Amodei’s general argument is this:
"my basic prediction is that AI-enabled biology and medicine will allow us to compress the progress that human biologists would have achieved over the next 50-100 years into 5-10 years."
This may be correct, but his estimate of what is expected to be achieved in 100 years without AI is likely wildly overoptimistic. In particular, his argument for doubling of lifespan is just an extrapolation from past increase in life expectancy, which is ridiculous because progress in extending maximum human lifespan so far is exactly zero.
Cell line being immortal doesn't prove that immortal brain is possible any more than microbe strain being immortal.
This chain of logic is founded on an assumption that these technologies are possible, which I find highly dubious. If an (aligned) superintelligence is built, and we ask it for life extension, the most probable answer would be that biological immortality (and all stuff requiring nanorobots) is just plain impossible, and brain uploading wouldn't help because your copy is not you.
No, that is not realistic. Bacteria described in the article don't really eat iron, they just make corrosive chemicals as methabolic waste. They rely on other sources of energy (sulfates or organic compounds). Metal-eating bacteria (those which derive energy by reducing metals) exist but require metals dissolved in water, eating solid metals doesn't work chemically.
Generally I think Eliziers definition of weak pivotal act doesn't include civilization collapse, because there are multiple obvious ways which don't kill all humans.
Well, the more precise phrase would be "fertility decline was not caused by the invention of new birth control technologies". It is totally possible for a society to have below replacement fertility using only birth control methods available since pre-industrial era.
If birth control hasn’t been enabling fertility rates to decline, then what has?
Rising women status contributed more than everything else combined.
However, the increasing availability of the birth control pill, other contraception methods, and the legalization of abortion during the 60s and 70s (in the US) are notable >for contributing to the declining fertility rates in the US.
That was a continuation of trend which started more than a century before that, after temporary baby boom reversal ended.
No, the opposite doesn’t usually happen. For all of human history, higher fertility memes have tended to outlast lower fertility memes.
Now of course, the last 200 years are exceptional, since many lower fertility memes have overpowered higher fertility memes.
The reason that happened is that communication became much easier. So it is reasonable to expect that low fertility memes will generally win for as long as the world remains interconnected.
there’s also many high fertility memes and memeplexes that still have very high fertility rates, such as the fundamentalist Muslims, the Amish, and Ultra-Orthodox Jews.
There were many more highly religious (and fertile) communities in the past. So the default is to expect that they will follow the same path like say Quebec.
I’ve written a list of things that could be done to boost Western fertility rates.
This list looks rather US-centric. Many countries, for example in eastern Europe don't have these specific problems but have low fertility anyway. So most likely this would not help much.
There are several dubious assumptions there.
The first is that fertility decline is caused mostly by birth control. The problem is, it began long before birth control became widespread. A century ago, most developed nations had TFR somewhere between 2 and 2.5.
The second is that high fertility memes are durable. But usually exactly the opposite happens, "cultural change causes lower fertility" is the same as "high fertility memes lose". That happens with religious groups the same way - Mormons used to have much higher fertility, and now they don't.
As for adapting for deceases - that is a survivor bias. For example, several dozen amphibian species are believed to be wiped out by fungal infection in last decades. It is rather unlikely that humanity will go extinct that way, if anything there are some isolated tribes. But industrial civilization can collapse due to low population long before natural selection would cause fertility to rise again. With TFR 1.2 (like in Italy now) population would drop below 100 million in about three centuries.
Anti tank FPV drones? Almost certainly not long term as they’re more expensive than ATGMs,
That is not true at all, anti-tank fpv cost is about 1/100 of a Javelin missile. It is not obvious how much autonomous guidance would add to a drone cost, but probably less than 10000%.
The point about chaff is that a regular size sniper rifle bullet can't contain it in any significant quantity. Smalest existing chaff shells are for 23mm cannons, and a drone carrying ~20mm cannon has to be rather large.
That is not entirely true. Some people who say "cryonics doesn't work" mean "identity is irretrievably lost when the brain activity stops, and in the best case you will have a different person with the same memory and personality traits". Since that argument doesn't give any testable predictions, it cannot be disproved.