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But that's not the outcome - Earth will survive, most of its ecosystems and resources will survive and humanity will survive. That's the rock the smug crowd stands on, and the point the panickers overstate; they're both wrong.
With respect to climate change alone, what's going to happen over the next century is that God or Darkseid or Douglas Adams is going to pick up Earth and shake it like a snowglobe. EVERYTHING will be pushed around - weather, arable zones, coastlines, ecosystems. The result may be a planet no less livable, with no (long term) less diversity of life... but as the occasional hurricane or earthquake can cause global disruption of human activities, trying to imagine global disruptions of what's outside the windows is probably impossible. Imagine the disruptions of the great drought and the Dustbowl... worldwide. Not all caused by aridity, but by aridity in formerly arable zones, massive rainfall in areas now measured in a few inches per year, vast warming of chill and temperate zones, global storms of the kind we've just started seeing, the loss of quite a few coastal cities... and arable zones across the northern shores of Canada and Russia, and possibly parts of Antarctica.
There will, of course, be absolutely no disruption to nations, populations, treaties, trade, energy production, and manufacture of iPhones, so you can just ignore all of the above and go back to sleep.
Because, as our learned colleague has noted at length, none of this has ever happened and it's thus of course nonsense - clueless nonsense, yet - to claim it will.
You know, it’s kind of hard to take you serious when every argument you create is xyz will be true in the future, and I can’t prove it, but I’m going to tell you if you don’t believe me you’re closed minded and ignorant. It’s not even a discussion. It’s a one sided talking down to. That’s just my perception.
You know, it’s kind of hard to take you serious when every argument you create is xyz will be true in the future, and I can’t prove it, but I’m going to tell you if you don’t believe me you’re closed minded and ignorant. It’s not even a discussion. It’s a one sided talking down to. That’s just my perception.
So do you want to vote on it?
Or is this a kindergarten class or afternoon tea where every uninformed opinion has equal value?
In my field, I associate with respected, name experts in both AI and climate science. I don't quote them out of courtesy, but neither am I expressing an opinion pulled out of Instagram's ass. Everything I can say is easily validated against current - and, as an aside, I mean current - respected and knowledgeable experience in the field. Modeling of the effects of climate change, expressed across a range of maximum global rise, are out there for anyone who cares to review them.
Sorry if I don't pepper my posts with British demurring.
We have a frequent-poster in the Ohio forums, who is convinced that climate-change will result in "climate refugees" moving to Ohio... that is, as other places in America become unbearably hot, or inhospitably dry, or as Miami and even NYC submerge into the ocean, and Atlanta becomes Atlantis, both the hicks from the South and the hipsters from California and the banksters from NYC and Boston will all flock to Ohio. So, hot tip: buy Ohio real estate, while prices are still reasonable. Incidentally, I have some acreage for sale.
The northern 100 miles of the US will likely be borderline in arability, about like Western Kansas/Eastern Colorado. The bread basket will be across the provinces, all the way to the Arctic Sea in about 100 years.
The problem will be bad enough here, where the US and Canada are highly interlinked and largely cooperative nations; Canada having low population density helps as well.
The situation in Asia just might be a little dicier.
Ginni Rometty, CEO of IBM, was on CNBC this morning warning about AI affecting everyone's job in the future.
Of course, the idea that machines are coming to take our jobs has been around for hundreds of years, and it has always been wrong. "This time will be different," say the AI scarecrows.
This brings to mind the classic story of the invention of the automatic knitting machine back in the 16th Century. At a time when technology in the textile industry meant spinning wheels and hand looms, clergyman William Lee invented a machine that could knit stockings.
In 1589, Queen Elizabeth I of England was alarmed when Lee applied for a Royal Patent for his knitting machine, and said:
The above is from "History of the Framework Knitters" written by Gravenor Henson back in 1831 in England. Hensen's thesis was that hosiery, lace and all other industries should be regulated by the government so as to maintain a decent living standard for the workers and fair conditions of trade, that British industries must be protected from direct foreign competition and, more particularly, from industrial espionage, migration of skilled workmen to other countries, and export of machinery.
It didn't quite turn out that way. Productivity went up, GDP went up, the standard of living went up, and there was no widespread unemployment or starvation as a result of automatic weaving and knitting machines. Just the opposite, of course: more people were raised out of abject poverty as a result of the disruption as far more jobs were created than destroyed.
Everyone agrees this is the way it worked throughout history regarding technical innovation and disruptive technologies: society is better off.
Yet somehow, AI scares people (most of whom have no understanding of technology and indeed lack the capacity to spell AI). People just don't get what AI is and does. Journalists write about the dangers of AI but they have zero domain knowledge and have even less subject matter expertise.
At its basic level, AI is good for determining "this is a cat" and "that is not a cat" when examining two photographs, such as:
And somehow, this is supposed to lead to massive unemployment?
I don't think AI now can be compared with automation from the past. Those machines could not do everything humans can, AI is going to be able to one day. Stephen Hawking, before he died, made several predictions, one of them being that within 100 years, AI will surpass human intelligence. He said we will just have to "hope their goals are aligned with ours".
Automation of the past took over tasks of laborers. Now we have robots that can detect lung cancer from an x-ray before any human radiologist can spot it. The jobs that are going to be replaced are going to be many and varied, and it won't be as gradual as in the past. The numbers will be much, much greater as well. How many knitters lost their jobs, a few thousand? There are 3.5 million truck drivers in the U.S., how are we replacing that many jobs in a short time period? That doesn't even count other driving jobs such as bus drivers, UPS, etc.
It is also not the case that jobs lost to automation have been made up for. It is not mainly alternative energy sources that killed all the coal mining jobs, it was automation. You could open 10 new coal mines in West Virginia tomorrow, and most of the jobs in them will not require humans.
Even the wealthy know this is inevitable, that's why they are seriously discussing things such as giving people a basic minimum monthly income (I hear $1000 being bandied about most often, but that won't do much to make up for it).
I don't think AI now can be compared with automation from the past.
It can't. That's why the looking-backward crowd is expressing itself in complete irrelevancies. We have at least three global situations of type and scale we've never encountered before; how Ireland responded to the Famine and how the US responded to the Industrial Age are almost meaningless except as lab studies.
Quote:
Even the wealthy know this is inevitable, that's why they are seriously discussing things such as giving people a basic monthly income (I hear $1000 being bandied about most often, but that won't do much to make up for it).
They haven't begun to address the problem; throwing down on GBI in the sense it's been proposed over the last fifty years is a tepid acknowledgement of reality, about like saying it's time to put the cars in the garage because a Cat 5 storm is coming.
We have a global economy based in every respect on individual worker productivity. If you all but remove that from the models... you can't move the pieces around, any more (e.g. impose a wealth tax to pay for GBI), you have to create a completely new economic model.
And AI can do a LOT more than " this is a cat, this is not a cat".
At its most basic level, AI distinguishes between A and B -- or, if you prefer, State A and State B. This can be extremely valuable to mankind, so I don't want to diminish it.
"This mamogram shows evidence of cancer, that one does not."
"This biopsy shows cancerous cells, that one does not."
"These driving conditions dictate a reduction in fuel/air mixture to minimize harmful pollution, that one does not."
"The set of things that have happened in the kitchen in the past 20 minutes dictate a 911 call because an elderly person has appeared to pass out leaving the stove on, while that set of things in that kitchen indicates no cause for alarm."
"The weather conditions and cloud patterns indicate a need to adjust the HVAC in this industrial building, while that set of conditions do not."
All of the above are fundamentally similar to "this is a cat, and that is not a cat." But I don't want to minimize it.
And the accelerating reduction of individual productivity...
Fascinating, uh, alternative fact assumptions.
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