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weweweoo commented on Peak population may be coming sooner than we think   ft.com/content/3862923c-f... · Posted by u/johntfella
TheOtherHobbes · a year ago
Many populated areas are about to become uninhabitable, and transport and supply chain infrastructure in and around them will be permanently broken.

Rising sea levels are much less of a problem than a constant series of rain bombs, storms, droughts, and fires.

When you get a Milton and/or a Helene every few years - or every year, or more than once a year - there's no practical way to rebuild, and insurance will be a distant memory.

The only reason most people don't know this is because extreme weather events around the world aren't making the news unless they're local-ish.

Hardly anyone in the US has heard about Acapulco after Otis, or the recent rain bomb storms in France, Spain, and Italy, or the flooding in Iran, or the fact that large areas of arable land in the UK are waterlogged and farmers are promising significantly smaller crop yields.

weweweoo · a year ago
What I'm most worried about is how farming will adapt. Either food production needs to shift to geograhically new areas, or we'll need massive storm-proof greenhouses where hostile weather conditions don't matter. Large scale desalination of seawater will be likely needed too.

Given enough money, anything is possible of course. In my country we grow things like cucumber and tomatoes during winter in heated greenhouses with artificial light, even though it's dark and freezing outside. They just cost 2-3x more than same stuff produced further south.

weweweoo commented on Peak population may be coming sooner than we think   ft.com/content/3862923c-f... · Posted by u/johntfella
ThinkBeat · a year ago
Combine this with the current climate change model that estimate 14.5 million¹ will die as a consequence we can expect significant population reduction.

Sadly our western capitalist societies and probably the rest as well will collapse.

Our present arrangement is based on growth. As the population declines so does growth potential. (though that requires the market to be already saturated. If you are a new company creating a new widget that people want you will naturally see growth. If you are Apple much less so).

https://www.weforum.org/publications/quantifying-the-impact-...

weweweoo · a year ago
I believe most of the misery could be still avoided with massive amount of investment into green technology, AI and robotics to take care of the old and so on. But if Americans continue to elect people who hate science and have ideological love for fossil fuels, then we're probably doomed indeed.
weweweoo commented on Computer use, a new Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Claude 3.5 Haiku   anthropic.com/news/3-5-mo... · Posted by u/weirdcat
bamboozled · a year ago
This is because it will be absolutely catastrophic economically when the majority of high paying jobs can be automated and owned by a few billionaires. Then what will go along with this catastrophe will be all the service people who had jobs to support the people with high paid jobs, they're fucked too. People don't want to have to face that.

We'd be losing access to food, shelter, insurance, purpose. I can't blame people for at least telling themselves some coping story.

It's going to be absolutely ruinous for many people. So what else should they do, admit they're fucked? I know we like to always be cold rational engineers on this forum, but shit looks pretty bleak in the short term if this goal of automating everyone's work comes true and there are basically zero social safety nets to deal with it.

I live abroad and my visa is tied to my job, so not only would losing my job be ruinous financially, it will likely mean deportation too as there will be no other job for me to turn to for renewal.

weweweoo · a year ago
If most people are unemployed, modern capitalism as we know it will collapse. I'm not sure that's in the interests of the billionaires. Perhaps some kind of a social safety net will be implemented.

But I do agree, there is no reason to be enthusiastic about any progress in AI, when the goal is simply automating people's jobs away.

weweweoo commented on Computer use, a new Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Claude 3.5 Haiku   anthropic.com/news/3-5-mo... · Posted by u/weirdcat
snowe2010 · a year ago
Defining AGI as “can reason about 5MLOC” is ridiculous. When do the goal posts stop moving? When a computer can solve time travel? Babies have behavior all the time that is no more differentiable from what an LLM does on a normal basis (including terrible logic and hallucinations).

The majority of people on the planet can barely reason about how any given politician will affect them, even when there’s a billion resources out there telling them exactly that. No reasonable human would ever define AGI as having anything to do with coding at all, since that’s not even “general intelligence”… it’s learned facts and logic.

weweweoo · a year ago
Babies can at least manipulate the physical world. Large language model can never be defined as AGI until it can control a general purpose robot, similar to how human brain controls our body's motor functions.
weweweoo commented on Math is still catching up to the genius of Ramanujan   quantamagazine.org/sriniv... · Posted by u/philiplu
FeepingCreature · a year ago
I mean, just as a counter-note: I utterly hated every second of a multitude of subjects, and indeed now I am 37 and I never needed them and was entirely correct about what I would require later.
weweweoo · a year ago
Personally I loved history, social science and geography, but none of that has been useful in working life. Being good at mathematics is prerequisite for nearly all well-paying jobs, humanities are not of much use except for being able to write and read well.
weweweoo commented on Antidemocratic, Racist, and Antisemitic Sentiments in Postwar West Germany   cambridge.org/core/journa... · Posted by u/Traces
weweweoo · a year ago
Obviously extremist attitudes don't disappear overnight when a regime promoting them disappears. Still, I would prefer to see a comparison to other parts of the world. Were antidemocratic, racist and antisemitic attitudes more common in postwar West Germany compared to other countries?

What is particularly lacking in research is perspectives from countries beyond Western world. Humankind's history is full of racism and xenophobia everywhere, but most research has a Western perspective.

weweweoo commented on Why wordfreq will not be updated   github.com/rspeer/wordfre... · Posted by u/tomthe
weweweoo · a year ago
Yeah, I'm no fan of Musk or Trump, but I think Twitter always was a spam-infested, hateful cesspool where people with online-addiction yelled at each other. There was nothing for Musk to ruin, because the whole concept was rotten from the start. Allowing only short messages doesn't promote intelligent discussion, it does the opposite.
weweweoo commented on Boeing workers vote to strike   washingtonpost.com/busine... · Posted by u/isaacfrond
weweweoo · a year ago
Yes, firing ordinary workers and moving production elsewhere is definitely going to fix bad management and rotten company culture on top level.

Boeing management created the 737MAX fiasco and killed those people.

weweweoo commented on Learning to Reason with LLMs   openai.com/index/learning... · Posted by u/fofoz
pid-1 · a year ago
Why can't medical doctors be automated?
weweweoo · a year ago
Mainly the various physical operations many of them perform on daily basis (due to limitations of robotics), plus liability issues in case things go wrong and somebody dies. And finally, huge demand due to aging population worldwide.

I do believe some parts of their jobs will be automated, but not enough (especially with growing demand) to really hurt career prospects. Even for those parts, it will take a long a while due to the regulated nature of the sector.

weweweoo commented on Learning to Reason with LLMs   openai.com/index/learning... · Posted by u/fofoz
MattDaEskimo · a year ago
Most of these posts are from romantics.

Software engineering will be a profession of the past, similar to how industrial jobs hardly exist.

If you have a strong intuition with software & programming you may want to shift towards applying AI into already existing solutions.

weweweoo · a year ago
The question is, why wouldn't nearly all other white collar jobs be professions of the past as well? Does the average MBA or whatever possess some unique knowledge that you couldn't generate with an LLM fed with company data? What is the alternative career path?

I think software engineers who also understand business may yet have an advantage over pure business people, who don't understand technology. They should be able to tell AI what to do, and evaluate the outcome. Of course "coders" who simply produce code from pre-defined requirements will probably not have a good career.

u/weweweoo

KarmaCake day143January 12, 2024View Original