I studied chemistry and worked in Pharma research for half a year (Germany, 2018). Standard safety procedures are there, but it's no biology lab. Stuff gets spilled, you breath in vapors of solvents, and the lunch break happens in the office next to the lab, after a quick hand wash.
I am pretty sure up to a microgram of almost anything we made ended up in somebody... Usually we handled 10mg up to 10g batches. Surprisingly, the lab Assistents are overall pretty fine and don't appear to suffer any consequences more than the average population well into their 50s and 60s. (And those guys worked there last century with even LESS protocols!). I guess we would need an extensive study on the health effects of working in the chemical industry, I suspect there to be SOME consequences...
Another point I might add: University is much worse! The lower semesters are all over the place and the students need to buy new jeans regularly because of all the sulfuric acid holes after washing... Even later I clearly remember being positively euphoric after distilling or refilling DCM, Chloroform or Ether more than once...
Last defense for the sweeteners: I do have a sample of Neotame and in my experience, everyone who "smells" the powder (light breathing from 10-20cm away) after opening the package spends the next 5 Minutes being weirded out with eeeeverything being sweet and having this weirdly sweet taste run down the back of your throat. It is hard to describe how sweet it is and how hard it is to avoid making everything in the vicinity or that you touch lightly sweet as well. If you touch the powder at all, even after a diligent hand wash with soap, your fingers are still notably sweet 😉 (And that is just 10.000x Sucrose)
Thanks! I am not "really" new though. Have just been reading for the last few months but I suppose this actually was my first comment 😅
Also, if you already know LW, the channel screams "Hey, this is LW stuff!". But I don't think I would have made the connection if I encountered the channel first. It does a hell of a job getting the "average" nerd informed and interested in these topics though, which is really nice.
Not sure how the average population fares. I suppose the videos have way too much content to appeal to a mainstream audience... Which is good, in a way. Somebody has to do the "informing the public"-chore at some point though, but it might as well be someone else ^^
Thank you for putting in the effort to make this Video! Even though the comments went into a "lewd=bad?" Discussion pretty quickly, in my opinion it does a very good job of transmitting, that misalignment is something that can actually happen in real life and we should be concerned about. It is valuable, because it connects the theory to real life experience and a true story (also good clickbait). "Catastrophic AI risk" is widely discussed in other videos anyways, so based on transfer learning many viewers will probably get the point anyways.
Also I wanted to let you know, that together with kurzgesagt, rational animation is my favorite channel right now and I do recommend it highly to friends. The style of animation is delightful and I love seeing these LW topics come to live on screen.
Thank you for writing this. I understand the feeling of worry and being overwhelmed in regards to AI. It sure does feel unlikely to get global politics to listen and, ideally, on board for this...