintain their independence, lessen fatigue and protect against bad injuries from falls, the leading cause of injury-related death among those over 65.

  Exercise can reduce the risk of certain age-related diseases, including Alzheimer's, cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

• Decades-long bet on consciousness ends - and it's philosopher 1, neuroscientist 0

  Christof Koch wagered David Chalmers 25 years ago that researchers would learn how the brain achieves consciousness by now.

  Both scientists agreed publicly on 23 June, at the annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) in New York City, that it is an ongoing quest - and declared Chalmers the winner.

  What ultimately helped to settle the bet was a study testing two leading hypotheses about the neural basis of consciousness, whose findings were unveiled at the conference.

• Is AI a danger to humanity or our salvation?

  The founders of AI are divided over what's next.

  But one major researcher thinks these fears are entirely unfounded: Yann LeCun, the third 2018 Turing Award winner alongside Hinton and Bengio, and Meta's chief AI scientist since 2013. LeCun and Hinton have been friends for decades. Hinton taught LeCun. Now they are at odds. Hinton's predictions about the impact of AI on jobs have been "totally wrong" in the past, LeCun tweeted on 28 May, having dismissed Hinton's fear of "an AI takeover" as "very, very low-probability and preventable rather easily" on 2 April. "AI will save the world, not destroy it," he wrote on 6 June, criticising the "destructive moral panic" being fostered by some, invoking Hinton in all but name.
  ...
  Hinton thinks such reasoning quickly leads you towards what he has described as a "pre-scientific concept": consciousness, an idea he can do without. "Understanding isn't some kind of magic internal essence. It's an updating of what it knows."

  Also see the editorial in Nature, Stop talking about tomorrow’s AI doomsday when AI poses risks today.

  Talk of artificial intelligence destroying humanity plays into the tech companies’ agenda, and hinders effective regulation of the societal harms AI is causing right now.

• Why AI Will Save the World

  by Marc Andreessen

  My view is that the idea that AI will decide to literally kill humanity is a profound category error. AI is not a living being that has been primed by billions of years of evolution to participate in the battle for the survival of the fittest, as animals are, and as we are. It is math - code - computers, built by people, owned by people, used by people, controlled by people. The idea that it will at some point develop a mind of its own and decide that it has motivations that lead it to try to kill us is a superstitious handwave.
  ...
  So far I have explained why four of the five most often proposed risks of AI are not actually real - AI will not come to life and kill us, AI will not ruin our society, AI will not cause mass unemployment, and AI will not cause an ruinous increase in inequality. But now let's address the fifth, the one I actually agree with: AI will make it easier for bad people to do bad things.

• Researchers work to make prostate-specific antigen test for cancer more accurate

  The most common screening test for prostate cancer so often returns a false positive result that it's no longer recommended for men older than 70, and it's offered as a personal choice for younger men.
  ...
  By calibrating PSA levels to each man's genetics, doctors could control for other factors that might cause levels to be elevated, according to researchers at Stanford Medicine, in California.
  ...
  By one estimate, less than one-third of men with elevated PSA levels were confirmed by a biopsy to have prostate cancer, the researchers reported. Moreover, 15% of men with normal PSA levels were later found to have prostate cancer.

• How Winning (or Losing) a Grammy Changes the Music Artists Make

  After winning a Grammy, artists tend to release music that deviates stylistically from their own previous work, as well as from other artists in their genre. Nominees who lose do the opposite-their subsequent albums trend toward the mainstream.
  ...
  While winning an award prompts creativity and innovation, nominations alone result in conformity.