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

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

#401

Post by krainboltgreene »

_yb2s wrote: post #311
krainboltgreene wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is an absurd level of nitpicking... the phrase "is about" means both of those things in common speech, and everyone can tell which you mean depending on context. Language is defined by regular people through its use and context, scholars only describe it after the fact- to their extreme dismay. You might be technically correct within the jargon of, e.g. an academic literature course, but you aren't correct to in…

I don't really care about your opinions on academic literary analysis, it's OK to be wrong and have your own thoughts on the matter, but prepare to be confused when people don't agree that the Transformer movies are about the dangers of aliens turning into vehicles.

For someone who doesn't care what Gibson thinks of his own artistic works you sure do have a strong opinion on Gibson's artistic work.

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

#402

Post by Workaccount2 »

short_sells_poo wrote: post #256
Workaccount2 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically I often post the exact same sentiment that you are sharing. But you are conflating two different things. AGI doesn't require consciousness. We likely will have no idea whether or not the first AGI computer is conscious or not. What we will know though, is that it is solving novel problems that humans struggle with, and from the outside the only way to discern it isn't another human is because it is way to…

I didn't say that AGI requires consciousness, just that we don't understand what intelligence truly is, along with consciousness (which appears to be a form of intelligence). And I'm not particularly keen of the reasoning: "it is solving novel problems that humans struggle with", because a pocket calculator can solve problems that humans struggle with. A computer can play chess better than a human can, does it mean i…

Wikipedia has an entire article for helping to understand what "AGI" refers to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc...

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

#403

Post by kgabis »

8note wrote: post #387
kgabis wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What's that mean though? We could still dig under the earth, and put AC in the tunnels, and ship food and water in from afar. Do you mean, "no longer habitable at a certain price point" ? If so, what is that price point?

By uninhabitable I mean it would make no economic sense for people to live there.

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

#404

Post by jtolds »

mike_hearn wrote: post #399
jtolds wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

He said 20 years of doom predictions that haven't come true. Compounding effects don't apply to the accuracy of academic predictions. It's not like academic accuracy automatically gets exponentially better over time. Linear projection when attempting to guesstimate the accuracy of future predictions by a group of people who have also made predictions in the past is a fairly reasonable thing to do, unless you have som…

When someone says "20 years of doom predictions haven't come true", I charitably assumed that claim was about scientific consensus predictions, but perhaps I can't assume that everyone shares knowledge of what that is.

So far, all data says that the climate scientists are dead on and have been very accurate: https://eps.harvard.edu/files/eps/files/hausfather_2020_eval...

What doom predictions from the last 20 years haven't come true? If someone says that doom hasn't happened yet, I guess what I want to say is that they haven't waited long enough.

I think the climate scientists are frustrated and giving up. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/01/climate/ipcc-climate-scie.... My initial link was an attempt to show where the Overton window is regarding the experts in this field, more than anything else. This comment is probably not the right place to bring someone up to speed with the climate science field when they can Google it themselves.

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

#405

Post by flir »

krainboltgreene wrote: post #396
flir wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Again I must stress you've confused theme with plot point. I haven't read QOA in a long time, but I'm pretty sure it was about identity and justice.

It's about an AI struggling to become conscious! Alarms go off when it uses the word "I"! The whole point of that subplot is why that AI can't achieve consciousness, but the one sent to Alpha Centauri[?] can. It writes essays meditating on its circumstances, the way humans have treated it and its sibling, it writes an essay exploring whether punishment of others is a gateway to self-awareness...

You want to tell me the theme of that thread is human identity? It's our responsiblity to our creations. It's what does it mean to be sentient? It's the ethics of using a self-aware AI as a tool. (Amongst many other things).

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

#406

Post by EasyMark »

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.

Gaia isn't really a thing. There are only natural processes, chemistry, and physics, and there is definitely nothing motherly about them; they are ruthlessly efficient.

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

#407

Post by dahart »

vixen99 wrote: post #304
dahart wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If anything we should see significantly accelerated plant growth by about 10 to 50% If that’s true, there should be global evidence of this happening already- are you aware of any publications confirming this effect? You say accelerated growth like it’d be a good thing, but I don’t think we should wish for it or expect that to mitigate any damage… getting to the point of doubled CO2 would probably be extremely bad.…

> there should be global evidence of this happening already There is. https://www.nasa.gov/technology/carbon-dioxide-fertilization... for instance. "From a quarter to half of Earth’s vegetated lands has shown significant greening over the last 35 years largely due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change on April 25." Interesting observati…

Are you suggesting that trying to reduce CO2 isn’t worth it? What alternative are you proposing? What lowering of quality of life are you referring to? How do you know what Mauna Loa would have measured without the efforts to date? And what is the expected delay between CO2 reduction and effect?

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

#408

Post by card_zero »

tzs wrote: post #383
card_zero wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you control for population But why would you control for population? So there are a vast number of Chinese who can't afford a large share of China's emissions, so what? What's your mindset here, that we have to determine the most guilty individual person and ignore governments? There may be lots of people in China but it's one government and it's emitting a lot, in absolute terms. Is Liechtenstein (population un…

> But why would you control for population? Because the atmosphere does not care about arbitrary political boundaries. If we take whatever total amount of CO2 emissions per year we decide the world needs to stay under and divide that up giving each country an equal share you get an unstable result. For example let's say we agree on 4 x 10^10 tons of CO2/year. There are around 200 countries, so each country gets 2 x 1…

> the atmosphere does not care about arbitrary political boundaries

But it does, if "cares about" means "is affected by". This is about how you think action can be taken. The tired old premise is that action can be taken by raising the consciousness of individuals, raising awareness, guilt-tripping them in a sort of viral chain-letter way until everybody just decides "oh my gosh I must monitor the carbon footprint of everything I do because I don't want to be a bad person", and then we've all stopped emitting and we're saved.

But really it's controlled by government policy. The responsibility only lies with the individual in so far as they can control governments. It lies with governments in proportion to the share of emissions that government is responsible for via policies it could make.

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

#409

Post by EasyMark »

mataslauzadis wrote: post #6

The title is misleading, the article does not claim the current rise is “natural”, they just compared it to prehistoric records which were natural

Humans are "natural". Many species have overpopulated and overused the resources they need to survive and eventually became extinct, we are extremely natural.
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