The Sixth Great Mass Extinction
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@cartman82 Some very good IA would us to drop robots on a planet and use their own resources to build the infrastructure to build more robots and whatever we need.
Maybe 1 million years from now, if we're still around.
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@fbmac Well, you can get your brain cryonically preserved today for only $80,000!
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@blakeyrat said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
I seem to recall mammals did pretty good in that environment.
Lots of life did. But we're doooooooomed.
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@boomzilla said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
@blakeyrat said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
I seem to recall mammals did pretty good in that environment.
Lots of life did. But we're doooooooomed.
...
The mammals were all rodent-sized, with minimal energy needs. There was hardly any competition for food among them. I don't see your kids evolving to be 2 inches long.
And again, the point of the dinosaur CO2 level comment is that we're breaking records and are on our way to Permian levels.
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@boomzilla My objection to the general fuckings-up is not that we're doooooooomed, because of course in the long run we are doomed and there's no getting around that; it's that I'm saddened to think that my kids' kids will be growing up in a world with so much less in it to celebrate compared to the world I grew up in myself. And no, the likelihood of their having extra toys is insufficient compensation.
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@Captain said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
The mammals were all rodent-sized, with minimal energy needs. There was hardly any competition for food among them. I don't see your kids evolving to be 2 inches long.
And again, the point of the dinosaur CO2 level comment is that we're breaking records and are on our way to Permian levels.
Dinosaurs were a lot bigger than 2 inches. You're not being coherent here.
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@boomzilla said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
You're not being coherent here.
You should try to follow the conversation.
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@flabdablet said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
My objection to the general fuckings-up is not that we're doooooooomed, because of course in the long run we are doomed and there's no getting around that;
I totally agree. I contemplate it sometimes and find it very tragic.
@flabdablet said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
it's that I'm saddened to think that my kids' kids will be growing up in a world with so much less in it to celebrate compared to the world I grew up in myself. And no, the likelihood of their having extra toys is insufficient compensation.
Unless the comet comes, I'm not particularly worried about that. At least, not for the reasons mentioned in this topic. As we get richer, we're more interested in and capable of preserving stuff. We just have to get China and Africa up there with us, not pull ourselves down closer to their level.
Anyways, I'll ask @Captain again...what do you think we should do about it?
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@Captain said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
@boomzilla said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
You're not being coherent here.
You should try to follow the conversation.
Look, you're the one making contradictory statements in the same post.
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@boomzilla said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
As we get richer, we're more interested in and capable of preserving stuff
We (by which I mean humanity at large) have never been richer than we are right now. We have also never been fucking everything up at such a frantic pace. I don't share your optimism.
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@flabdablet said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
We have also never been fucking everything up at such a frantic pace. I don't share your optimism.
I don't share your assessment. The environment I live in is a lot nicer than what I grew up in.
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@Captain said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
Yes, but they were also mouse-sized with commensurate energy/nutritional requirements.
maybe you didn't notice the username of the person you're replying to. that's not a problem for him
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@flabdablet said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
First they came for the pandas, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a panda.All the effort we've spent on pandas would be much better spent on a species not so intent on going extinct.
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@xaade said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
All the effort we've spent on pandas would be much better spent on a species not so intent on going extinct.
But they look cute…
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Honestly though. Humans are pretty arrogant thinking that they're somehow removed from nature. It's no different than the actions of a predator over-eating prey, just on a larger scale.
Doesn't make us evil...
One day humans will go extinct, and no life in the universe will care about the millions that Stalin killed.
It'll just look like a berserk wolf asserting pack leader by offing a few wolves.
Our wars will look like two factions of ants fighting on someone's driveway.
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@dkf That's THE reason we give a damn.
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@dkf tell me more of their cuteness.
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@blakeyrat said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
The Americas are no different.
He said "wilderness", not "unmodified". What about the parts of, say, Montana, where there's basically no people, would you not consider wild?
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@blakeyrat said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
Well I guess it's "wilderness", but it's not "untouched wilderness". If you want to be a pedantic dickweed about it.
Since you brought up "untouched" wilderness, you're the one being the dickweed here.
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@blakeyrat said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
Are we gonna be living in motorboats built from freezers?
Naw, man, it'll be all scavenged stuff. Didn't you see Waterworld?
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@dkf said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
Uncertain. We've not yet actually proved that,
Have you compared the relative richness of variety of the panda and human diets? Or the reproductive effectiveness of the two species? I think we have proved it, enough for all intensive porpoises.
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@blakeyrat AI will travel outside the earth and perhaps even between the stars. They can hibernate for few million years, travel to a nearby star system and set up a receiver for their counterparts on earth to upload (latest version of) themselves to. Humans are cursed by their biological heritage, a sag of meat highly energy inefficient and clumsy that is bound not to travel with the speed of light.
But our AI offspring may one day surpass us, and I do not begrudge them if they extinguish us if we do not eradicate ourselves. Just I hope we reach the level of AI that is self-sustainable before we perish.
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@dse said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
Humans are cursed by their biological heritage, a sag of meat highly energy inefficient
This is actually exactly backwards.
Show me a proposed electronic neural network of comparable complexity to the human brain that doesn't consume at least three orders of magnitude more power and I'll revise that opinion.
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@flabdablet And exactly why do I need the wisdom teeth, or the appendix, or sex for reproduction?
And why do you think neural network is even necessarily the best solution? Plus, computers are much much faster and more precise, which makes them incomparable to the human brain, there is always compromises to be made in the engineering.
Yes our brain has been our most prominent evolutionary advantage, but so has been long distance running in the hot weather. Only in the last 10000 years or so we have found a new usecase for our brain, we are pretty good at understanding 3D geometry and have a good GPU that helped us in the forest but when it comes to the abstract math well it takes too much power, so much so that it is comparable to the physical exercise, math is tiring.
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@FrostCat said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
Have you compared the relative richness of variety of the panda and human diets? Or the reproductive effectiveness of the two species? I think we have proved it, enough for all intensive porpoises.
I understand your point, but would point out that we don't actually know this, and so merely believe (with some justification, to be fair) that it is true. We appear to be better adapted to life on Earth at the moment than pandas, but adaptation is always a local effect — local in both time and space — and when the environment changes, what was well-adapted can become very ill-adapted or vice versa. That's pure standard evolutionary theory, and common sense too.
I suspect that the main threats to humanity are that we have long childhoods and large energy-hungry brains. Will our smarts allow us to change our behaviours fast enough? Total open question…
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@dse said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
the appendix
Has been found to be far from useless, and in fact plays a role in the immune system as well as helping maintain gut flora:
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@dse said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
why do you think neural network is even necessarily the best solution?
Oh, you're going to make this easy? Great. Show me any proposed electronic substrate for subjective experience that doesn't consume at least three orders of magnitude more power than a human body per consciousness and I'll revise that opinion.
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@dse said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
And exactly why do I need the wisdom teeth
I'll let you have that one.
or the appendix
Not need per se, but it's now believed to perform a minor function helping to repopulate your gut bacteria after illness, or something along those lines. We didn't notice for a long time that it was doing anything useful because most appendectomies are performed in the developed world where people have good sanitation and yoghurt.
or sex for reproduction?
Best solution we've got for testing new combinations of genes if you're not small enough to just swap them with an adjacent organism like bacteria do.
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@dkf said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
We appear to be better adapted to life on Earth at the moment than pandas, but adaptation is always a local effect — local in both time and space — and when the environment changes, what was well-adapted can become very ill-adapted or vice versa. That's pure standard evolutionary theory, and common sense too.
You seem to be arguing @FrostCat's case here.
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@boomzilla said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
You seem to be arguing @FrostCat's case here.
I'm not exactly arguing for or against him. More crosswise I guess…?
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Humans are about ~100 W, and smartphones don't pull nearly that much power. Between this and alphago, the dominion of the wet brains is coming to an end.
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@AyGeePlus Yawn. Wake me up when any electronic device anywhere shows any sign whatsoever of displaying anything even vaguely resembling sentience while consuming under a hundred kilowatts. Because until then, transhumanist handwaving about "our AI offspring" is just another exercise in wishful thinking and technological idolatry.
There is no solution to the problem of relentless human destruction of our own living spaces that doesn't require acknowledging and accepting our status as embodied biological beings first and minds second. We are, and for the foreseeable future will remain, components of the Earth's ecology rather than masters or even stewards of it. Science fiction escapist fantasies are just that: fantasies. Unless we put a voluntary brake on our own reproduction rate, and get serious about ceasing to out-compete every other living thing on the planet for living space, we will eventually lay waste to the whole thing and crash our civilizations.
Ejecting a few hardy souls beyond the atmosphere in order to establish extraterrestrial colonies will do fuck-all to solve that problem. There is no easier place for human beings to live than the planet we evolved on; if we manage to fuck this one up, why would anybody imagine insignificant numbers of us would do better in far harsher conditions elsewhere?
Imagination and "vision" are all very well, but too often they run aground on a complete failure to understand scale.
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Oh, I don't actually disagree with you at all. I'm just really excited about pocket fritz!
It's a big deal because it shows that we can build computers better and more efficient than us at computational tasks using general-purpose hardware. That was not a certainty before, given the exceptional efficiency of the human brain.
Sentience is hard, and probably pointless. Why bother? Seriously, why?
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@AyGeePlus said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
Seriously, why?
There is no shortage of fantasists who believe with complete seriousness not only that uploading themselves to the cloud will be a thing within any of our lifetimes, but that mass adoption of this practice represents humanity's best and only hope of averting civil collapse due to ecological degradation.
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@AyGeePlus said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
it shows that we can build computers better and more efficient than us at computational tasks
That's been true since we started tying knots in things and making marks instead of relying on our own short-term memory to help us with arithmetic.
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@flabdablet I'd argue that knots and sticks are special-purpose hardware.
I don't think we'll ever upload ourselves to the cloud. It's a bit pointless to do so, honestly. You have perfectly good hardware where you are. The boundaries between intuitive UI and the brain will dissolve, given how easy it is to get brains to talk to computers, and we'll end up with a bunch of extra senses.
Although who knows, maybe we'll all revert to fucking around naked in an idyllic paradise managed by computers keeping an eye on our dopamine levels.
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@flabdablet said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
Unless we put a voluntary brake on our own reproduction rate
Now you just sound racist to anyone who is familiar with current demographic trends.
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@AyGeePlus said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
It's a big deal because it shows that we can build computers better and more efficient than us at computational tasks using general-purpose hardware.
Well, yes, but "computational tasks" is a relatively small domain compared to actual animal intelligence, and the gap between the two is yuuuuge.
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@dse said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
And exactly why do I need the wisdom teeth
I never had wisdom teeth. Don't know why you have them. Clearly you have not evolved enough yet.
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@darkmatter said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
Clearly you have not evolved enough yet.
Or maybe you haven't. We don't always know which way the arrow of evolution points…
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@darkmatter said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
@dse said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
And exactly why do I need the wisdom teeth
I never had wisdom teeth. Don't know why you have them. Clearly you have not evolved enough yet.
I was born without my 2nd bicuspids. I win.
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@AyGeePlus said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
Sentience is hard, and probably pointless. Why bother? Seriously, why?
Ah; A Riverworld reader.
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@darkmatter said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
I never had wisdom teeth. Don't know why you have them. Clearly you have not evolved enough yet.
Even worse! I have sharp canine teeth, and can move my ears
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@boomzilla said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
@flabdablet said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
Unless we put a voluntary brake on our own reproduction rate
Now you just sound racist to anyone who is familiar with current demographic trends.
How so? If the aim is to curb the rate at which we're trashing our living spaces, then the population sizes in most urgent need of reining in are those of the industrialized countries where most of the resource consumption happens. Yes, those are already the countries with the lowest reproduction rates on the planet. In my view they're not yet low enough.
Also note that I do not and never would advocate for any person to exercise control over the reproduction of another. This needs to be a collective decision emerging from billions of informed individual choices, not a collective decision imposed by the powerful upon those less so.
Personal reproduction is a blinding overwhelming priority for most people, so I have no confidence whatsoever that any such emergent decision is likely to eventuate; hence my lack of optimism.
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@AyGeePlus said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
I'd argue that knots and sticks are special-purpose hardware
/me uses special-purpose computing hardware to tie up @AyGeePlus and deliver a switching
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@flabdablet said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
This needs to be a collective decision emerging from billions of informed individual choices, not a collective decision imposed by the powerful upon those less so.
Educate them, they will know they can send one kid to college (maybe) but have multiple kids and they end up flipping burgers and go to Trump rallies and such
@flabdablet said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
the population sizes in most urgent need of reining in are those of the industrialized countries where most of the resource consumption happens.
It is on a different scale, and correlates well with being poor and uneducated:
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@flabdablet said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
Yes, those are already the countries with the lowest reproduction rates on the planet. In my view they're not yet low enough.
If they'd rather die, then they had better do it and decrease the surplus population.
(Note: speaker never volunteers themselves)
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@flabdablet said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
If the aim is to curb the rate at which we're trashing our living spaces, then the population sizes in most urgent need of reining in are those of the industrialized countries where most of the resource consumption happens. Yes, those are already the countries with the lowest reproduction rates on the planet.
I dunno, things like the continued desertification of Africa and the subsequent migration into Europe seem to say otherwise.
@flabdablet said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
Also note that I do not and never would advocate for any person to exercise control over the reproduction of another
I don't believe that. This was more an application of Alinsky's Rule #4 on my part.
@flabdablet said in The Sixth Great Mass Extinction:
This needs to be a collective decision emerging from billions of informed individual choices, not a collective decision imposed by the powerful upon those less so.
And it certainly seems that once people get out of old agrarian lifestyles those choices change very drastically.
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And it certainly seems that once people get out of old agrarian lifestyles those choices change very drastically.
IRRS that it's a function of the value of labor. If everyone farms, kids can also farm, more kids more better. If few people farm and use tractors and shit, kids can't contribute economically without an education, few kids more school.
More 'developed' nations offload pointless manual labor an 8 year old can do onto machines.