Currently, there are no known functional cures for AD. There exist a number of treatments (monoclonal antibodies) for which there is supporting evidence for slowing cognitive decline and delaying the progression of functional disability, but the effect size is generally modest. To be fair, some people seem to be stronger responders than others; however, these amyloid-targeting treatments also have a risk of ARIA (amyloid-related imaging abnormalities), which are associated with microvascular hemorrhages (bleeding of the small blood vessels in the brain).

A subgroup of the general population is predisposed to AD because of a genetic mutation they carry (ApoE4). Each of us carries two copies of this gene, and we know that people who have one mutant copy (heterozygous) have a modestly increased risk of developing AD, and those with two mutant copies (homozygous) have a significantly higher risk. Not only is the lifetime risk increased, the typical age at onset is decades earlier; homozygotes may begin showing MCI (mild cognitive impairment) as early as in their 40s, and we call this "early-onset AD."

So, to answer your question, you are correct: there isn't really anything someone can do to stop or reverse the condition, but with early detection and treatment, they might be able to improve their quality of life and reduce the burden on caregivers and long-term financial cost of care. How such a person copes with a diagnosis is a psychological question. Some will spiral into depression and despair. Others might plan for the future in ways they might not have done otherwise, and find focus and purpose during the time they have. And it is for this latter group that the availability of such a test might be particularly helpful.

That said, having a validated and (relatively) noninvasive biomarker for AD pathology is a huge game-changer for AD research and drug development. One of the biggest challenges for targeting AD is accurately identifying the patient population. In the past, it was not always clear whether trial participants--many of whom were elderly (i.e. 75+)--actually had AD, or some other dementia, since the gold standard was to perform an autopsy. Because of this, clinical trials often suffered from a lack of statistical power due to a proportion of participants not actually having the disease that drug was intended to treat.

Since then, we devised various imaging modalities (e.g., PET) to use in conjunction with investigator assessment to improve population quality, but the more measures we have, the better the trial data gets, and the better researchers can identify targets for drug candidates. But we are still a long way off from figuring out how to prevent and/or reverse AD. One reason is that we believe that by the time patients exhibit symptoms of cognitive impairment, it's already too late--there is already extensive damage. So if there is a biomarker that can reliably detect subclinical AD pathology, this also has positive implications for designing clinical trials that aim to prevent AD disease in susceptible people, much like a vaccine for infectious disease or cancer.

It's a big dream, like being able to prevent or cure all forms of cancer. But I would like to imagine it is possible. These diseases take such a tremendous toll--on patients, on their caregivers, on the healthcare system, on society--and I hope there will come a day when they can be prevented as easily as going to your local pharmacy and getting a shot.

We generally don't let the general public have access to enriched uranium, high explosives, or chemical or biological agents. These are also just "technologies." Anyone sufficiently intelligent CAN gain access to hazardous materials. But we don't allow it because society has recognized that these things are too dangerous to not tightly regulate. Unauthorized possession is itself considered a crime, and this is because of the risk level.

AI agents might not reach this level, but this example serves to illustrate that your arguement--that "outlawing technology is not the answer"--requires more nuance. Many gun owners are fond of saying that "guns don't kill people, people kill people." That is also a specious argument. The gun makes it much, much easier to do it, and to do it in a way that is faster, more deadly, and more difficult to trace.

And the way these AI systems are designed is similar: whereas before, a competent hacker could go in and manually find vulnerabilities, now the process is automated and not even explicitly asked for. That's the crux of the matter: the more capability we train this technology to have, the more dangerous using it will become--just like a revolver pistol versus a chain gun.

The solution is not just technological or even legal. It's a societal one. We need to first acknowledge that agentic AI technology is intrinsically burdened with very serious risks, by understanding what it is actually and potentially capable of doing. We are at a phase of LLM development where there is a great deal of power exhibited by and granted to these tools but very little regulation due to the lack of such understanding. It might evolve to a point where computing systems have built more robust protections against abuse (whether intentional or not). It might evolve to a point where laws will be passed restricting certain uses. But to your point, the genie is already out of the bottle, and unlike, say, the relatively successful proliferation of age-verification laws and censorship of legal adult material worldwide under the pretense of "protecting children," the real reason why there hasn't been a massive concerted effort to prevent AI abuse is because the people who have the power to restrict it are the same ones who are making billions of dollars off promoting its use.

How difficult is it for an operating system update to detect whether or not a service is installed, and if not, then not install it unless it is explicitly requested?

I find it strange that this simple design philosophy is ignored. When a user installs or updates software, they should be presented with a dialog box with a list of components that can be checked/unchecked for installation, with any dependencies reflected as appropriate. The whole paradigm of "automatic" and "background" updates is absolutely bizarre to me. I never want the OS to decide if or when to update itself. I never want it to decide by default to install and enable a new service without giving me the option to choose. Microsoft seems to violate this principle with alarming regularity.

The fact that OneDrive at one point its its development caused massive data loss for users who found it had exfiltrated their locally stored files means that at no point in its future development can it be trusted. The risk is too high to not check whether it has deleted the local copy, relative to the inconvenience of performing the check.

Who and what are we to believe here? LAPD audit says the 2-month error rate was 32.3%, yet Flock CEO says misreads are less than 1 in a million.

While both statistics can be correct, they are probably measuring very different things. If any given camera is reading thousands of plates a day, then an error rate of 1:10^6 is plausible. But that's not the correct metric by which to understand the consequences of false positives in the system, because most reads--correct or not--are not associated with criminal activity. And for that reason (as well as others not from the article), it's obvious that both the Flock CEO and the various law enforcement agencies are engaged in this public finger-pointing exercise to make it seem that they aren't the ones who are primarily responsible, while behind the scenes they're still cooperating with each other.

If instead we look at it from the point of view of data that is believed to be associated with criminal activity, and then using the system to locate a match, then we can see why even a very low read error rate can result in many false positives, because there are so many cars out there, each having their plates read repeatedly and under varying conditions.

As much as I am opposed to Flock for their role in the creation of a surveillance state, I place just as much blame on law enforcement. They are racist, lazy, stupid, corrupt, and too eager for violence. Tools like Flock merely enable them to be even lazier, all while getting fat on the taxpayer's dime while they parade around their militarized weaponry and vehicles. Actual honest detective work is a thing of the past. And this is not just a problem in the US, but also in other countries, with the proliferation of mass surveillance and automated systems for gathering data. Even if they weren't lazy, they lack the capability to think critically. And idiotic legal doctrines such as qualified immunity further remove any incentive to investigate properly, because they cannot be held accountable for their mistakes.

Then there's this: "A recent report from Business Insider shares a worst-case scenario." No, that was FAR from a worst-case scenario. I'll tell you what "worst-case" is. It's an overzealous, violent cop with a itching trigger finger who gets bad data and ends up killing innocent people just because a computer said they were a criminal.

Fundamentally, the problem is not really about technology. It's about a society and government's approach to policing and crime. The abuse of technology only makes the systemic deficiencies easier to see, by making them happen more frequently and indiscriminately. The very principle of mass surveillance is unjust and undemocratic; the (mis)use of the resultant data is merely the proof.

TFA: "If you want to ban profiting from the failure of clinical trials, you would start with the stock market, where the financial incentive for this type of profit is orders of magnitude larger," said Kalshi spokesman Jack Such, pointing to stock market short sellers who have profited from clinical trial failures. "While Kalshi and the stock market are the same in this regard, they do differ in one important way: the stock market doesn't give any valuable information to researchers," Such said.

This is either ignorant and/or maliciously deceptive for the simple fact that there are rules against insider trading. Investors in pharmaceutical companies are not (or at least, should not be) privy to modifying the conduct of a trial in order to secure or deny approval. There is no similar oversight for these betting markets. Sure, they might say that your wager could be disqualified if it comes out that you interfered in the outcome, but that is little comfort for the trial participants and the drug sponsors, who can't just hop into a time machine and run it back.

And that's why there are so many regulations surrounding the conduct of clinical trials. People might argue that there is corruption and untoward influence already--that FDA approvals (especially under the current administration) are not necessarily based purely on scientific and medical legitimacy. But that's a very strange argument to put forth in defense of enabling MORE interference.

While I'm at it, let's also just shut down the absurd idea that betting markets somehow facilitate better information sharing about novel treatments. The point of these trials is to gather the evidence in an unbiased, objective, scientific way. Betting on them is not going to gather you any more meaningful evidence than what the trial designers have specified in the study protocol. The idea that "the market is efficient" is not in any meaningful sense a scientific approach to deciding whether an investigational product actually works. If that were the case, the FDA would be basing approvals off stock prices.

Honestly, who do these assholes think they're fooling? The only reason why they want to do this is because the house takes their cut, win or lose.

We can debate ad nauseam about the appropriateness of Asimov's laws, their historical context, how he as a SF writer applied them in his work, whether or not he was "right," etc. But the essential problem remains: the current framework that we are using to develop these technologies are inadequate for the purpose of ensuring safety.

Now, some people would argue otherwise--that, to make an omelette, you have to break some eggs. Every technology has the potential for misuse. Nothing can ever be 100% safe. And I don't dispute this, but that is also not the point, because, again, the central question of safety has to do with designing systems that will not destroy us. We're not talking about individual adverse impacts--which, mind you, we should strive to avoid as well--but the kind of technology that has the potential for global impact. Not enough effort has been made to safeguard against this contingency.

And we also have people who would say that such worries are needlessly alarmist, and assert that current systems are nowhere near that level of capability. That may be true. But that kind of thinking is much like climate change denialism in that it is rooted in a failure to anticipate and plan. Scientists warned us about climate change over 50 years ago and nothing was done; the evidence continues to mount and there still are people who have a financial and political motive to deny it. And for similar motives, there are people who insist on moving forward incautiously, with no regard for safety or ethics or consequences, because it gives them power and money.

I'm less interested in the specifics about whether Asimov's laws are appropriate or sufficient or correctly ordered, than I am about what we actually need to do as a race to prevent disasters. Let the historical record show that have been profoundly cavalier--we literally discovered planet-destroying science (nuclear fission) and then treated it like a toy. I don't think it is unreasonable to express doubts about our ability to have learned our lesson.

The fact that you had to point this out is in itself very telling: it shows that the issue isn't simply the extent of corruption, but also the overwhelming success with mass disinformation and censorship.

I know the term is overused, but Americans really are being gaslit into believing that these brazenly criminal acts are things that previous administrations have always done, or that the current administration deserves to do it because they have secured the power to do so. And neither of these are even remotely true.

There's this insidious mass delusion facilitated by the oligarchy and mainstream media. Their fascist playbook is:

1. Commit as many crimes as possible, as quickly as possible, so that people don't have time to react or investigate. This is Steve Bannon's "muzzle velocity" strategy.

2. Control media messaging and suppress honest journalism by taking ownership of media corporations and threatening those who refuse to be silenced.

3. Delay or bury investigations through misuse of government resources and agencies. Ignore court rulings.

4. With cooperation of tech companies, set up mass surveillance to make people afraid to oppose them.

5. Instill hopelessness in the public by showing that they are still getting away with these crimes.

Their actions aren't really about reputation, whether their own or the company they represent. It's all about ego and control for these people. It's about demonstrating power and influence, to show that they belong to a privileged class for whom certain consequences do not apply.

When we think of it in that way, we can explain so much of the behaviors we have recently witnessed (and continue to witness). These are people who believe they can act with impunity because they have not been held accountable in any meaningful way. And for the most part, that belief has proven to be correct, which is why we repeatedly see corrupt acts go unpunished.

It isn't really about the corruption per se. That's just the cherry on top. In fact, the real purpose is to demonstrate and signal to others that they CAN and DO get away with it, with no or minimal consequences. And the reason they want to demonstrate this is because it creates a feedback loop of more corruption and identifies those who will suck up to them versus thsoe who have ethical standards. How else do you know who to trust if you yourself are not trustworthy? Who do you know to target if you are a psychopath? Signaling that you can get away with murder is the key.

And I would argue that, in this case, the punishment was far too lenient, because if you think of the crime in this context, it really says that these people DID get away with it. They got a slap on the wrist. The company paid the bulk of the damages. And so, this settlement again signals that, yes, the privileged class is above the law, because even when the law finds them culpable, the penalty is nominal for them. It's a cost of doing business.

So let me see if I understand your argument, which is that because surveillance is already pervasive and ubiquitous, we should allow the use of even more of these devices in a non-public space (which, owing to conference registration and admission terms, DEF CON qualifies as such)? Devices that make it even easier to record others without their consent, including bathrooms where there is a clear expectation of privacy, becuase by their very design, are intended to be worn at all times because of their functional relationship to vision correction?

Okay. If the surveillance state is already a problem, why are you defending the idea of making it easier? I'd say that's the oddest hill to stand on. Just because people already use their phones to record others without consent in public does not mean we should let that practice expand to eyewear.

If you're a conventionally attractive person, you wouldn't be caught dead with these massive, chunky frames sitting on your face, unless it becomes a status symbol for your conspicuous consumption. The reason you're conventionally attractive is because you know how to groom and dress yourself, and to not buy shit like this.

If you're not a conventionally attractive person but somehow can afford to spend the money on these, believe me when I say that if you wear these, everyone within a 100-yard radius can see you're a creepy tech nerd, and everyone within a 200-yard radius can smell that you're a creepy tech nerd. You may as well be wearing a giant sandwich board saying "I install peephole cameras in public restrooms."

AI has done nothing of the sort, and in fact, has done the opposite. Individuals in creative industries have lost their jobs and income because consumers have chosen to either generate their own slop or purchase slop because it's cheaper than real, human-made work. And there is no reason to believe nor any evidence to support the notion that AI will lead to this post-scarcity paradise you claim will come into being. Simply legislating it will not make it happen. As much as I respect Sanders for the attempt, it fundamentally fails to address the core, underlying problem with generative AI, which is that it can only thrive by stealing the collective output of actual humans, and in doing so, suppresses the desire to be creative.

Nobody will WANT to be free to do what they want if everything they do is watched, tracked, datamined, analyzed, and repackaged for consumption. The problem is not even about the economics of labor. It's about what the quality of life means for a society in which every thought and action is being analyzed. I don't want to live like that. I don't know anyone who does, and if you do, then YOU go and do it. I don't want any part of your dystopian panoptic bullshit.

I don't think that's a meaningful question to ask, since it seems to be based on the flawed premise that there should only be a limited market for creative work, and that the forces of supply and demand ought to dictate how we as a society should value such work.

And what the developments in generative AI have shown us is that those same market forces have no problem trying to replace the underappreciated, underpaid work of countless artists and creative industry employees with a neverending firehose of AI slop.

The human desire to create and the desire for imaginative self-expression is extremely deep seated. To be told that this is economically worthless, easily replaceable, and undeserving of recognition, while at the same time the very means for automated generation of AI slop are stolen from and built upon centuries of handcrafted, human-imagined labor, is the height of hypocrisy.

So, to answer your useless question, no. The world does NOT need more starving artists. What the world needs is to properly recognize the value of human art and creative expression. And to the extent that technology is being used to suppress the worth of others, I say artists have every right to reject it. I hate the panoptic, uneducated society we have become. I detest how creative people are being forced to choose between bringing something new into this world, versus preventing some tech oligarch from training a LLM model on it. I despise the fact that mega-corporations routinely wield their vast financial and legal resources to protect the enormously profitable intellectual property that they pay slave wages to artists to create.

I don't know this Eggers guy. I haven't read his books. Whatever he wants to do with his time and money is up to him. But wanting to give more people a pathway to create, and to do it without having it stolen by the Zuckerbergs and Musks and Altmans and Bezoses of this world so that they can turn around and claim that the same things they've stolen are not really worth anything after all, is, in my opinion, better than sitting behind a computer asking whether the market for art is saturated.

The teachers--at least, the competent ones--are often the only ones who care. But they're the least empowered of the parties involved.

They are paid a pittance by the district and treated like glorified babysitters by the parents. They have had their ability to enact discipline taken away; parents are unwilling to hear that their little angel could do anything wrong or that they themselves are responsible for a home environment that doesn't foster learning.

The administrators only want to line their own pockets. They keep increasing class sizes and cutting programs and services, while repeatedly falling for band-aid, quick fix "solutions" pushed by corporate educational snake oil salesmen.

Parents are overworked, underpaid, and can barely enforce discipline on their kids. They've abdicated their role as parents to social media algorithhms. In this regard, social media is a symptom of the problem, not the root cause. In other parts of the world where social media is as pervasive, why have we not seen a similar magnitude of decline in learning outcomes?

Meanwhile, corporations and politicians are behind much of these problems. It's a societal and cultural issue, in which those in power correctly believe that they don't need to cultivate future generations of intelligent citizens. They only need some of them--their own children and friends--to be well educated, while the rest of the working class only needs to be smart enough to do whatever menial tasks their corporate overlords enslave them to do.

It makes more sense as a dialogue if we think of it not so much as a one-to-one conversation, but more like an ongoing, global discourse. After all, movies are not made in a vacuum, and they are--generally speaking--not made for a single specific individual to watch. The artist is informed and shaped by their experiences.

I frame it this way because I want to move away from the "maker"/"viewer" framework--this dichotomy of the creator of an experience versus those who experience the creation. There is a kind of feedback at play that is intrinsic to the ability to create art and to enjoy it. We even see this in cinema--the works of actors (which roles they choose, how they play those roles) are invariably influenced by the culture and sentiments that surround them.

In a strict sense, you are right--it's not as if the artist is directly engaging in a back-and-forth literal conversation. But I think that a more encompassing point of view is useful for contextualizing why generative AI being propped up as "art" is so offensive to some. It doesn't feel "real" to us, and it isn't because the tool is "artificial"--we have computer animated films, for instance. It's because it feels disengaged from that feeling of human connection.

is not, as many would have you believe, to be found solely in its consumption or appreciation.

Art is a dialogue. It is a conversation between humans--those who feel joy and pain, sorrow and hope; and it is the embodiment of creative expression in which the artist, for all their imperfections and struggle, brings into being something that marks existence--as if to say, "I was once here, in this space that you now observe."

And that is not necessarily pretentiousness or egocentrism. Art is born from a desire to connect with others, across space and time.

The intrinsic problem of "generative AI" as it is presently utilized as a vehicle of artistic expression is that, overwhelmingly, it fails to create a true dialogue, in much the same way that using a chatbot amounts to speaking with nobody but yourself. There may be a director and other humans who are prompting the AI and exerting control over the output, but the lack of human actors and cinematographers means that the result can only ever be a simulation of art, not art itself. It is not until we can create artificial consciousness--machines that experience human emotions and concept of self--that we can ever say that their status can transcend that of mere tools and their product might become art. To be clear, I am not suggesting we should attempt to do so. But what we have today is very, very far away from this.

Maybe a simulation is enough for most people, who think of popular media as nothing more than transitory stories to consume, discard, and forget. That the audience may not have the capacity to respect art as a process, by failing to distinguish what it is and is not, does not invalidate the artist, no more than someone who doesn't understand mathematics or computer programming can decide that it is not worth learning or doing.

The reason why there is a lot of pushback against AI has to do with the preposterous notion that it can (and therefore, should) serve as a substitute for human creativity. Of all of the things that such sophisticated computational models could be used for, the last thing that I would want it to do for me is my thinking and feeling. We should be using technology to make our lives easier and give us more freedom to express ourselves creatively, not less. People who are using it to simulate art have entirely missed the point of why we make art in the first place. Creative expression is not a chore like washing my dishes and scrubbing my toilet bowl. Yes, making art is sometimes painful and difficult and challenging. But that struggle is not something to be eliminated. It is meant to be overcome.

AI apologists--at least, nearly all of those I have met--are, in my view, nearly entirely lacking in understanding of what makes living worthwhile; and those who do understand are intentionally and cynically promoting AI because they stand to gain financially from this position.