This is such ridiculous alarmism. This is one of the worst case predictions and is unlikely to occur.
Most likely you'll see gradual migrations over the next 100 or so years away from coastal areas, probably not too much larger than typical migrant and infrastructure turnover.
Please stop relying on journalism to make your decisions regarding climate change. It's pure dogma by completely ascientific liberal arts majors.
If you read the IPCC reports yourself (they're huge but you can read the introductory summaries) they're much less certain about the future. Meanwhile alarmism has a real cost now, if you foolishly allow it to influence policy.
And on the subject of habitability, why is it that media rarely, if ever, runs stories regarding the increase in arable land that comes with thawing permafrost? How much habitable land will be gained from climate change?
And just to emphasize the short sightedness of "banning" fossil fuels as you originally proposed, good luck getting food and medical equipment (and pretty much anything else) to the hundreds of millions of people living in cities without diesel for trucks.
I didn’t propose banning anything. At most, my plan would crank up the cost of gas or reduce the rate at which new cars entered the market.
Also, the “ridiculous alarmism” over the migrations and positive emission loops is already playing out. It was 100F in parts of the Arctic circle earlier this month, and the permafrost fires from last year survived the winter. 100’s of millions will he starving by the end of this year due to crop failures (COVID will more than double that due to economic disruptions).
The IPCC has always been very conservative with their projections. So far, their predictions have been wildly
optimistic.
Not all animal species carry the same risk. This isn't about privilege - or at least not anymore. Mainland Chinese learned to eat anything and everything that moved after food shortages and famines caused by e.g. the four pests and such. This is cultural. as are the unsanitary conditions at wet markets, and completely unscientific "traditional medicine" and the common notion that live beings taste better if tortured before death.
Stop bending over backwards to excuse antisocial behavior. Not all cultural practices are positive and need to be celebrated.
> Mainland Chinese learned to eat anything and everything that moved
That's an incredibly broad brush you're painting with there. China has as much culinary diversity as geographic regions with smaller countries. If you throw it all in one pot, you might end up with "anything and everything", but almost nobody would eat all that.
If it looks as if there was such a thing as "Chinese food", then only because the majority of early Chinese immigrants to North America came from only four counties in Guangdong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siyi , establishing a standard for Chinese restaurants that later ones had to follow to seem "authentic".
"Weird" food is generally confined to regional delicacies. E.g. 土笋冻 (sipunculid worm jelly) is pretty much only made in Quanzhou in Fujian, even though the worms it's made of can be found elsewhere. (The Chinese Wikipedia article mentions they actually have to import them now because the local stock suffered from pollution.) https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%9C%9F%E7%AC%8B%E5%86%BB
I had no idea that all those stereotypes about moonshine turning people blind and/or crazy were real - I guess methanol alcohol was a common enough contaminant in bootleg alcohol during prohibition. And wherever they make moonshine these days, though I imagine even backwoods people are wiser these days.
Distillation is a way for farmers to transform crops into a denser form with arbitrary shelf life. This means that if they think local spot markets are offering a raw deal, they have the options of both temporal and spatial arbitrage.
In my country, people with stills on trailers often come around to villages to help the farmers with excess crops, and home distillation is legal. I haven't heard of problems with CH₃OH.
Even in russia distillation has been legal for all of this century. I would not be surprised if a fair amount of the booze mentioned in "Выпил С2H5OH / Сел на «Ниву» Ростсельмаш" was homemade. (who needs a fancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_currency when one can express appreciation for favours in bottles?)
For that matter, in china, 白酒 is discouraged but legal.
Anyone know what the north korean line may be? If they're a repressive state on the order of iran or the soviet union, they might ban home distillation.
>In places such as Siberia, a hotter climate can have devastating effects, not just on the local wildlife and people who live there, but also on the world’s climate system as a whole, for example through thawing permafrost, reduced snow cover and melting ice.
My biggest issue with climate alarmism is that sources universally consider only the negative outcomes of climate change. Thawing permafrost also opens up an enormous amount of arable and habitable land. Some species will benefit from warmer temperatures and extended ranges (and that's not just insects).
Not to mention that neither the change or the rate is unprecedented according to geologic data.
The world is very unlikely to end, human migration and economic impact will be gradual (≈100) years, and people need to consider that mitigation of climate change at this point is also not "free" when they ask people to go vegan (yeah, right).
How many of them even realize that their worldview is potentially being shaped by the moderation teams of the tech they consume? And what alternatives exist to the major platforms (Facebook, reddit, etc)?
Perhaps you meant this hyperbolically but I do not believe it to be an exaggeration.
>What specifically makes them captive
They are captive because of a combination of their ignorance and the network effect. If all of your friends are on Facebook for example you'll have to leave them behind if you delete your account.
In fact, if your argument is "most people are ignorant" it's an argument in favor of not letting their primary source of news be dominated by wealth and network effects instead of grounding in at least some objective reality (imperfect though it may be).
People who want "the real truth" have few impediments to seeking it out on the modern Internet. People who don't want to do their own fact-checking are better served by somebody doing it (and then we can keep a close eye on the watchmen).
To all of the people who feel similarly, and have problems ruminating:
Try thinking in terms of probabilities - that's the real way out, to recognize that all of the negative scenarios you keep replaying in your head are very unlikely to happen at all.
Once you realize that much it might get easier to brush these thoughts aside sooner.
This was hilarious, but it brings up a serious concern: if you train your AI on a bunch of shallow, clickbaity content from the internet, you're going to get shallow, clickbaity output, like much of the presentation - in other words this isn't just a lack of human knowledge to fill in gaps, the training data sucks because the internet is full of high level garbage dumbed down for clicks.
I believe it may well be possible to train GPT3 to write more accurate technical content with the existing tech and infrastructure, except we don't have a large enough body of technical content outside of academic papers, which isn't the kind of training data you want if your goal is to write prose.
In many ways, ML as it evolves and becomes ubiquitous will eventually become a dark window into the triviality of the average human's existence.
You can prompt GPT-3 for different levels of politeness. It's actually necessary, to make sure the generations are not going to be NSFW. In the same way I think it can switch from bullshit to serious mode, you just need to mention that the article appears in a prestigious publication or something.
The prompts don't matter if the training data isn't up to par - more importantly I believe the nature of the training is such that the weight activations for the various prompts are unlikely to be independent.
In other words if 20% of your training data is scientific literature, even with appropriate disambiguating prompts the output will still be heavily influenced by the other 80% of your training data.
When you use GPT-3 to generate outputs, you're actually sampling from a learned subset of a super complex, super high dimensional space - and without human knowledge all the neural networks are doing is translating priors (input prompt) into points in the learned space. And the learned space is some complex topology of points between which the net interpolates - it's extremely difficult with current tech to control the shape of this learned space and that shape is influenced by all training data under a scheme like GPT-*.
After playing with AiDungeon I think you are right about the data not being up to par. It fails more frequently than it appears in the news. Has some brilliant moments too.
For example, when prompted to talk about deep learning it generated a nonsense paragraph. This is not unexpected, but when it generates news or dialogue it can be coherent on much larger pieces of text. Clearly shows it didn't read too much on the topic.
I can hardly make it do any math. Even simple things like 11+22= don't work. I expect the next 10x scale up will fill most of these holes, especially if they improve the training corpus quality and breadth.
One obvious example would be to fully automate social engineering email scams. Imagine how much disruption it would cause if spearphishing became as common as robocalls have become post-automation.
If it became that common it would quickly cease to be that effective. Spearfishing works because it's rare, so it doesn't automatically set off your bullshit detector. Most people don't fall for "cheap vi@gra" emails anymore.
Social engineering in general is effective because it's rare enough that people don't feel the need to develop policies and strategies for preventing it.
Sure, but there's no reason to expect the required strategies to be non-disruptive. It's now impossible for anyone not on my contact list to call me, because I won't pick up or listen to their messages - it'd be a tragedy if email became similarly locked down.
