Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Fastest rate of natural carbon dioxide rise over the last 50k years

today.oregonstate.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 504 posts

Re: Fastest rate of natural carbon dioxide rise over the last 50k years

#191

Post by hackerlight »

kgabis wrote: post #145
hackerlight wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heatwaves are a serious issue already, try being one of the few hundred million people in South Asia/SEA with 3k annual income and no aircon during April 2024. School cancelled and outdoors work nearly impossible due to wet bulb temperatures nearing the threshold of human survivability.

I meant serious as in "this place is no longer habitable".

I don't think it's binary, exactly. We have entered a grey area where large swathes or land near the equator is technically survivable but really sucky to live in, where one month of the year is spent sheltering from the heat in an air conditioned mall while you're barely working and your kids' school is cancelled, and the other 11 months of the year suck more than they used to but you're still surviving and working.

As we go from 2C to 4C warming that's when the mass deaths near the equator should start happening from the wet bulb temperatures due to sheer lack of AC in poor areas and households. But even then we might figure out logistics and information systems to get rural and poor people to the nearest mall when a heatwave is expected, which will be often. Assuming a blackout doesn't happen. They might not die if these systems work properly, but it'll be terrible for their economy and human development indices.

At 6C warming, it's just an even worse version of the above.

Whatever the case it's going to massively suck and the people who will pay the biggest price will be the people who have pumped the least amount of carbon into the atmosphere. Life is just structurally unfair.

Re: Fastest rate of natural carbon dioxide rise over the last 50k years

#192

Post by daveguy »

_yb2s wrote: post #160
AlexandrB wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#1 is marketing hype. #2 is very real. #3 is happening and could cause #2 if wars for livable land and water resources break out.

Regardless of how realistic you think AGI risk is, it’s not marketing hype- it has been a human fear and central in scifi for a long time. Movies like 2001, Terminator, and the Matrix were hugely popular long before AI was profitable. Arguably ancient myths about golems and genies are essentially the same fear and concept. AI companies are afraid of public fear over AI as it might lead to regulating them out of exist…

Fear of AGI is very real. But our proximity to AGI is marketing hype. In terms of existential crisis #2 and #3 are serious and already worth investing in mitigation. But #1 (AGI) is science fiction.

Re: Fastest rate of natural carbon dioxide rise over the last 50k years

#193

Post by airstrike »

c048 wrote: post #20
belter wrote: post #3

We are in the multilayered race between - The risk of the rise of AGI - The risk and madness of Nuclear conflict - The risk of runaway Climate change My money is on Mother Gaia. She will brutally and swiftly discipline her puppies.

'Mother' Gaia will wipe all complex life from this planet with 1 to 1.5 Billion years if her 'undisciplined' puppies don't find a way to leave this ball of dirt. She's also got quite a lead with killing off 99.99999% of all species that ever lived, when compared to us.

Luckily we have 1 to 1.5 billion years to figure out how to survive outside of this ball of dirt... (cataclysmic asteroids and other similar events notwithstanding)

Re: Fastest rate of natural carbon dioxide rise over the last 50k years

#194

Post by short_sells_poo »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #131
blueflow wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm patiently waiting for my sysadmin job to be automated away. AGI, its time to deliver! I'm waiting. Should have happened yesterday?

AGI by 2030 is not a reach statement at all anymore. The LLM's we have today weren't supposed to show up until 2030 at the earliest and 2050 more realistically. If you go back 10 years and read what people were writing about AI progress, you will find that they were _completely_ off the mark. It's prudent to assume a very liberal timeline for AI progress, based off whats been happening now.

I'm loving this absolutely breathless parroting of "AGI in the next 5 years" and yet: we don't even know what general intelligence is. We don't know how/why/where consciousness arises. It's not even a clearly defined concept. But here we have "Workaccount2" prophesizing the rise of general intelligence :D

Please enlighten us sensei, what is actually General Intelligence, and how will you know it's here?

I realize my reply is a bit flippant, but it's tiring to see how certain are people about something that nobody truly understands.

Re: Fastest rate of natural carbon dioxide rise over the last 50k years

#195

Post by Jun8 »

belter wrote: post #3

We are in the multilayered race between - The risk of the rise of AGI - The risk and madness of Nuclear conflict - The risk of runaway Climate change My money is on Mother Gaia. She will brutally and swiftly discipline her puppies.

On the topic of “Mother Gaia” being a bloodthirsty bitch (how we humans like to anthropomorphize rather than grasp things as they are) see Tiptree’s excellent story: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Flight_of_Dr._Ain. We may have come close to this being reality four years ago perhaps.

Re: Fastest rate of natural carbon dioxide rise over the last 50k years

#196

Post by daveguy »

aurareturn wrote: post #62
AlexandrB wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#1 is marketing hype. #2 is very real. #3 is happening and could cause #2 if wars for livable land and water resources break out.

#1 is very real #2 is warmongering #3 will be solved by human ingenuity I have a more positive outlook. :)

One person can make one command decision and make #2 a reality. That's all it takes. No matter how many people drool over AGI the bandwidth and processing just isn't there. We barely have control systems as intelligent as a bacterium.

Re: Fastest rate of natural carbon dioxide rise over the last 50k years

#198

Post by darksaints »

jmyeet wrote: post #188
belter wrote: post #3

We are in the multilayered race between - The risk of the rise of AGI - The risk and madness of Nuclear conflict - The risk of runaway Climate change My money is on Mother Gaia. She will brutally and swiftly discipline her puppies.

I'm not that worried about nuclear conflict because it's a scenario where literally nobody wins. There's always the "Madman" hypothesis but really that's no way to do geopolitical analysis. Nobody is truly "crazy" (IMHO). Remember those orders have to be carried out by someone. They've studies on this with missile silo operators and they had a disturbing or comforting (depending on your POV) tendency to not launch. I…

Really? You’ve never met someone with the “if I can’t have it, nobody can” mindset? Never heard of a custody dispute where the losing parent kills the kids in order to deprive the other parent of them?

Vladimir Putin is exactly that kind of person. When backed into a corner and knowing he will die, he would rather nuke the whole world than accept his fate. And those orders will be carried out by people in heavily restricted information silos, who only have the explanation of their commanding officers as reasoning. For all they know, this is a test, or the US already has launched their nukes, or if they don’t launch the nukes their mom will be dropped out of a window.

Re: Fastest rate of natural carbon dioxide rise over the last 50k years

#199

Post by cheschire »

sharpshadow wrote: post #140
AlexandrB wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#1 is marketing hype. #2 is very real. #3 is happening and could cause #2 if wars for livable land and water resources break out.

That’s a difficult one, securing livable land and water with nuclear fallout.

I think the implication is that the nuclear war would exist between sovereign rulers, not necessarily between the physical spaces themselves. Wipe out a capital city in an attempt to behead a sovereign government so that their land is available for take over.

Apparently though, the bombs that landed on hiroshima and nagasaki did not create much fallout, making the space livable relatively quickly.

It seems less destructive long term than a nuclear reactor meltdown which may be a tempting but misleading proxy.

Re: Fastest rate of natural carbon dioxide rise over the last 50k years

#200

Post by rafaelmn »

Delmololo wrote: post #168
AlexandrB wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#1 is marketing hype. #2 is very real. #3 is happening and could cause #2 if wars for livable land and water resources break out.

We have now chips with 20petaflops. The weekly news regarding AI are always adding new things to ai. We started pouring billions into ai. The amount of new research papers regarding AI are exploding. I would argue that it is not marketing hype or aluminum hat thinking to take that serious

You could give similar numbers for crypto (powerplants, custom chips, billions invested, R&D) and yet it amounted to nothing.

Not saying it's the same - just that your argument isn't very strong.

Ironically Nvidia is riding both waves. A few people in the tech scene know how to fuel a hype train.

Post reply on HN