471–480 of 504 posts
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.
#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.
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Fear of AGI is not based on Altman’s latest brews. Look at the progress curve of AI in general is one way to get a feeling for it. The other one, which I prefer, is looking at existing AIs for which we thought human ingenuity was top notch and how they are beating us left and right. Strategy, creativity, cunning, all human notions that are being slaughtered. Slowly, but surely. It is “just” a matter of combining. I t…
I'm patiently waiting for my sysadmin job to be automated away. AGI, its time to deliver! I'm waiting. Should have happened yesterday?
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The choice to start at 2000 BC is interesting, because as soon as you zoom out more, the story completely changes: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/356606430/figure/fi... https://www.climate.gov/sites/default/files/styles/full_widt... Randall chose one of the lowest point every in the history of earth as the "baseline". We are still in one of the coldest period ever for earth. The recent rise of temperature i…
The problem is not the absolute temperature change, but the rate of change.
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> they only stay suspended for 10 years or so And then what happens? Earnest question.
And then we have to do it again, and again, and again; once you grab that tiger's tail, there is no letting go. In the meantime, sense of urgency abated, we would most likely keep on burning fossil fuels and putting more CO2 into the atmosphere, locking ourselves further into the loop. It is a terrible idea which will almost certainly happen.
We don't know how bad the climate will be at 800 ppm. 300 millions years ago, during the Carboniferous era, there were vast forests and very high CO2 levels, around 1000 to 5000 ppm. If the Earth gets too hot we will simply do stratospheric aerosol injection. If climate change turns out to be overhyped, then we get the CO2 fertilization boost for free, win-win.
Regardless, the real solution is next level energy production from advanced fission, deep geothermal, and ultimately fusion power. With a vast surplus of energy we could do wildly impractical things like filter sea water for gold, and of course extract extremely diffuse gases from the atmosphere. Renewable energies are very low energy density, and more akin to farming from a physics perspective. They make sense in certain situations, but are not reliable for powering an advanced industrial civilization.
I also suspect people's intuitions are out of perspective in terms of time scales. It seems likely AGI will arise within the next 20 years. Climate change is nothing compared to the singularity and rise of superintelligence.
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> So obviously the US has to make a larger change in the structure of society. That's not obvious at all. Suppose the difference in per capita emissions between country A and country C is that in country A they drive big cars and in country C they drive small ones. Well, both countries ought to stop using internal combustion engines. How is that a "larger change" for country A, just because they have larger cars? And…
> How is that a "larger change" for country A, just because they have larger cars? We are never actually going to get to zero carbon emissions. There are many industrial operations that will emit CO2. The hope is that we can plant enough trees that the sucked CO2 is equal to those non-replaceable emissions to get to net zero. In your specific case of cars, the production of cars does emit CO2. And production of large…
You originally said "a larger change to the structure of society" is required if a country emits more carbon per person, and I said this was balls because America could be doing it in exactly the same structural way as China, only more of it. For another example, suppose China is exactly identical to America apart from having an extra 1 billion very poor people who emit no greenhouse gasses at all. Now is there any reason the burden of responsibility, or priority for change, falls on America instead of on that version of China? I say no, that would make no sense.
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'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.
Everyone hell bent on leaving is actually distracted from the real less immediately glamorous challenge, which is learning to sustain life and exercise restraint.
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I imagine it will happen when heatwaves and droughts start to be a serious issue.
Nah. Politicians will still have the wrong incentives, and they’ll just let the poor die. Meanwhile the rich will buy up all arable land, and all land not largely affected. Following that, they’ll tighten control of national borders to stop waves of migration.
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The optimal CO2 level for plant growth is between 800 and 1000 ppm, as observed within greenhouses. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/plant-science/articles/... There is no perfect solution. One of the benefits of stratospheric aerosols is that they only stay suspended for 10 years or so, reducing the risk of long term effects. They are also an exceptionally cheap strategy, on the order of a few billion a year to…
Seems plausible at least, and you are of course correct about the world; the CO2 level of the atmosphere when I was born was well below 400 and we'll not see that again as long as I live. That's what I tell those who respond viscerally to the idea of messing about with the atmosphere purposefully - we are already altering it regardless.
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Everyone hell bent on leaving is actually distracted from the real less immediately glamorous challenge, which is learning to sustain life and exercise restraint.
> Everyone hell bent on leaving is actually distracted from the real less immediately glamorous challenge, which is learning to sustain life and exercise restraint. Unless you're willing to exterminate people who don't comply, the incentives are such that maintaining the status quo will give economic (and military) advantages. Besides, over long time scales there's more to fear than a few degrees of climate change.