it'll take roughly 1.5 million mature trees to sequester 315,000 metric tons of CO2 over 10 years. The "Billion Tree Tsunami" in Pakistan aimed to plant a billion trees from 2014-2017 and surpassed its goal. Similarly, India set a record in 2016 by planting more than 66 million trees in a single day.
Yeah, tree planting is mostly feel good unsustainable crap. People keep trying to get around this problem without taking a hit to lifestyle, but I don't see how that happens.
There's also a question of how good these plans are for the ecosystem as they tend to plant all the same tree in tight spaces so they wind up competing for resources and driving out other parts of the system.
I think surveys for five years survival are still being done, but an earlier survey by WWF found 70-85% survival rates for earlier stages in the life of the trees [1].
Regarding your point, yes, there is a lot of problems in the project with monocultures being planted, especially comprising non-local ones. This is a complex political problem because you want to incentivize planting, but cost of planting "multi"-cultures is much higher.
Pakistan actually went for Ten Billion trees [1] next. This one is going slower, because of a variety of political and scientific reasons but there is still quite a lot of progress.
I have been using Scala. I have found that it can give you the best of both worlds. You can reason algebraically, and often after a refactor, if it compiles, it works. Type inference and monads works great too. You also get to benefit from being in the java ecosystem. In instances where it gets too esoteric, I can break rules and code more like java. I am curious what others think.
"Prior to the long peace, there’s little question what happens to a country like Venezuela, which is essentially a giant pile of barely guarded wealth: one – or several – of its neighbors would move in, oust the government and seize the territory and its valuable resources (oil, in this case)."
While I don't advocate war and violence, I can't help think that such a hostile takeover of a poorly run country by another better run country can be perceived as creative destruction in capitalism. War is too costly now reassuringly, but the incentive of leaders to keep the country strong, economically as well as militarily, is much less. The fear of being wiped out by a neighbor may have kept leaders in check. Now that fear is gone, and nothing has replaced it yet. The optimist in me hopes that states abandon the pretense of being above markets. The fear we desire in those who run states, the fear that we hope will keep them in check, will be that of losing paying customers, their citizens, to other competitive jurisdictions.
The war has long been internalized in "Banana Republic" or "Resource Cursed" situations with coups. It has the same element of fear of being killed. Of course that also has different definitions of "poorly run" and "strong". "Not funneling enough oil money into the military's pockets." could count as "poorly run" and "military well under control" as "strong".
Dictators tend to have shitty armies because they depend upon buying loyalty and/or setting up self-sabotaging hierarchies beneath them to stay on top. They are good enough to oppress their own populace just fine but tend to get their asses handed to them when they ill-advisedly attempt external use.
His original thesis on Bitcoin as expressed in his NYT article "Why Bitcoin Matters" [1], is still very compelling. His later obsession with shitcoins is quite misguided, I agree, but not enough to compromise all of his credibility. It'll be nice to see a decent critique of his AI position, instead of ad hominem.
His take on Bitcoin is wildly optimistic and many points addressed regarding solutions to BGP and trust on the internet have proven to be completely false, or at best - only true in a frictionless vacuum.
Imagine us humans being merely regression based function approximators, built on a model that has been training, quite inefficiently, for millenia. Many breakthroughs (for example heliocentricism, evolution, and now AI) put us in our place, which is not as glorious as you'd think.
It is also sad that every other specie has already suffered before humans are starting to feel this way. There was massive biodiversity loss on this planet and most of mammalian biomass consists of humans and animals that feed humans. Humans need to retreat. We have enough tools and people improving human lives. We now need more people and tools to improve many other lives and systems on this planet.
Cost of products made solely by machines will approach zero. If machines take all the jobs, humans will live like aristocrats. Imagine telling farmers 200 years ago, that 95% of the humanity won't be farming at some point. Imagine them making bets similar to yours.
Money is just a game coin. The aristocracies need it because they need someone to provide services to them. By creating that bond an economic and currency system has to be created as well. But once they don't need people to provide services, well, they can remove that system too.
That pretty much means the end of everything for ordinary people and the beginning of the "Lord of light". That also means that humans probably won't be able to go through the great filter -- yes I believe it is not a scientific filter, but a social one.
That’s not going to happen overnight. Producers will keep the price the same for a higher profit margins because other things in life still require money.
Labor is not the only requirement for production. Resources will become the limiting factor, and their price will rise above what non-AI-owning people will be able to afford. So back to square one of scarcity.
If AI automates software creation, which automates everybody else's job, why does it follow that a "massive percentage of the economy would be wiped out?" What is so undesirable about productivity going up by a factor of a 100 or a 1000 and everyone living like an aristocrat, because machines do all the work? Why is full employment such an obsession?
Because the benefits of these tools are not distributed equally. The ultra wealthy will become even more wealthy and the unwashed masses will starve.
Of course the ideal outcome is the Star Trek post-scarcity utopia. But humans are not currently incentivized in a way that I can see leading to that outcome in our lifetimes.
Benefits of innovation start with the privileged, but invariably end up benefitting the masses. Cellphones once were once available only to the rich. Poor people have smart phones now.
Many may argue that the science and innovation in the last century was funded by the taxpayers and the government that proportionally taxes the poor more than the rich.
Workers merely made tools to make their own work processes more efficient which was taken by many corporations and applied across the workforce without the payment of proportional savings to the people who invented it.
The mass adoption of technology funds the future research process thus the profit is diverted from the masses directly to benefit and maintain competitive advantage.
The time saved due to technology never did reduce working hours or increase leisure time of the workforce.
Yet healthier foods are now less accessible to the poor. Where once the rich were fat and had rotten teeth from sweets, now the rich have trainers and personal chefs and healthier food. Poorer folks have food deserts and junk calories.
Innovation doesn't always trickle down. Sometimes it works in reverse to exploit the poor and the ignorant.
Having a smartphone is probably not hugely conducive to an increase in quality of health or happiness.
Sounds like OP is worried that they aren’t going to be able to afford a roof over their head. No government seems to be ready to roll out a plan to deal with huge swathes of the populous suddenly being out of a job because their employer wants bigger profits.
I didn't say it would be undesirable! Just that it would completely alter the world in ways that we cannot prepare for on an individual basis.
Ideally, we move to UBI and, as you say, everyone lives like an aristocrat. But we don't get there by trying to hedge against AI taking over our individual jobs.
With our current societal structure, a few people would live like aristocrats guarded with AI weaponry while the rest eke out an existence in shanty towns.
The bottleneck to wealth creation wouldnt be nothing it would be access to natural resources, which is and always has been mediated, ultimately, through violence. Land ownership is mediated by states until they lose their monopoly on violence.
Already the % of wealth that is earned through labor has dropped to record lows. The productivity gains gets swallowed by things like rent, because land has been bottlenecked through excess hoarding.
What happens when labor is commoditized to death and the only value comes from natural resources? Fighting. LOTS of fighting.
> What is so undesirable about productivity going up by a factor of a 100 or a 1000 and everyone living like an aristocrat, because machines do all the work? Why is full employment such an obsession?
Nothing is undesirable about the future you laid out in your comment, except for the fact that it will never ever happen the way you describe (be nice if it did, but I'm not holding my breath). You could have made similar claims about the computer or the internet back in the day, but what we've seen from those technologies is ever increasing concentration of wealth in a few hands, which is what technology does, it centralizes by default. And most human attempts to redistribute wealth on a large scale have been more disastrous than the inequality they were trying to solve.
Food would be so cheap that watching a 15 second ad that played on the disposable e-ink screen that wraps your burger will pay for it.
Note: I don't think this will happen. I think rich people now would rather let people starve so they could save the price of the 15-Second Ad Burger.
We have incentivized sociopaths to run things in the name of efficiency. We will either realize this is a false goal, remove all those people from power and influence, and live in a post scarcity society... Or we will all suffer the consequences.
If everything is automated, that includes the production of whatever goods or services may be advertised. I think that leaves only ideological advertising: theological, political, whatever.
If the food has a meaningful cost, or the adverts has meaningful revenue, then there is meaningful labour to earn money to pay — directly or indirectly — for the food and/or advertising.
Taleb changed his mind on this subject. :) I can see Bitcoin as a "stable" long-term Store of Value. Short-term, it's always volatile. It's not suitable as a Medium of Exchange.
