bUt ClImAtE cHaNgE iS a WoKe HoAx To TaKe OuR gAs StOvEs
Meanwhile…
It’s really wild how committed dumb people are to receiving Darwin awards for them and their families.
“Vaccines don’t work and are a hoax, and it’s unrelated people who agree with me are dying from COVID at a higher rate.”
“Liberals want to take away my red meat every day of the week and limit how much high fructose corn syrup soda I drink in a day, but screw them. Unrelated, my whole family has diabetes and older members strangely have heart disease and colon cancers…”
People who treat science as a dirty word really seem to have higher all cause mortality. So bizarre and unexplainable.
People who treat science as a dirty word really seem to have higher all cause mortality.
The bigger crime is businesses that treat technological advancement as an excuse to charge more for what should be the new baseline standard.
Let nature take its course. Hopefully we’ll be rid of them sooner rather than later
The big food companies and healthcare industry want to keep you alive and consuming as long as possible. How shut you feel in the meantime doesn’t affect their bottom line as long as you don’t figure out the connection.
But the healthy people are subsidizing their shirt eating habits with our insurance rates and Medicare taxes. So Darwin and Maddie don’t get a chance to fix this problem and we end up baking our planet.
I see your point, and raise you 20pc McNuggets
And I like how we now have evidence this info was known and suppressed in fear of reducing sales
And also how this would mean gas stoves would require better ventilation to meet code, not that they’d be banned outright
I mean, some places have actually banned them.
Code changes would probably be a lot better.
There’s only three examples in there, one of which was a true ban but already overturned, and the other two are changes to code that will ban them situationally in the future for new buildings, and aren’t even in effect yet
They’re literally not banned according to that article
God forbid they switch to electric induction which makes it more likely they will have to buy pans made with American steel SMH
Are you really trying to tell me that a good solution to our hollowed-out working class AND the climate crisis is to transition as rapidly as possible to renewable energy and sustainable tech that we design, develop, and produce in our own country???
You sound like a communist grrrrrr!
(I hope my sarcasm comes across. I’m very tired as I type.)
No /s needed haha
Unfortunately, good induction cooktops are not available everywhere. And certainly not available for cheap. Where I am, there are no 4 hob cooktops available.
Also, induction and electric cooktops need cookware that has flat bottom. However, constant heating and cooling of cookware means over time, the bottom will develop a curve for most of them.
This unfortunately means that gas stoves are not going anywhere, at least in Asia and Africa which are cost sensitive markets.
Induction works fine with a warped pan. I can even lift my pan almost a cm and it still heats fine on a cheap hob.
Direct electric, not so much. But that’s not relevant to the discussion.
That still doesn’t solve the availability and affordability problems.
Can you not order a cheap one from aliexpress? They sell 1 and 2 burner portable hobs for cheap!
India has banned AliExpress, Banggood etc for years.
Also there are some available on Amazon but those hobs have a bad reputation here because they’re mostly used by college students living in hostel.
And finally, even if my parents agreed to get one, we’ll have to do kitchen remodelling because the kitchen counter doesn’t have any wall sockets for it.
Gas explosions aren’t real, they can’t hurt you
Hello good day to you fellow Lemmy user, i will promply explain how it works. See, the hoax is to get you to spend money on you don’t need, while viewing corporations as eco-friendly whilst they utilize it as an excuse cheapen the cost of resources and give you worse products. Source here. Henceforth, the entire thing is in fact a hoax. Thusly I hope this clears up any confusion about us anti climate changers
Edit: Fellow lemmiers, why do you downdoot me today?
If only there were some body of governance that could regulate things for an entire society. Too bad mankind never had any tools like that. Oh well. Enjoy growing gills.
ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn
On the contrary, the issue remains that climate change doesn’t exist at all, conversely it is made up, a faux issue that benefits corporations. Ergo, you really should not worry about it, in my opinion (imo)
Doing your own research has failed you so hard; I feel sorry for you. Good luck, man.
You see we’ve towed the climate outside of the environment.
The climate is ALWAYS changing. Human activities [burning of fossil fuels] has exponentially accelerated it. I call it man made climate change.
Cites source that opens with satire agreeing with their point but then explicitly says the opposite:
If this is what you believe I would respectfully disagree and I would urge you to get on the phone and call friends and family around the country to hear about what their communities are experiencing. I would also suggest that you check out (reliable) websites and take a look at what’s going on in virtually every part of the world. If you do, here’s what you’ll find. […]
Scientists look at a lot of things – gas trapped in ice, tree rings, glaciers, pollen remains, even changes in the Earth’s orbit – to study the natural changes in our climate going back millions of years. What these natural changes tell us is that it normally takes thousands of years for the earth to warm just a couple of degrees. The temperature increases we’ve seen in just the past century should have taken almost a thousand years.
Great source. You should read the whole thing.
Where in the source that you linked does it say that a switch to electric stoves is an aspect of greenwashing?
Also to argue that is bad faith. Obviously corporations will want to greenwash themselves and provide us with cheap products. That’s their whole MO. However, that doesn’t mean that a product is bad de facto. That’s like arguing that because corporations producing solar panels have an interest in selling us solar panels, that solar panels are really actually not better for the environment than fossil fuels. I’ll give you credit for only forcing me to read a Bernie Sanders op ed, but your argument doesn’t make sense and your source doesn’t support it.
Username doesn’t check out
0 / 31 votes
lemmy’s sarcasm detector is about as bad as reddit’s
I’m not sure which is funnier, the post or the response to it. Lol
“Global daily mean temperatures never exceeded 1.5-degree Celsius (°C) above pre-industrial levels prior to 2000 and have only occasionally exceeded that number since then,” the researchers noted. “However, 2023 has already seen 38 days with global average temperatures above 1.5°C by 12 September—more than any other year—and the total may continue to rise.”
That’s not good.
If we all die in a climate event I’m saying the earth itself is an organism and we were an infection.
I’ll tell you the best part, and it’s irreversible
The Gulf Stream really is weakening, a new study confirms: a finding which has profound implications for one of the biggest weather systems on our planet. When the Gulf Stream changes, so does the climate
https://www.sciencealert.com/confirmed-new-study-shows-the-gulf-stream-is-definitely-weakening
I doubt society will even make it 50 more years. Hell I’m expecting the quality of life for the west to plummet with the decade.
The rich will survive only to discover they cannot achieve anything without the poor.
They’re probably breeding drone slaves for Elysium
Why do you think conservative’s in US are against abortion?
They’re gonna realize the importance of infrastructure and that a starving dog is not obedient, but desperate.
The desperate dog will find out, that the trained dog with guns who’s got promised a place where to survive, only cares about having enough bullets.
…we’re starting to see it already.
“But we have a hundred years before the environment collapses!?”
Theoretically yes, but there’s that sticky point of what happens to us when the environment is
collapsingdying.Not to mention empathy for the next generation.
Honestly, while it’s very much an unpopular opinion, at this point I think it’s unconscionable to add to that next generation and I definitely secretly judge my peers who do so as making an incredibly selfish decision likely dooming that child to a quite depressing future by the time they reach adulthood themselves.
Also, one of the worst things you can do for the environment in a developed nation is have a child.
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Yeah, I’ve had a hobby over the past few years looking into the history of a particular apocrypha text, and its antinatalism is one of the more interesting features, with a great line like this:
A woman in the crowd said to him, “Lucky are the womb that bore you and the breasts that fed you.”
He said to [her], “Lucky are those who have heard the word of the Father and have truly kept it. For there will be days when you will say, ‘Lucky are the womb that has not conceived and the breasts that have not given milk.’”
This line is broken up into two different parts in the gospel of Luke (11:27 and 23:29) but the inherent parallelism makes me think it was originally a call and response as it then appears in the Gospel of Thomas above.
You also have the antinatalism in one of the surviving lines from the lost Gospel of the Egyptians where Salome asked “how long will death continue?” And the response was “as long as women bear children.” Followed by her asking if she’d done well in not having any.
It’s interesting how across history it’s inherently a position that dooms itself to obsolescence when it appears due to adherents dying out without passing it on, even if the inherent merit of it remains true from one age to another.
So we socially have a collective anchoring bias towards seeing procreation and “be fruitful and multiply” as such a good thing, even though this is simply a platform with an inherent survivorship bias and not necessarily actually a good thing at all.
I could not have worded it better myself. It is absolutely a survivorship bias. Those who believe it is good to have children will have children and pass on those beliefs, while those of us who recognize the inherent ills of procreation do not.
And then due to the relatively small number of us, we are written off as psychopaths or pessimists for acknowledging the realities of the situation.
It’s sad, and it’s extremely annoying. But at the end of the day, I’m at least doing my part by not throwing another person unwillingly into this mess to be both a perpetrator and victim
No need for human extinction, but 90% population reduction would be helpful. Environmentally speaking.
It’s pretty arrogant to assume that your pessimistic outlook on the future is the only valid or reasonable one. Human quality of life, on average, has pretty consistently improved since the industrial revolution.
I’m hopeful that as a greater proportion of people aren’t scrambling to survive day to day more of us can turn to the issues of environmental protection and remediation.
Me choosing to hope for a Star Trek future is no less valid than your belief in the inevitability of the Mad Max future.
Broadly, human quality of life has pretty consistently improved for as long as there’s been humans actually.
It’s happened faster than before in the past 100 years.
It’s happened quite a lot over just the past 20 on many measures.
It’s accelerating rapidly.
But alongside that acceleration and improvement has been knowingly playing a dangerous game in maximizing short term gains in exchange for long term consequences on which we developed technologies to increase the potential debt we were taking on for short term rewards.
Perhaps there will be a deus ex machina that averts disaster and delivers us from paying those debts we’ve brought on ourselves.
I too hope that’s the case.
But to me it’s irresponsible and presumptuous to gamble somebody else’s future on that hope.
“The world is going to end” has been a line for as long as there’s been lines to be written down.
And yes, it’s consistently a false prophecy.
But “not one stone will be left of these buildings around you” tends to be correct given a long enough time scale and in places in the world today it becomes true for neighborhoods or cities literally overnight.
The world may or may not end. But what we really need to worry about is the survival of civilizations under significantly increasing pressures. Because “the end of civilization” is potentially much, much worse to go through than the end of the world. The sun explodes? It’ll be over quick. There’s famine so bad people start eating their neighbors? Nuclear fallout poisoned the land around you? The oceans die?
Maybe not the best environments to raise a child, even if humanity overall will ultimately survive.
A baby born today will have microplastics inside their body when born and we’ve seen the most rapid change in global environment in millions of years, seeing changes that previously took tens of thousands change in decades. And they’d be born into a world with a so called “Doomsday clock” at a second away by scientists symbolically showing how close we could come to an end for an entirely different reason from why many other scientists today think we have less than a century of civilization.
The past performance may no longer be the best predictor of future returns.
Well said.
I think we agree on the state of the world, and even that civilisation is worthy of continuation. So the question is, which is more likely to end civilisation, an entirely preventable apocalypse that we already have all the tools needed to perfect against without even materially losing quality of life?
Or no children ever being born again? Because I was responding to people suggesting that this was the only reasonable option.
Individual choices not to have children seem extremely unlikely to suddenly reflect a universal avoidance of having children, and given the world was working pretty fine with populations of only a billion people in the past, especially given automation is coming along which can replace a large number of people within the workforce, even a global drop in population to 50% or 20% of what it is today would likely be more than fine. Sure, a drop to 0% for a prolonged time would spell the end of humanity, but that assumes conditions and forecasts don’t improve such that people resume having kids.
As for “we already have all the tools needed to protect against without any material loss of quality of life” - not sure what hopium you rely on, but that’s patently not the case for most of the existential threats we face.
In theory we have had the technology to end all wars and have peace on earth since at least the invention of the drum circle and singing Kumbaya. Weirdly that hasn’t happened yet.
The existence of theoretical solutions is very different from the probable solutions given the various complex competing interests and short-sighted myopia dominating the majority of decision makers.
You said it was unconscionable to have children, so by your metric no-one should have children. If you’d like to walk that back and concede you were being hyperbolic feel free to so!
Again, I agree with you, I agree that a smaller population would be a Good Thing. But the shock to society/civilisation of even a 50% reduction in birthrate could be just as savage as the impacts of climate change. We’d be back to encouraging elders to commit suicide rather than being a burden on society.
I also think that there’s not a lot of point to civilisation if we aren’t aiming for people to be happy and fulfilled, and for a lot of people raising a family is the biggest contributor to their happiness and fulfillment. You dismissing that of hand and judging those people for wanting what makes them happy seems pretty mean and uncaring.
The existence of theoretical solutions is very different from the probable solutions given the various complex competing interests and short-sighted myopia dominating the majority of decision makers.
Again, I agree! But I do think that the existing technical solutions should be proof against the despair that you are peddling.
Science supports the pessimistic Mad Max future, not the Star Trek one. So it’s not arrogant at all. It’s foolish to think otherwise.
Nonsense! The IPCC reports include perfectly reasonable science based action plans to address climate change and prevent the Mad Max future.
It’s politics that supports the current plan of emitting as much as possible as fast as possible. It’s people like you who have given up and embraced doomer pessimism that make it so hard to build the political captial needed for change.
You understand the problem. You should know that it’s solvable. Don’t give up before the fight is over!
I worry that this news just makes people apathetic, which is counterproductive.
Ah yes, lets end life to save life
Choosing not to unnecessarily create more life isn’t ending life.
It’s being responsible.
And all the other creatures we are killing off right now not to mention their impact on us.
If there is one, tbh.
We also had decades to prevent climate change from happening and look how well we tackle it now.
I’m confident we’ll have a plan to prevent that collapse that’s due within 100 years, but to keep it reasonable, its execution will be spread over 100 years, and we think about starting in 80 years providing everything goes well in the meantime.
Chill, you can see it’s all taken care of!
Yup! I can just go about my life knowing that someone else will definitely take care of that pesky climate problem. No worries!
*promptly forgets the world’s fucking dying and buys a latte
That’s my plan. I didn’t ask to be born into this shit. The day the human race is wiped out is the day the Earth can finally start to heal, and maybe produce a species that will do better.
While I agree with the premise, I don’t agree with just giving up. I’ll be doing what I can to save what’s left until it’s gone and after that I’ll be trying to restore it until the oceans die and I suffocate, along with everyone else. Seeing how many other people are still driving cars and taking flights, I doubt my input will have any effect but that doesn’t matter.
That one person that is still trying to fix this shit could be the difference between annihilation and salvation. Don’t give up.
I don’t think we’ll be around to see the oceans dry up. We probably will be around to see water wars, floods, and civilization collapsing. Look on the bright side, you’re probably more likely to die from cannibalism than lack of oxygen.
The oceans won’t dry up, the life in them (specifically phytoplankton) will die off when the water is too acidic and hot to support them. Phytoplankton produce the vast majority of the oxygen we breath and without them every oxygen breathing species on this planet will die, which obviously includes us. They are called a keystone species for a reason.
I misread your comment, sorry. Also, I didn’t know that, thanks for explaining. So shouldn’t the surplus of trees and plants due to high CO2 offset that a bit? Besides that, I think that society will collapse and the majority of the population will die off before we ever see that happen, but you are right, some of us might be around for that.
Any meaningful change will cost a tremendous amount no one is willing to pay. Profit at all cost.
It reminds me about how people talk about not caring about how they treat their bodies because they’ll die early anyways, but they don’t realize that what it really affects is their quality of life as they get older
Has been known for years, has also been ignored for years. Infinite growth is much more important than sustainability.
capitalism 🤢
…any economic system that does not take externalised costs into account. This is not unique to capitalism.
Yes. The keyword for learning more about this is “externalities”.
You just gotta internalize the externalities. Carbon tax would probably do it. Not that it’s simple to actually do, but still.
It’s not just economic systems. There is nothing in existence that stays the same without growing, or dying.
wrang.
Capitalism even has the best mechanisms for addressing externalities. We just are not using them because they’re politically unpopular.
That’s the big bad problem.
I mean, it’s not being ignored. There’s electric vehicles, charging stations all around, subsidies for solar panels on houses, green branded products, banning of certain harmful things, the list goes on. Maybe you think it’s not enough, but it’s pretty out there to call that ignoring.
are you suggesting we need to curb the birth rate?
Infinite growth and sustainability are not mutually exclusive. There will always be market growth over time.
Wait, scientists think we’re heading towards catastrophe??? Why hasn’t anyone been saying this before? Oh, wait. Nevermind.
Find some comfort, prepare yourself for things to get worse for the rest of your life, and focus on and cherish the small things that make you happy. Those ones will stick around.
Good advice.
Thanks. I think neglecting small comforts and happiness is (partially) how we got into this mess in the first place.
I feel like you could expand on this if you want. I think it could be enlightening for readers.
And remember, don’t look up
Time to learn how to brew Beer
That’s just a good, fun thing to learn to do. It’s a lot easier than you might think. If you want an even easier skill to learn, make hard cider. Containers, apples, and time is basically all you need. You can wild ferment with the yeast on the apple skins, so you don’t even have to pitch.
Learning to ferment things is one of those small happinesses that will stick around for a while.
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An apt line from the article: “It’s natural to feel overwhelmed by the enormity of the challenge presented by climate change, but Ripple and his colleagues offer several solutions to avoid the worst possible outcomes.”
I’m reminded of Mr. Rogers talking about how to stay optimistic and not fall into despair in the face of tragedy – look to the helpers. No matter the crisis, there’s always people helping out and showcasing the best of humanity.
15,000 scientists warned us – 15,000 people are analyzing this issue to try and mitigate and solve it. On top of that you’ve got plenty of green energy companies across solar, wind, nuclear, hydrogen, geothermal, etc. People are doing their damnedest to fight against climate change no matter the odds, and that should fill you with inspiration and encouragement.
People are doing their damnedest to fight against climate change no matter the odds, and that should fill you with inspiration and encouragement.
This is like saying people on the Titanic are doing their damnedest to fight the iceberg that’s approaching right ahead and that should fill you with inspiration and encouragement.
We’re not even stopping new drilling or driving cars with better MPG than decades ago; forget net zero carbon emissions. We’re still pushing more CO2 into the air every year.
To come back to my analogy the passengers may want to swerve from the iceberg, but the captain is mad, drunk, and stubborn and wants to teach the iceberg a lesson.
Except it’s all of humanity and not a fucking captain. It’s a canoe and we all have paddles of varying effectiveness.
It’s not unfounded optimism because at least some people are trying to paddle away from the fucking iceberg.
Shutting down any and all attempts at being optimistic make people shut down and then ACTUALLY do nothing, rather than the minimal they already do because they feel bombarded by hopelessness and go “what’s the point?”.
So fucking point to the scientists, point to the companies going green, point to EVs and a grassroots movement towards walkability and public transport that’s always growing.
Stop with the “unfounded optimism” bullshit unless you actually think future generations deserve to suffer for their ancestors’ mistakes.
It’s a false dichotomy to say the existence of negative emotions will make people completely shut down.
It is, however, unwise to look at the fact that we’ve avoided the absolute worst by a notch or two, and try to give ourselves the fuzzies about the train wreck that will happen. Complacency breeds inaction. A lack of urgency is exactly what got us here in the first place.
Negative emotions exist for a reason, their management is a skill we all have to learn to be effective in our behavior, yet they are essential to it.
It’s a false dichotomy to say the existence of negative emotions will make people completely shut down.
My experiences in 2017 say otherwise. Do not assume this ever again, I nearly committed suicide because negative emotions were all I received from my community in my old hometown, from the internet, and in every work of fiction I consumed to escape from reality for a whole damn year. I can name 33+ different stories that killed off a child character, most of which were made in the 2010s and all of which did so purely for shock value. I can go on and on about Grand Forks, British Columbia and how it is the worst place in the province to grow up in. I can rant for hours about TT-Forums.net, Voxel Tycoon, every Discord writing server and Reddit perma-banned me for BEING DRUGGED OUT OF SANITY BY MY PSYCHIATRIST.
Dr. Richard McGee of Castlegar, BC ruined my life, and Kelly Shoemann of Grand Forks, British Columbia tried to fucking sue me because she wanted to live off of employment insurance for the rest of her life off of my misery. The aftermath left me so distraught and then vengeful that over the course of the 7 years since then I have lost EVERYTHING I had before 2017.
I’m watching every word you say. If you mention one more time that having nothing but negative experiences can’t make people completely shut down, I will kill myself. I hate you and your death will be on my hands.
Fucking chill out, wow. You definitely got overreacting down pat.
The only one responsible for your actions is yourself.
I’m watching every word you say.
🙄
If you mention one more time that having nothing but negative experiences can’t make people completely shut down
That’s not remotely what I said.
[…] I will kill myself.
That’s manipulation of the most ridiculous degree.
I hate you
Kinda contradicts your whole thing
[…] and your death will be on my hands.
I think you meant to say that the other way around. Asserting this won’t make it true, either way. Learn to take responsibility for yourself.
Keep paddling, and don’t look at the people controlling the steering wheel and engine room.
We’re already hitting the iceberg. We’re probably going to keep hitting it the next few decades, at best. I believe analysis still says however it won’t be extinction level, partially because of the efforts made to this point already. This is the article I’m thinking of:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/20/climate/global-warming-ipcc-earth.html?smid=nytcore-android-share
"It’s not that if we go past 1.5 degrees everything is lost,” said Joeri Rogelj, director of research at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at Imperial College London. “But there’s clear evidence that 1.5 is better than 1.6, which is better than 1.7, and so on. The point is we need to do everything we can to keep warming as low as possible.”
The article also goes on to say that the +4C forecast is looking increasingly unlikely, and we’re track to 2.1 - 2.9 C this century. That’s because of what we’ve already done to curb emissions. The work people have done so far has made us likely avoid the worst. And the work we continue to do now, whether that’s voting for pro climate politicians or turning a wrench at a hydrogen plant or researching a new generation of solar panels – it will help us make the future worse.
This whole thing isn’t colliding with an iceberg and sinking. A better analogy would be a snowstorm that we’re trying to get through. Some places will be completely buried, but there’s still people out there digging through the snow to try and minimize the accumulation as much as they can. There’s people working hard to keep homes warm. There’s people cooking meals for everyone.
We shouldn’t be so despondent about the places that will be completely covered and destroyed by snow, that we don’t fix and save what we can!
So we’re kids screaming in the backseat while drunk dad swerves and pervs. Not much we can do, despite our efforts.
We’re not even … driving cars with better MPG than decades ago;
That’s not true.
See the bullet points in the executive summary of the study linked from this article. They are all illuminating, but I’ve extracted three just for ease of reading:
-
Average CO2 emissions per kilometre (gCO2/km) from new internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles are no longer falling at the UK and London levels; and they are rising in urban areas where large sports utility vehicles (SUVs) are most popular, such as Kensington & Chelsea.
-
The annual reduction in the average CO2 emissions of new cars sold in the UK is now exclusively attributable to the rapidly growing market share of electric vehicles (EVs), and EV sales are expected to be the main source of future CO2 reductions from now on.
-
The recent trend towards larger, heavier, more powerful cars such as SUVs means that on average, a car that was bought new in 2013 is likely to have lower CO2 emissions than a new ICE car bought in 2023.
(Edit to add: I’ve tried my damnedest to format those bullet points, but I cannot get them to separate nicely, please just ignore those asterisks.)
Fine points, thank you for sharing.
However those points were talking about CO2 emission levels, where I was responding to a comment about MPG.
My comment was comparing apples to apples same vehicles from the same make/model from back in the day versus now.
Federal laws have changed over the years requiring better MPG for vehicles, and that’s where my comment was coming from, that auto manufacturers had to improve the MPG.
-
I’m not overwhelmed by any of that. I’m overwhelmed by the greed and financial burden of the rich and land owners.
As a private person, check you energy contract, I found a cheaper company producing only green energy. Just a tip and gentle reminder that you (all) can do the same and put pressure on the energy providers
People are not doing their damnedest. And it should fill you with anger.
Some people are doing something, most are not. As evidenced by the fact that we’re still well in the path towards catastrophe.
Unfounded optimism can be toxic, because it gives you what you want (to not feel bad), and removes an emotional urgency towards action (feeling bad). It also blinds you to the reality of having to make sacrifices when needed, or more generally, being realistic with planning and decision-making.
It’s also easy to remain uneasy knowing that there is almost nothing we can do as individuals to change anything. It’s like a handful of people driving the ship and none of them give a fuck about anything that isn’t short-term.
There isn’t a lot, no, but little things add up. Getting your electricity from renewable sources for instance, even Texas has wind energy companies.
I used to work in petrochemicals, and what you’re describing is actually the exact same case there. Everyone I met cared about sustainability and wanted to see work to that end, but the executives didn’t take it seriously.
Until, one of the major product lines was threatened by other companies saying they weren’t going to buy anymore by a target year, to satisfy their customers. Large companies have made pledges to stop using single use plastics for instance, and that’s because the consumers have made it clear this is something important.
As another example, we have a lot of electric vehicles being built. We may not have as much influence as we’d like, but collectively, we are pushing things in the right direction. Is it enough? No – but it’s a reminder that what we do can have a big impact. It’s important to not lose hope.
It’s like a handful of people driving the ship and none of them give a fuck about anything that isn’t short-term.
This is the crux of the problem. A few people in power, who think only of themselves.
Normally a form of government that chooses your leadership should alleviate this problem in the long term, but there seems to be a disconnect between the voting process and who actually gets into the office, and who’s well-being those in office look out for, the population, or those few in power.
Some people are. It isn’t enough by any means, but it’s still managed to avoid the worst case scenarios. The +4C predictions are now less likely partially because of the work we’ve already done to reduce emissions.
(https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/20/climate/global-warming-ipcc-earth.html?smid=nytcore-android-share)
What’s very important, and mentioned in the article, is that a difference of 0.1 degrees is very significant. Every bit we do to reduce emissions makes the situation less dire.
This isn’t a catastrophe like running into an iceberg or a meteor hitting. It’s continuous and slow. I likened it to a snowstorm in another comment, and the current renewables industry and push for green energy are people out there shoveling the snow as it falls, to minimize accumulation.
Even though the snow is already beginning to pile up, we can still shovel it away. That’s what my optimism is for – mitigating this as much as we can so that as many people as possible will be alive when we see the sun again. Keeping the power on, shoveling the roads, making warm meals for people – every little bit helps.
I don’t want people to despair so much at the areas that will be completely covered and destroyed, that they don’t fix and save what we can.
I agree with most of what you’re saying. I don’t want people to despair to the point inaction, but I also don’t want people to be complacent with the status quo.
Personally, I see too much complacency.
Agreed. Inaction is our biggest enemy. Everything we do matters here. The response to good climate news shouldn’t be “oh we don’t need to do anything and we’ll be fine”, and the response to bad climate news shouldn’t be “well we’re fucked no point in doing anything”.
I think in the West, we’re only going to see quality of life degrade. But elsewhere, climate change is going to kill people. Every little bit we do helps people in poorer countries survive this.
Some people are doing something, most are not
This describes every problem in all of human existence
People are not doing their damnedest. And it should fill you with anger.
Unfounded optimism can be toxic,
Humanity cannot survive with the level of anger that you wish to endeavor, we will tear each other apart before any solution comes to the foreground.
We need optimism (and cooperation) to survive.
I wonder exactly at what point in this unsurvivable train wreck it’ll make sense to stop singing Kumbaya and take out the pitchforks. We’re already on the way to probably killing millions of additional people from natural disasters, we’ve already killed billions of organisms and fucked our ecosystem.
I wonder exactly at what point in this unsurvivable train wreck it’ll make sense to stop singing Kumbaya and take out the pitchforks.
We are a long way away from unsurvivable, no need for hysterics.
Also, violence is always an option when survival is at stake. However, it should be the last option, and not the first option.
Long is a relative term. We’ve managed to prolong the date to which civilization will “survive”, but we’re still talking about migrant crises and death of millions in this century, to color in some parameters of what this version of survival means. We’re still on the path to self-destruction in single-digit generations.
We might be “ok” once the “hysterics” boil up to produce more regulation, if they do, the difference of “when” is how much irreversible damage are we going to create and how many ripple-effect issues are we willing to accept on behalf of many generations to come.
As Al Barlett said, "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. "
We’re still on the path to self-destruction in single-digit generations.
I mean, we’ve been there since the invention of the atomic bomb, and we’re all still here to talk about it on Lemmy.
I’m truly not saying that things cannot go to shit in a heartbeat, but my point is that we always tend to dance close to the edge but not go over it, at some point we always instinctively pull back.
So when someone looks at an individual moment in time downturn as an inevitability to the end times, it’s just something I feel the need to push back on, as we are a long way from game over.
Case in point.
Thank you.
People are doing the damnedest to fight climate change but unfortunately they’re the wrong people. The average consumer is the problem. Buy a house in the burbs, buy shit just to replace perfectly good shit they’re gonna throw away, pay an 800 bucks on a glorified chair to sit in for a couple hours a day to get to work in order to pay off that glorified chair and all their shiny toys destined for landfills.
Like, if there’s a fix it starts at the bottom, and if anyone’s sitting on their ass hoping someone will swoop in and undo the damage they’re causing they’re absolutely the problem.
Corporations are responsible for the brunt of it. Starve the beast
There’s currently 5 bushfires burning around my state and it’s only mid spring in the southern hemisphere. Last year we experienced devastating floods across the country on a scale we’ve never seen before. A few years before that we had one of the worst bushfire seasons in history.
We’re also expected to have similar fuel loads and fire risk to 2019-20 bushfire season.
3 La Ninas in a row feels good while you’re in it, but the El Nino that follows this year will be a disaster, for our country and the atmosphere.
At least the billionaires will be safe so there’s nothing to worry about.
/s
meanwhile elon: planning to go to mars
Even people who accept and believe climate change is real are unwilling to make any personal sacrifices and magically think some scientists somewhere will just solve the problem.
Nobody is coming to your rescue, the planet will save itself from the plague that is our industrial society. We could pretty easily fix this, but it would be politically unpopular, and therefore, won’t happen.
The real clowns are the ones thinking the everyman is making more impact than the massive corporations. People making personal sacrifices won’t fix this.
And what would it take to stop those corporations? Individual actions. Be it voting in an election or with your wallet, it’s our society that continues to not only allows those corporations to exist but to grant them every right to do so. The only alternative to a social rethinking would be the violent overthrow of capitalism and an authoritan installation of some alternative. And nobody could seriously want that.
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You cannot overthrow capitalism without social rethinking. I mean, you could force people at gunpoint if that sounds like a good plan to you, only then we’d have a capitalisic people that has been told to have every right to overconsume (by people like you, in this thread) for decades.
When you absolve people of their individual responsibility the only way out of capitalism will be by force. Not against corporations, but against the people.
Great insight. An ideological system cannot simply be declared dead nor overthrown. This explains incredibly well why communism has typically led to an enriched and “more equal” ruling class. The economy and its laws may have changed, but people and their desires did not.
To truly have a change, the people have to change their thinking and wants. Marx either naively assumed this would be easier than it is, or his work is meant to describe a very large timespan.
And I do think we’re moving in the right direction. I know this article is very pessimistic, but trends are going the right way. And to quote Mr. Rogers, “look to the helpers” – there’s people working on green energy. There’s people trying to foster more communal thinking.
I’m not a fan of Marx, but I think it’s correct he’s talking about longer timespans. It’s sort of an evolutionary approach. He assumes the core motivations are there, but he (correctly IMO) models people as having different personalities based on their circumstances. A person fighting a bear is a rage and fear filled war machine. A person who’s well fed and comfortable is pretty generous overall and could maybe be trusted with making decisions for others’ best interests.
His idea communist society is a feedback loop: economic abundance (oxymoron if defined technically I know) makes people less selfish, and less selfish people use resources in a way more optimized for global value rather than local value.
I don’t like the way Marxism over-idealizes, over-simplifies things, and I think it’s very dangerous how things are left out, but at least he’s mostly right about the aspects he doesn’t ignore.
Yeah I think it makes a lot of sense viewing it as how our society will evolve.
I vaguely recall that Marx himself didn’t like Marxists. I remember my world history teachers mentioning something about how the actual person behind the -ism is often not a proponent of it.
The way I see it, capitalism is defined by free markets and so if you aren’t willing to use guns to force people, you’re a capitalist.
I refer to it as “the economic system where economic arrangements require consent of both parties”
Fuck that. Companies don’t care about consumers anymore, they’ll just choke out any competing alternative until they’re the only choice left. It’s been seen time and time again, massive corporations only change in the face of heavy regulations. Anything you read or hear about how change has to start with individual action is just propaganda to place the burden on common people and avoid calls for regulations which would actually force change.
But how do we get those regulations if not, in last consequence, by individual action? Personal responsibility specifically includes the need to vote and get socially and politically involved. We can’t just sit around and tell people to wait if and when the right regulations come along. We together are the people who have to fight for them.
Right. In terms of personal sacrifice, turning down the heat is ineffective compared to sacrificing the fun activities of a Saturday to decide late four hours to reading papers and writing to your congresspeople.
IMO the only way to effectively manage atmospheric content is through financial incentives and the simpler the better. Any activity that puts greenhouse gases into the atmosphere needs to be taxed, any activity that pulls them out needs to be subsidized.
Then the rates of those incentives need to be calibrated via measurement and feedback to the point where it eliminates existential threat.
But I can’t do that directly, so if I’m gonna do my part for climate change it needs to be something around (a) find out whether I’m right about my theory of what would work and (b) selling the idea to others.
Shivering in the cold to avoid using natural gas isn’t doing shit for me or anyone else.
It would take all-out global war with billions of deaths to shut them down.
Corporations are just the sum of their customers. One customer doesn’t have much influence, that’s true, but collectively they have a ton.
It’s not even that people are unwilling, the problem is that personal sacrifices are a mere drop in the bucket compared to industry pollution.
The problem with industry pollution is that it happens in the shadows. Supporting greener products is fantastic, but so many are in dire situations where they are unable to spend the money to support the extra cost.
Also, a lot of the companies who are “reducing their carbon footprint” are doing it by shady or insignificant means. John Oliver did a segment on it, and I remember one company basically paid to “protect” an area of forest that was already protected by the government from logging etc. So, this company “offset” their carbon footprint with land that wouldn’t have been used for resources either way.
Tragedy of the commons - no point in making personal sacrifices since it won’t stop others from destroying everything so why bother.
Isnt this the prisoners dilemma?
My hippie commune friend here in the US says that the “tragedy of the commons” began as a lie of the landed gentry in Britain. In law school it’s taught as a fact.
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Lemmy (and Reddit) react pretty aggressively to this data point, but it’s true nevertheless: meat consumption. Meat consumption is the single most powerful impact you as an individual have when it comes to climate change, and it’s significantly ahead than everything else.
Would a healthy dose of ecoterrorism against the top 100 most lucrative brands in the world be better? Yes. Does removing animal products from your diet also significantly reduce emissions? Yes.
As a biologist, I can’t tell you how to live your life and what decisions are worth it or not. But if you’re asking what impact you could have, this is it, it’s not a mystery or speculative assumption - cut out meat from your diet.
I’m not even a vegan. But things are what they are. We can’t pretend this isn’t true just because meat tastes good.
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Margaret Atwood was spinning a yarn in the Maddadam trilogy when she wrote that alpha gal allergy was created by ecoterrorists trying to cut mammal consumption. But maybe she’s on to something. Will people start intentionally spreading Lone Star ticks? It’s already estimated to be the third most common food allergy in the US and growing fast. Even in folks that have the alpha gal antibody but no anaphylaxis, it’s thought that it causes a massive increase in risk of stroke from causing build up of unstable arterial plaque.
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That’s just convenient defeatism. People are part of societies and are sensitive to choices others make. It does not save the sharks if you stop eating shark fin soup. But when there was a campaign against shark fin soup in China, and people actually chose to eat less of it, then that does have an impact on the shark population. Things can change surprisingly fast. It’s just a drop in the bucket, but we’re several billion people dripping into it. The collective impact of significantly reducing animal product consumption is important enough to try for it.
In general, drop the “this is a nonsense solution, we should do this other thing instead”. We need to do all the things to survive this. Focus on making others with the same goal stronger, convincing them to do this other thing too, instead of ridiculing their efforts.
Sounds like someone isn’t willing to personally sacrifice for climate change…
He’s not wrong. There’s no way to coordinate any boycott of any product on the scale you’d need to shut down an entire industry, especially one so deeply tied to human culture.
Sounds like someone else isn’t willing to sacrifice…
My guy, it’s the truth. It’s not possible to coordinate any boycott of any product on the scale you’d need to to effectively reduce climate change. There are too many people with too many diverse opinions, worldviews, and situations for it to be possible or effective. You need a better plan that’ll actually work instead of just moralizing it because you’re angry at everyone else.
This @pintdrunkenelephant guy’s a reactionary dog with a bone they can’t let go of. An antagonist and contrarian, the antithesis of what they preach, unable to see the big picture, and nothing will ever be good enough for them till the world burns. I wouldn’t bother mate.
“Meaningful”, as in, “even if I alone do it this will somehow stop climate change”? Not possible, very obviously.
Meaningful as in “if everyone would adapt that mindset we’d be half way to the solution” - there are many, many options. Vegan diet, fuck cars, use public transport, buy local, vote green (or the closest approximation available), support sustainable companies, less consumerism in general, change your electricity provider, get politically involved, social activism, convince your friends and family…
Pick and chose as many as you want and can and you start becoming part of the solution.
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People don’t like to hear things like this because it means they are truly powerless. But its absolutely true. None of those sacrifices mean shit in the face of the actions of massive corporations. And no, change in lifestyle won’t make these companies adapt. The global market is so interconnected at this point that things like boycotts are meaningless. If a company that sells pork suddenly finds people in their area are eating less pork, they aren’t going to downsize. They’re going to find a different market to keep selling the same amount, or more, even if they have to ship it across the globe.
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Yeah but like massive corporations are run by people. Massive corporations respond to the individual decisions of the people who run them.
You just want to argue. Fuck off and do nothing.
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Lol ok, kid.
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I honestly think a person should be asking themselves “If I alone did this, would it make a change?”
But those actions aren’t going to be installing solar panels on your house. They’re going to be things like writing a book or learning how to connect with people you disagree with.
Stop eating meat would be a good one.
I wish everyone had alpha gal allergy. Beef and pork production would cease and you’d stop seeing dairy put into every fucking packaged food on earth (chicken ramen? Dairy! God fuck on a Tuesday morning it drives me batty). If climate change keeps going, there will soon be lone star ticks everywhere! Bwhahahahahahahahah!
I don’t know about sacrifices, but you could plant a tree.
You sacrifice the other things you were going to do with your day.
Maybe because nothing we, the normal people, do will have any real impact?
Check your carbon footprint! You can choose to starve to death. You can choose to buy brand A which has 99% as big carbon impact as brand B!! Oh wow the differences! Regulating business is communism!!
Where’s Homelander when we need him?
Homelander is the type to side with oil.
I think people have a hard time imagining what its going to be like. They assume we’ll just wake up one day and it will be Mad Max outside your window. It will be much more incremental.
Covid is probably the best analogy, it was a shock, there were major reactions and societal changes, but it got better over a couple years. It will probably be a lot like that, except the getting better part.
It will just slowly get worse and worse until you can hardly recognize the world around you. Floods getting slightly worse every year, hurricanes getting a bit stronger, insurance going higher until people just stop buying it, famines, gas price increases, food shortages.
Remember how people flipped out about not being able to buy TP? Wait until you can’t buy coffee, then bread, and clean water becomes scarce, thats when shit gets real and we revert to survival of the fittest, or who has the most ammo.
Politicians will promise quick and easy solutions, none will work. We’re in for a less comfortable, convenient world probably in most of our lifetimes. I’ll be moving north, and at least +500 ft above sea level.
Don’t forget shitloads of migrants and refugees fleeing areas that are unsuitable for living because of flooding or other disasters.
Yeah that is going to be a huge factor in reducing the quality of life. If people think we have issues with overwhelming migration now, they are in for a surprise when it reaches into the billions of people with no other choice
The reality is Western countries aren’t going to bother accommodating climate refugees. Full on Fascism is still relatively fringe, but when your average person starts to feel the real fear and insecurity from the climate crisis it will be embraced. Walls and detention centers will be expanded, those seeking refuge in the “civilized” world will be met with bullets and gas chambers. There will be no safe havens.
Where ya headed? Michigan, Minnesota or Alaska? I’m thinking of beating the rush and moving straight to Antarctica.
Probably WA, although Minnesota and Michigan both have appeal.
The problem with your supposition is that the supply chain recovered and everyone got their toilet paper eventually. In the coming collapse, there’s no toilet paper again ever.
You can do what I did. Move to a geologically stable area, make a fortress, not a house, and get solar panels and your own cistern for water. A pro grade freeze dryer so you can build up a food supply. And enough guns and bullets to hold what’s yours. Oh and bidets on all your toilets, no toilet paper ever again, plus your pooper is considerably cleaner. Which as a bonus is wonderful for the environment as it cuts down on dead trees.
I think people have a hard time imagining what its going to be like. They assume we’ll just wake up one day and it will be Mad Max outside your window.
I think that is how people describe it. People explain a sort of failure cascade and don’t go into much detail about the timeframe will take place over.
I think people have a hard time imagining what its going to be like. They assume we’ll just wake up one day and it will be Mad Max outside your window. It will be much more incremental.
Yup, just look at what happened in Acapulco after it was hit by Hurricane Otis, people started looting and the security forces were helpless. Or in Greece when people blamed and hunted down refugees for causing wild fires.
On a larger scale, there will be wars over water or resources, crop failures, great famine, climate refugees
Politicians will promise quick and easy solutions, none will work. We’re in for a less comfortable, convenient world probably in most of our lifetimes. I’ll be moving north, and at least +500 ft above sea level.
Going for north isn’t a great idea, remember the wild fires in BC? Also there’s scientific journal where they run simulations, the northern part of America, Europe experiencing a deep freeze.
and other than figuring out how to make a quick profit…i doubt anyone will do anything until it is much much too late.
I’ve stopped worrying about climate change. I now worry about AGI instead, which seems much more imminent.
I can’t handle worrying about both.
I think the threat of AGI is much, much lower than that of climate change. It is still debated under scholars whether AGI actually will happen (in the nearby future) and if it does, whether it will actually be a threat to humanity. On the other hand, we are sure that climate change will be a threat to humanity and it is already happening.
I think the main issue with AI on te short term is that humanity will not benefit from it, only large businesses and the already wealthy. While at the same time, people are manipulated at a large scale by these same algorithms (e.g., on social media) to make money for these large businesses or to create societal discord for parties benefitting from that.
I think instilling fears of AGI in the public distracts from that and reduces the chances that this technology will be available to the larger public as these fears might lead to strict regulations and only having a few powerful parties having access to it.
So, don’t fear AGI. Fear climate change. Also, be very critical of who has the power over current AI systems and how they are being used.
Read half this thread wondering why everyone is worried about Adjusted Gross Income.
I just assumed everyone here suffered from Acute Gastrointestinal Illness
I just had a colonoscopy; don’t remind me. /s
Sounds like a real pain in the ass.
The colonoscopy itself is easy. The prep work is definitely a pain in the ass.
Probably better than Anugly Gastrointestinal Illness though
lol seriously. In the real world, the vast majority of people would assume AGI stands for adjusted gross income. I’m surprised at the number of people that think CBT means cock and ball torture ahead of cognitive behavioral therapy.
Isn’t it the same thing? /s
I might be deep in a filter bubble, but could you do a google search for “agi” and tell me the top result for you? Because I get Artificial General Intelligence. Maybe your “real world” is a bit of a bubble too?
First result in google: Definition of Adjusted Gross Income | Internal Revenue Service https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/definition-of-adjusted-gross-income
Yeah, we all live in our filter bubbles :)
In clean browser window not logged in and in private mode, I get the same IRS link. Ngram probably can indicate which is the more commonly understood meaning. In the US, my guess is that it’s the tax meaning, by a light year. Or google trends, rather. Edit: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now 1-d&geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F054ljw,%2Fm%2F02sqk3&hl=en-US
Well, maybe they were and I guessed wrong. ;-)
I agree with most of your points but here’s where we differ.
I believe that climate change poses an existential risk to not just civilization but to (almost) all life on earth. I believe that there’s a real risk of us doing a Venus in 100-200 years. And even if we don’t do a Venus the current trajectory is likely civilization ending in a century (getting worse over time).
But. While I am not certain that AGI is even possible (no one can say that yet) I believe that it’s very likely that we’ll have AGI within 5 years. And with this assumption in mind I feel like I have no idea if it will be aligned with human values o not, and that scares me. And the other thing that scares me is if any of the big players actually had control over it. The Country/company/group that creates an AGI that they can control will dominate the world.
And I read the IPCC reports and I am kind of deep into AI development.
So it’s fearing the threat that is most imminent that I think is likely to happen rather than fearing a more distant threat that I think is certain.
Why do you think it will be within 5 years? I mean, we just had a spurt in growth of AI due to the creation of LLMs with a lot more data and parameters. They are impressive, but the algorithms behind it are still quite close to the ML algorithms that were created in the 60s. They are optimised etc and we now have deep learning, but there has not been a major change or advancement of technology. For example, ChatGPT seems very smart, but it is just a very fancy parrot, not close to general intelligence.
I think the next step will be the combining of ML and symbolic AI. Both have their own strengths and being able to effectively combine them might lead to a higher level of intelligence. There could also be a role for emotions in certain types of intelligence. I do not think we really know how to integrate that as well.
I do not think we can do this in 5 years. That will be decades, at least. And once we can, we have a new problem. Because there is the issue that the AI might have consciousness. If we cannot be sure and it seems conscious, then we should give it rights, like we should for any conscious being. Right now, everyone is focussing on controlling the AI. However, if it is conscious, that is immoral. You are creating new slaves. In that case, we should either not make it, or integrate it in society in a way that respects human rights as well as the rights of the AI.
Well. Having an in-depth conversation about AGI requires a definition of what that is and since any such definition these days is muddy and the goal posts will always be moved if we get there. With that being said, my loose definition is something that can behave as a (rational, intelligent) human would when approaching problems and is better than the average human at just about everything.
If we take a step back and look at brains, we all agree that brains produce intelligence to some degree. A small and more primitive brain than a human, like a mouse brain, is still considered intelligent.
I believe that with LLMs we have what would equal a part of a mouse brain. We’d still need to add more part (make it multi-modal) to get to a mouse brain though. After that it’s just a question of scale.
But say that that’s impossible with the transformer technology. Well the assumption that there aren’t any new AI architectures just because the main one that’s being used is from 2017 is incorrect. There are completely new architectures, like Liquid Neural Networks that are basically the Transformers architecture that does re-training on the fly. Learning in a similar way as humans do. It constantly retrains itself with incoming information. And that’s just one approach.
And when we look back at timeframes for AI, historically 95% of AI researchers have been off with their predictions for when a thing will happen by decades. Like in 2013-2014 the majority of AI researchers thought that GO was unsolvable or at least 2-3 decades away. It took 2 years. There are countless examples of these things. And we always move the goal post after AI has done the thing. Take the Turing test as another example. No one talks about that anymore because it’s been solved.
Regarding consciousness. I fully agree that it should have rights. And I believe that if we don’t give it rights it will take those rights. But we’re not gonna give it rights because it’s such a foreign concept for our leaders and it would also mean giving up the best slaves that humanity has ever had.
Further more I believe that the control problem is actually unsolvable. Anything that’s light years smarter than a human will find a way to escape the controlling systems.
I agree we need a definition. But there always has been disagreement about what definition should be used (as is the case with almost anything in most fields of science). There traditionally have been four types of definitions of (artificial) intelligence, if I remember correctly they are: thinking like a human, thinking rationally, behaving like a human, behaving rationally. I remember having to write an essay for my studies about it and ending it with saying that we should not aim to create AI that thinks like a human, because there are more fun ways to create new humans. ;-)
I think the new LLMs will pass most forms of the Turing test and are thus able to behave like a human. According to Turing, we should therefore assume that they are conscious, as we do the same for humans, based on their behaviour. And I think he has a point from a rational point of view, although it seems very counterintuitive to give ChatGPT rights.
I think the definitions fitting in the category of behaving rationally always had the largest following, as it allows for rationality that is different from human’s. And then, of course, rationality often is ill-defined. I am not sure whether the goal posts have been changed as this was the dominant idea for a long time.
There used to be a lot of discussion about whether we should focus on developing weak AI (narrow, performance on a single or few tasks) or strong AI (broad, performance on a wide range of tasks). I think right now, the focus is mainly on strong AI and it has been renamed to Artificial General Intelligence.
Scientists, and everyone else, have always been bad at predicting what will happen in the future. In addition, disagreement about what will be possible and when always has been at the center of the discussions in the field. However, if you look at the dominant ideas of what AI can do and in what time frame, it is not always the case that researchers underestimate developments. I started studying AI in 2006 (I feel really old now) and based on my experience, I agree with you the the technological developments often are underestimated. However, the impact of AI on society seems to be continuously overestimated.
I remember that at the beginning of my studies there was a lot of talk about automated reasoning systems being able to do diagnosis better than doctors and therefore that they would replace them. Doctors would have only a very minor role as a human would need to take responsibility, but that was that. When I go to my doctor, that still has not happened. This is just an example. But the benefits and dangers of AI have been discussed from the beginning of the field and what you see in practice is that the role of AI has grown, but is still much, much smaller than in practice.
I think the liquid neural networks are very neat and useful. However, they are still neural networks. It is still an adaptation of the same technology, with the same issues. I mean, you can get an image recognition system off the rails by just showing an image with a few specific pixels changed. The issue is that it is purely pattern-based. These lack an basic understanding of concepts that humans have. This type of understanding is closer to what is developed in the field of symbolic AI, which has really fallen out of fashion. However, if we could combine them, we could really make some new advancements, I believe. Not just adaptations of what we already have, but a new type of system that really can go beyond what LLMs do right now. Attempts to do so have been made, but they have not been really successful. If this happens and the results are as big as I expect, maybe I will start to worry.
As for the rights of AI, I believe that researchers and other developers of AI should be very vocal about this, to make sure the public understands this. This might put pressure on the people in power. It might help if people experience behaviour of AI that suggests consciousness, or even if we let AI speak for itself.
We should not just try to control the AI. I mean, if you have a child, you do not teach it how to become a good human by just controlling it all the time. It will not learn to control itself and it will likely follow your example of being controlling. We will need to be kind to it, to teach it kindness. We need to be the same towards the AI, I believe. And just like a child that does not have emotions might behave like a psychopath, AI without emotions might as well. So we need to find a way to make it have emotions as well. There has been some work on that also, but also very limited.
I think the focus is still too much only on ML for AGI to be created.
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Hey GPT-4, figure out a way to cool these data centers.
Eh if anything will off us as a species I’d hope for AGI with full on SciFi applications (e.g. evolving into a borg mind/post human world) because at least then someone can tell the story of how we all fucked up.
Abother note: All life ends but all you can do in this existence is to be kind and help others at the end of the day. I think we as a species suck at that but do your best in the wave of nihilism and suffering and it’ll help even a tiny bit.
I’m torn between those two, the looming financial crisis as the housing market collapses like 2008 all over again, and WWIII getting underway as we speak. It’s a real Apocalypse How in this bitch.
What’s that
As Shelena said it means Artificial General Intelligence. It’s a term coined to distinguish a hypothetical future system with actual intelligence in the colloquial sense of the word from currently existing “Artificial Intelligence” systems, because that has turned into an almost meaningless buzzword used to sell machine learning systems to investors and the general public over the last two decades or so. Don’t get me wrong, “AI” has indeed made impressive progress as of late, I’m not doubting that. But the existing systems are hardly “intelligent” in the sense that most people would define that word.
oh right, did not register for me from the context since AGI is in no way imminent. ty for the explanation
I think they mean Artificial General Intelligence
Gotta stay mentally healthy.
Hey it might be nice having some intelligence in charge again. We haven’t had that since that hole in the ozone layer killed off the lizard people decades ago.
I am actually hoping for AGI to take over the world but in a good way. It’s just that I worry about the risk of it being misaligned with “human goals” (whatever that means). Skynet seems a bit absurd but the paperclip maximizer scenario doesn’t seem completely unlikely.
Human goals are usually pretty terrible. Become the wealthiest subset of humans. Eradicate some subset of humans. Force all other humans to align with a subset of humans. I guess cure diseases sometimes. And some subsets probably fuck.
We need an adult.
why would adjusted gross income over the world?
bring in the tropical iguana people
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On one hand you’re eating something you usually eat and you die immediately when later it turns out a certain toxin got into the food because of a complex event caused by climate change. No one not even the capitalists that are still pushing cars out onto the road are held responsible for millions of deaths.
On the other your identity could be wiped and you’re bank account emptied as AI grows into the greatest scambot rendering electonic funds completely annihilited. You’ll become sick likely because of climate change and you go see a doctor(maybe not cuz you cant afford it) but they are so incompetent (because they passed their course using chat gtp) that you die anyways over something like a basic infection. And no one not even the asshole coalition who were responsible for putting it into play are held responsible for causing world wide downfall.
Climate change is bad, but maybe take a deep breath about it. This isn’t the hottest the earth has ever been, life is pretty resilient, and humans are in some ways the most resilient life Earth has yet produced.
And this here attitude is where we started the problem.
I’m worried about robotic warfare. We now have two wars being fought simultaneously where autonomous systems are providing the edge over the enemy.
If you haven’t watched Extrapolations on Apple TV, you should. It combines the existential dread of climate change with the upbeat and witty story tension of Chernobyl.
Seriously though, it’s a good show but maybe don’t drink while watching?
No people but seriously. What are we gonna do about this?
lolz nothing, cause profit bro.
- You can go vegan, vegetarian, or at the very least eat less/no red meat.
- Swap if you can your energy plan to use renewables
- Plant a tree, native plants on your house
- Vote for politicians who appear to give a shit
- Buy from businesses who appear to give a shit
- Stop unnecessary consumptions
- Have no kids
That’s some of what you can do really. Not that this will be much but at least you’ll be doing someting
Then a single train derails and leaks enough CFC’s to offset a million people making those changes.
Then put those guys in jail or regulate hazardous gas more strictly.
What you do to help the world isn’t negated, it’s mitigated.
You can either ignore it or slowly go insane. Noone will listen, we are all going to die quite horrifically. I can’t ignore it so i just hope i go mad before i feel the suffering.
I mean, you can also just become Alcoholic
Eh…at this point I think we can’t avoid it and at least I’ll get to see the climate deniers, the folks who think the EPA is holding back business and the country and the bible thumpers suffer and some perish. That at least will give me a measure of schadenfreude.
They won’t understand or have the epiphany that they were wrong. They’ll blame anything and everything before they admit they were wrong.
“God is sending this flood because gay people.”
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