This would certainly appear to be one of the dynamics of cable news, yes.
If you mostly seek out information that supports what you already believe, you're doing knowledge wrong.
When have we seen this rate of change in CO2 concentrations in the geological record in this short period of time? Also, would you be willing to cite scientific evidence that renewable energy does literally one thousand times the damage of fossil fuels?
Well, that's kind of my point in my original note.
I don’t think I missed this point? I was talking about the electrical generation and transmission infrastructure.
Science-fiction has predicted a lot of technologies that might come to pass, yes. But I’d argue they didn’t predict the broader social and political dynamics that would come as a result of them. So while say, you could argue Jerry Pournelle predicted the smartphone in his fiction (which he called “pocket computers”), he didn’t predict the rise of say, social media and the economic and cultural impacts of mobile computing. So I’d say, yes and no.
(AI alone represents a likely series of threshold effects for which predictions about literally anything should be covered in a heap of salt)
People underestimate the importance of threshold effects in complex systems like the economy, culture and society at large. Most confident predictions about the future hold way too many variables constant over time, which leads to faulty predictions with high confidence.
Japan is such a beautiful country. I am going to come back here more.
To be clear: I think decentralized protocols and a decentralized approach is critical to a positive future, given the risks of concentrated power over information. Don’t get me wrong. I just think the problem can’t be reduced to along a simplistic systemic axis like this. The risks are multivariate, and the potential for harm is theoretically unbounded.
There are externality risks associated with it — I can advertently or inadvertently bring you harm by effects that stem from the technology — whether or not you are party to any transaction or relationship with the creation or use thereof.
There is a tendency for things to become more efficient over time through pure economic forces, though. Although, there has been evidence where regulation has certainly accelerated it. Examples I guess being fuel efficiency in cars, and bans on incandescent lighting.
Arguing EVs are "uninventing" the automobile is also just the No True Scotsman fallacy, writ large.
The internet was developed as a U.S. military project originally, and then further developed by taxpayer-funded universities, and the web was created by a guy on the taxpayer's dime -- Tim Berners-Lee -- at CERN.
Arguing a product is only legitimate if it comes about by purely private market forces is the height of ideological nonsense.
I think we don't know what we don't know. It's not hard to imagine scenarios why which AI could be weaponized in a winner-take-all scenario.
I've noticed some in this corner of the internet tend to take the point of view that decentralized protocols are the ultimate defense against these downsides, and I find that disturbingly naive. I do not share the view that the nation state is now effectively obsolete and we should accede to purely bottoms up, decentralized and communitarian approaches to such an asymmetric threat.
I tend to take the point of view that the dangers will very much manifest in the physical realm, and sometime in the next decade or two, we will likely touch the fire. The question is whether we will be able to put that fire out or not. I don't know how to quantify the risks there.
High variance. Extreme opportunity. Extreme danger.
Yeah. This sort of thinking also rears its head in sex preference for children -- where male children are seen as better economically for the family.
The way I think about it, and this might be over-simplified, is that higher relative wealth tends to lower time preferences, and that crowds out high time preference things -- which having children is.
I know these correlations exist. But I don't have a deep understanding of the subject. I am interested in it, though.
I think that might be true for some people. But I think the real paradox comes from the fact that with higher relative wealth, our time preference as a civilization shifts dramatically. This is why there is an inverse correlation between birth rate and relative purchasing power.
It's a real conundrum, I think.
I don't think I'd call it misanthropy, even though I agree it has that effect. I think people are deeply confused. Morally and intellectually.