I think the real problem would be ecosystem collapse.
Ecosystems evolve as complex, interdependent systems with nonlinearities. What happens when you kill off 50% of pollinators in a single instant? 50% of plankton? 50% of grasses? The problem with nonlinear systems is that killing off half of A and half of B won’t have a linear effect if the relationship depends on having minimum levels of A. Assume it’s a random function such that we kill off half of all plants and on top of that half of all rhizobium bacteria which fix nitrogen for many plant species. Now we’re killing off potentially all plants that depend on having a stable population of rhizobium bacteria, which will have a cascading effect throughout the already devastated ecosystem. It’s all about tipping points and sigmoid curves and such.
The truth is that it was a completely stupid idea, and it was what finally broke my love of the marvel franchise. Either you have runaway ecosystem collapses, or the populations will simply return back to their original levels to hit their ecological carrying capacities again. Kill off half of termites, and you’ll probably be back to the same level of termites in a decade or less. Even with people (using the word inclusively across all technological species), you’d have a population surge that within less than a century or so would be brought back to carrying capacities. Populations self-regulate via interaction with their ecosystems. You’re either going to end up with 100% extinctions or system recovery to current levels within a very brief period via normal reproduction and evolutionary dynamics.
It was a massive effort undertaken by an immortal and massively intelligent person that is inherently flawed because the marvel writers apparently never took Biology 101-102. I’m not saying it was GoT season 8 levels of bad, but after watching those last couple of movies I not only never rewatched them, but I checked out of the mcu pretty much entirely after having rewatched the previous movies multiple times each.
My problem isn’t that he’s a Mad Titan, but that the plot makes Ready Player One look like Les Miserables. It’s basically a concept script you’d expect to see coming out from the writer pool from 30 Rock where Tracy Jordan has a six armed alien outfit.
We all know GoT died the death it did because they had absolutely no idea how to wrap it up and just wanted to be done with it. The mcu money should have been more than enough to do a proper job with transitioning the storyline, but they felt the need to do something blockbusting with it. I would rather have had a Watchmen style conclusion where some people move into retirement homes while the next generation comes forward, but their need to go over the top just turned it into a ludicrous script.
I really don’t care that much. I was getting a bit tired of the franchise anyway (although the new GotG was pretty great), but it always kind of sucks when you can tell that the creatives involved just don’t care anymore. Contrast that with something like the final episode of MASH.
I’d like to offer a different perspective. I’m a grey beard who remembers the AI Winter, when the term had so over promised and under delivered (think expert systems and some of the work of Minsky) that using the term was a guarantee your project would not be funded. That’s when the terms like “machine learning” and “intelligent systems” started to come into fashion.
The best quote I can recall on AI ran along the lines of “AI is no more artificial intelligence than airplanes are doing artificial flight.” We do not have a general AI yet, and if Commander Data is your minimum bar for what constitutes AI, you’re absolutely right, and you can define it however you please.
What we do have are complex adaptive systems capable of learning and problem solving in complex problem spaces. Some are motivated by biological models, some are purely mathematical, and some are a mishmash of both. Some of them are complex enough that we’re still trying to figure out how they work.
And, yes, we have reached another peak in the AI hype - you’re certainly not wrong there. But what do you call a robot that teaches itself how to walk, like they were doing 20 years ago at MIT? That’s intelligence, in my book.
My point is that intelligence - biological or artificial - exists on a continuum. It’s not a Boolean property a system either has or doesn’t have. We wouldn’t call a dog unintelligent because it can’t play chess, or a human unintelligent because they never learned calculus. Are viruses intelligent? That’s kind of a grey area that I could argue from either side. But I believe that Daniel Dennett argued that we could consider a paramecium intelligent. Iirc, he even used it to illustrate “free will,” although I completely reject that interpretation. But it does have behaviors that it learned over evolutionary time, and so in that sense we could say it exhibits intelligence. On the other hand, if you’re going to use Richard Feynman as your definition of intelligence, then most of us are going to be in trouble.
I think we’re misaligned on two things. First, I’m not saying doing something quicker than a human can is what comprises “intelligence.” There’s an uncountable number of things that can do some function faster than a human brain, including components of human physiology.
My point is that intelligence as I define it involves adaptation for problem solving on the part of a complex system in a complex environment. The speed isn’t really relevant, although it’s obviously an important factor in artificial intelligence, which has practical and economic incentives.
So I again return to my question of whether we consider a dog or a dolphin to be “intelligent,” or whether only humans are intelligent. If it’s the latter, then we need to be much more specific than I’ve been in my definition.
Got it. As someone who has developed computational models of complex biological systems, I’d like to know specifically what you believe the differences to be.
Okay, I think I understand where we disagree. There isn’t a “why” either in biology or in the types of AI I’m talking about. In a more removed sense, a CS team at MIT said “I want this robot to walk. Let’s try letting it learn by sensor feedback” whereas in the biological case we have systems that say “Everyone who can’t walk will die, so use sensor feedback.”
But going further - do you think a gazelle isn’t weighing risks while grazing? Do you think the complex behaviors of an ant colony isn’t weighing risks when deciding to migrate or to send off additional colonies? They’re indistinguishable mathematically - it’s just that one is learning evolutionarily and the other, at least theoretically, is able to learn theoretically.
Is the goal of reproductive survival not externally imposed? I can’t think of any example of something more externally imposed, in all honesty. I as a computer scientist might want to write a chatbot that can carry on a conversation, but I, as a human, also need to learn how to carry on a conversation. Can we honestly say that the latter is self-directed when all of society is dictating how and why it needs to occur?
Things like risk assessment are already well mathematically characterized. The adaptive processes we write to learn and adapt to these environmental factors are directly analogous to what’s happening in neurons and genes. I’m really just not seeing the distinction.
Hello, I work with numerous humans. Navigating their emotionality is quite haphazardous at times, and today I have seemingly transgressed on my colleague “Mike”....
The correct procedure if you thought the experiment posed an imminent danger to the crew would have been to erect a force field around the container until any ill effects could be scientifically determined.
You also violated Starfleet protocols which require us to not interfere with developing cultures.
Transporting the container to the medical bay or science lab would permit the use of force fields whose emitters can be highly focused, permitting containment of the container in question without interfering with the lunches of you or your other crewmates. I’m not sure what emitter configurations are available in your mess hall, but the labs clearly are able to handle such and do so regularly.
We also have learned through unfortunate and perhaps overly-repeated experiences to not make assumptions about unknown cultures. I can’t even recall the number of captain’s logs I’ve read where little blinking lights or some weird rock thing or glowing space object turned out to be intelligent.
I think you are required to document the incident and report it to your commanding officer.
Yes. This is actually how humans work. We are not only social animals, but eusocial - similar to bees and ants. We are unique among primates in that regard, and one of only a few species of mammals that gets that designation (the other two being mole rats).
Both the title and the text of this article are painting with far too broad of a brush.
The evidence, from the remains of 24 individuals from two burial sites in the Peruvian Andes dating to between 9,000 and 6,500 years ago, suggests that wild potatoes and other root vegetables may have been a dominant source of nutrition before the shift to an agricultural lifestyle.
This was one study done on the remains of 24 people from one place. It’s only towards the last paragraphs that the author points that out, and even then it’s both soft-pedaled and linked in with western male biases.
While we still have a lot to learn about the vast varieties of human civilizations from 10k years ago, and while there are always massive cultural biases that need to be criticized and overcome, this is an example of the worst of scientific journalism. They take what’s an interesting study in a very narrow niche field, and instead of communicating it as such or saying how the work could be expanded, they write about it as if the author has managed to flip archeology on its head.
Just for starters, there’s almost never a single paper that changes everything. Science is a process of incremental progress with plenty of false starts and which undergoes constant revision. There’s a reason why it takes decades for a Nobel prize to be awarded - and those researchers are the ones who define and revolutionize their fields. The first author on this paper is a PhD student. I have no reason to question the soundness of their work, but the enthusiasm of the Guardian author (and the student’s advisor) is in excess of the meaningfulness of the study in a way that is frankly gravely concerning.
Some societies were primarily hunters. Some were gatherers. Many never became agricultural societies. Many did. Rather than throwing out every anthropology textbook because of a single paper written by a student from the University of Wyoming based on an analysis of 24 remains from a specific region of the Andes, it would be better to say “Hmm, that’s interesting - I wonder if that applied more broadly to the region,” or even “I wonder how many other regions depended largely on wild tubers.”
For better and for worse, humans (and I mean that term to be inclusive of species other than H sapiens as well) populated almost every ecosystem across the planet. They hunted and gathered and planted and raised livestock. There are fascinating interactions between the modes of subsistence of a culture and cultural norms from family relations to trade and war. In many cases the ecosystems they lived in don’t resemble what we see in those regions today, from weather patterns to flora and fauna. There’s less than no reason to think that populations living in wildly different ecosystems would resemble one another - they simply did not.
I’m very happy that these folks ate a lot of potatoes, and I agree with the more general observation that conventional wisdom is mostly wrong about many things, ranging from evolutionary biology to theoretical physics. I just wouldn’t ride too far on this particular horse.
If this is you playing Devil’s Advocate, then I have to voice my concern that the Devil has retained a lawyer that makes Trump’s attorneys look competent by comparison.
The crime is the clearly weighted d20 he’s going to try to bring to the game on Friday night claiming he only wants to use his own dice for his character.
Except it’s more intense, with older parts of the nervous system getting mis-developed.
I agree with pretty much everything you said, but I’m confused by what you’re referring to here. If you mean that the parts of the brain that develop in older children and young adults (eg the frontal cortex and prefrontal cortex) get maldeveloped, then I agree with you. If you additionally mean that this has deleterious downstream effects on the limbic system through loss of feedback and control mechanisms, I also agree wholeheartedly. If you mean evolutionarily older parts of the brain or parts that develop earlier in childhood (and there’s overlap there of course), I’m not entirely sure which specific aspects of neuroanatomy you’re referencing.
Could you include additional details if that’s the case?
In any case, the answer to “why shouldn’t one sexually abuse a child” is the same as “why shouldn’t one physically abuse a child,” “why shouldn’t one starve a child,” and “why shouldn’t one force a child to work on large scale heavy machinery in factories for twelve hours per day seven days a week.” It damages the child, it damages the abuser, and it damages society.
This is the correct answer. Overcharging (and self-dealing) is typically used in tax fraud and money laundering.
Of course, no one would actually do that, especially if they were to later do something as public as running for president. The entire justice system, due to its fair and impartial nature, would come crashing down on their head with every resource at its disposal, and the people would riot in the streets if it treated such egregious crimes as less important than passing a bad $20 bill.
I caught Covid in Feb 2020, so I was part of the first wave when they weren’t sure it was a thing yet. I lost my sense of taste and smell for almost a year, to the extent I could stand next to a pan of frying onions or a trash can with rotting garbage and not smell it. It never fully recovered from that - I couldn’t say whether is 50% back or 30%, but it also still goes out sometimes. I’ve had every shot and booster available and have had a few influenza like illnesses since but with different levels of severity.
I’m going to hazard a guess here based on some related studies I’ve seen about the effects of covid and say that there’s likely a genetic component. I probably have a gene variant that makes this outcome more likely. I’m saying that because I’ve seen at least preliminary studies that looked at the severity of covid symptoms and found a genetic correlation.
For the majority of people who do lose their sense of taste and smell, they recover within a few weeks to a couple of months, but I am unaware of studies that show the degree to which they cover sensation. I know from my own experience that “recovery” can mean getting a fraction of your previous sensation back.
“Thank god you’re here, Mr. President. Your new name is Billy O’Brien and you’re about to take over as the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination.”
I am standing by and watching my doorbell cam. I’ll let you know when he shows.
I left Reddit, deleting all of my content, because I disagreed with the elimination of third party apps and because of Reddit’s response to the community. Full stop. I wasn’t a heavy Twitter user - I tend to enjoy more drawn out discussions and topically focused communities - but I stopped using it entirely because of Elon’s moves, including his rejection of corporate censorship.
I have no problem with a service establishing a ToS that includes trust and safety policies that will remove posts and ban users over hate speech. I have no problem with forced demonetization and deplatforming of hate accounts. I would have no problem if federal and state governments enacted more anti-hate laws to bring us in line with other democracies around the world.
That’s because I do not think that permitting a group of American brown shirts to fly Nazi flags and shout racist slurs at passersby increases freedom. I think it decreases it, because it causes a large part of the population to live in fear. I think hate speech rules by private companies serve the same purpose.
oh snap. (slrpnk.net)
Am I the only one getting agitated by the word AI?
Am I the only one getting agitated by the word AI (Artificial Intelligence)?...
AIBI For throwing away my human coworker's lunch?
Hello, I work with numerous humans. Navigating their emotionality is quite haphazardous at times, and today I have seemingly transgressed on my colleague “Mike”....
26 January 2024 (sh.itjust.works)
Hunter-gatherers were mostly gatherers, says archaeologist (www.theguardian.com)
Praying Mantis, a WW2 prototype machinegun carrier with an articulated, elevating chassis. (lemmy.world)
This was a privately made design that was proposed to the British military in WW2....
Venus by Tuesday (lemmy.world)
The giga crystal (sh.itjust.works)
What do you think is the coolest designed sci-fi gun?
I mean the physical design of the gun, not the projectile or effect.
The quackening (lemmy.world)
by pierremortel: www.instagram.com/pierremortel/p/C0zIDvOtMVx/
deleted_by_author
Someone once told me that time was a predator that stalked us all our lives. (startrek.website)
Is it illegal to charge insane prices for things?
Is there a law preventing me from for example selling a baseball hat for $20,000?
How do I get my sense of taste back after covid?
This is just cruel (startrek.website)
FEDiverse (startrek.website)
You guys, the Feds are on the front porch…
750 m below ground in the Bavarian Alps... (slrpnk.net)
Corporate Censorship Bring You Here?
Pure curiosity:...