391–400 of 504 posts
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When it comes to regulations, production. Stricter laws in the US just lead to shipping production overseas to locations with less strict regulation.
Regulate trade. Carbon taxes on production and shipping disincentivize this.
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> - China and their global junk manufacturing industry And who orders, buys and pays for all the junk? The western consumers. Who offshored their own dirty manufacturing industry to China due to their lack of workers/human rights and environmental protection? The west. Which companies profited the most from this offshoring to China? The western ones. Same for the textile/clothes industry. So I think you're looking at…
What is the purpose or context of this thinking? To infantilise and absolve China?
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"5C warmer" doesn't mean a uniform increase in temperature of 5 degrees at all times. It means "5 * the thermal mass of the earth's biosphere" worth of extra energy in an extremely chaotic system that is currently in a local stable point, but doesn't have to stay there.
A 5C warming is indeed likely to make a few areas uninhabitable. I'm not saying climate change is not a problem. I'm just saying it's not an extinction event. But keep in mind that the areas that tend to get the greatest warming tend to be the dry ones. In such places, sweating will still allow human bodies to regulate body heat, if air conditioning breaks down.
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There is lots of space on earth that would be a lot more hospitable to humans if 5C warmer. Like the central eurasian steppe.
average is an average, you're forgetting about extremes. it only takes a few days (or hours) of above wet bulb temperatures to kill humans who live in and around the tropics today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature
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Global food production per capita now is massively higher than 50 years ago (and still climbing). And also probably higher than any time in the past. Even if food production falls globally by 25% or so, any famines will be due to distribution, not lack of global food production. If we really screw up, we may have famines similar to what was relatively common up to about 1980. And why did we stop having them?
Many countries in the world can't feed themselves. They import food from others. If there are crop failures, food producing countries impose export bans. For example, India has a ban on wheat export this year [1] because of crop failure. Once export bans become tit-for-tat (not dissimilar to the tit-for-tat export/import control bans between US-China right now), then some countries will be fine, and others will exper…
However, should global food trade suddenly stop, I may be one of those starving.
Edit: just to be clear: Global refusal to trade food is extremely rare. What happens a lot more often, is that some country is unable to purchase food abroad due to either some blockade or lack of purchasing capacity.
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You have massively confused "AGI as a plot point" with "is what the literary work is about". For example Neuromancer is about trauma and identity. If I'm being charitable I could give you Erewhon, but that's only because a major theme is anthropocentrism. A vast majority of the book is a criticism of victorian society. Ellison's analysis of his own work is pretty well known and while not specifically about AGI is def…
If not Neuromancer (although I feel differently) then Queen of Angels (Greg Bear). It's the most fascinating take on AI I've ever read - the entanglement with the themes of justice and punishment is thought-provoking. The Turing Option (Harry Harrison, Marvin Minsky). I can't stress strongly enough, do not read this book. It's terrible. But it does exist.
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A 5C warming is indeed likely to make a few areas uninhabitable. I'm not saying climate change is not a problem. I'm just saying it's not an extinction event. But keep in mind that the areas that tend to get the greatest warming tend to be the dry ones. In such places, sweating will still allow human bodies to regulate body heat, if air conditioning breaks down.
I think you missed the above comment’s point about risk to stability in a chaotic system…
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I think it's about as much about ai risk as transformers is. I'm terms of skynet I think you'd be referring to the third one? But that one is about drone strikes, and that's what we do today without AGI - we send out invincible killer robots to go wipe out villages from above because all males above the age of 16 are enemy combatants. The end of the movie could just as easily have been that they find a person behind…
The overall plot of Terminator is that an AGI called Skynet becomes self aware and unstoppable sometime in the mid 1980s and humans only hope of survival is to use time travel to destroy it before this happens. I’ll admit this isn’t very well explained to the audience, and the focus is mostly on Arnold blowing things up.
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1) Is real but will have net positive impact on humanity (of course there will be losers, but like most new technologies humans will have more for less effort) 2) It is real but unlikely to end humanity. Much more likely to create large areas that are unlivable, but a lot of work has gone into avoiding world ending scenarios. 3) Is mostly hype. Doom predictions in the last 20 years on this topic have been very wrong.…
How can this be such a top-voted answer? What? Without even going into the unsubstantiated assertion with #1, your comment on number 3 shows a dramatic misunderstanding of how compounding effects work. You can't use the last 20 years to linearly project like this. It is true that most scientists agree that humanity will likely not go completely extinct, but it is also true that most scientists agree that many, many i…
Your citation is merely an advocacy piece, not science. For example the first diagram contains charts of fertility rates, institutional assets divested and world GDP whilst claiming they are "climate related human activities". Presenting a nearly random collection of metrics as evidence for your argument isn't a sign of robust thinking or argumentation.
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average is an average, you're forgetting about extremes. it only takes a few days (or hours) of above wet bulb temperatures to kill humans who live in and around the tropics today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature
So people will move out of those worst affected areas.