Comment by himata4113
7 days ago
Well the real issue is that it knocks down the knowledge barrier, giving your step by step guides and reinterating what parts will kill you is the important part.
Understanding and staying alive while producing neuro chemicals are the biggest challenges here.
A depressed person with no prior knowledge could possibly figure out a way to make these chemicals without killing themselves and that's the problem.
A Michelin chef can give you their recipe, and give you their ingredients, but you still will fail miserably trying to match their dish.
It's the same with drugs, whose instructions and ingredient lists have been a google search away for decades now. Yet you still need a master chemist to produce anything. By the time AI can hand hold an idiot through the synthesis of VX agents (which would require an array of sensors beyond a keyboard and camera), we will likely have bigger issues to worry about.
That is completely wrong.
Food preparation, like pharmaceutical drug fabrication, is inherently scientific and methodologically controllable.
Look no further than the Four Thieves Vinegar Collective. Original synthesis line construction is hard. But the exact formula "add this", "turn on stir bar", "do you see particulate? Yes for +10m at stir", etc.
And if their results are replicated, theyre seeing 99.9% yields, compared to commercial practices of 99% (Solvaldi)
Spoken like someone who has never had to actually do these things in real life.
Recipes and formulae do not encode all the minutiae and expertise required to reproduce them. You can tell someone to sear a steak at whatever temperature for however long, but you can't encode the skill and experience required to reproduce in arbitrary conditions. One must learn what a correctly seared steak looks, feels, and tastes like and how to achieve that on uncalibrated cooking equipment.
Your assertion only holds true in a vacuum. If 100% of inputs, materials, environmental conditions are completely standardized and under control then sure, you can follow step by step instructions. The real world does not work that way. No stove on the market is calibrated. Reagents come with impurities. Your skillet may not conduct heat as well as expected or your mains electricity might be low causing your mantle to heat slower and your stir rod to stir slower.
These are things that one has to learn and experience in order to compensate for.
I am completely unsurprised that a person with a PhD in mathmatics and physics who spent 8 years working on clandestine lab medicine was able to produce high quality end products.
I also think it's a wholly dishonest rebuttal of my point.
If you honestly think chemistry (or any of the classic sciences/engineering) is as easy as copy+pasting a recipe and procedure, I suggest putting down the keyboard and trying to build something on mother nature OS. It will be a truly humbling experience.
They can do that by jailbreaking models but is that really easier and less work than getting it from Wikipedia?
We will only really know if (or when) it will happen. We can do a sample group of people attempting to create such chemicals under supervision and comparing how helpful they truly are.