livewired – The News Desk

Hoffman and others said that there’s no need to pause development of AI. He called that drastic measure, for which some AI researchers have petitioned, foolish and destructive. Hoffman identified himself as a rational “accelerationist”—someone who knows to slow down when driving around a corner but that, presumably, is happy to speed up when the road ahead is clear. “I recommend everyone come join us in the optimist club, not because it's utopia and everything works out just fine, but because it can be part of an amazing solution,” he said. “That's what we're trying to build towards.”Mitchell and Buolamwini, who is artist-in-chief and president of the AI harms advocacy group Algorithmic Justice League, said that relying on company promises to mitigate bias and misuse of AI would not be en...

It’s been a monumental year for Crispr, the molecular tool scientists use to edit genetic material. This November, the United Kingdom authorized the first medical treatment using Crispr gene editing, giving people with sickle cell disease new opportunities to receive a one-time therapy to prevent episodes of terrible pain. This week, the US Food and Drug Administration is poised to make a decision about the therapy. What was once seen as a moonshot is already changing lives.Right now, though, it’s still a rarefied treatment. “It’s expensive,” Jennifer Doudna, the pioneering biochemist who won a Nobel Prize in 2020 for her work on Crispr, told WIRED’s Emily Mullin at the LiveWIRED conference this week in San Francisco. The therapy is expected to be priced at over a million dollars a patien...

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OpenAI Cofounder Reid Hoffman Gives Sam Altman a Vote of Confidence

Jennifer Doudna Believes Crispr Is for Everyone