What we owe the microbiome

post by weverka · 2022-12-17T19:40:11.462Z · LW · GW · 0 comments

This is a link post for https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/DdzSEFBEb6rtfChpN/what-we-owe-the-microbiome

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Your microbiome is a bunch of microorganisms living in your gut and other epithelial places.  You have a symbiotic relation with this population.  You feed it.  It helps you digest.

Your microbiome population talks to you.  It creates chemical signals that affect digestion and possibly your feeling of hunger.  The extent of the influence of your microbiome on your brain is not well known, but the pathways for that influence are. The gut microbiome has been shown to produce various chemicals and signaling molecules that can influence the function of the digestive system and the immune system.   It produces short-chain fatty acids that may cross the blood-brain barrier.  

When it is out of balance, it makes you ill.  Sometimes it threatens your life.  We must try our best to avoid getting a disease that requires antibiotics.  Few of us succeed. Sometimes your only defense is a broad-spectrum antibiotic.

In the game of turning the tables, we ask that our overlords treat us as we would treat our underlings.  

If we create an AI so much more capable than ourselves, we become like the microbiome to the AI.  

Here are a couple options to explore:  1)Avoid creating an AI so great that we are like its microbiome.  Or 2) align humans to the interest of the AI so that a subpopulation of humans doesn't infect the AI to the extent it has to invoke the equivalent of a broad spectrum antibiotic.

The second one is expressed as a reversal of the perspective of alignment goals.  It is a perspective that may become necessary if we fail to do the first.

Wash your vegetables.

 

 

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