If you’re wondering what is left when you have a swarm of generally intelligent agents working on your behalf and can do every task as well as a human, we already have the answer. That is the life of a CEO.
Humans are left deciding the direction, choosing what matters and what to spend attention on, and making judgement calls on the edge cases.
In the future, everyone is a CEO. How many CEOs are there though in that future? Probably not 8 billion
Actually I think a lot of climate change denialism has more to do with the “…and so we have to do X to solve it” part of climate change. It’s “climate change activism” that turns people off.
Climate change is real. That doesn’t mean we should halt economic growth. Unfortunately this is another area that gets so wrapped up in political power and incentives where: Democrats have factions and groups that want to implement world changing measures and redirect billions of dollars in a way that benefits their interests, and climate scientists seem to weigh the climate costs far higher than the economic devastation a hard switch would bring, so naturally there’s a level of skepticism at the whole affair.
There should be level headedness about it: climate change is real, it’s not world ending yet but we should get ahead of it, we need to make investments in changing our societal behavior to get on a track that balances mitigating the harms while keeping the real economic boon that comes with our current approach.
> Climate change is real. That doesn’t mean we should halt economic growth.
I've never seen "halting economic growth" as a suggestion for dealing with climate change that was being taken seriously. There might be some crackpots out there insisting that we need to being the economy to a halt and move into caves or something, but I think the vast majority understands that it isn't going to happen. That said, there are things that could be done which would hurt the profits of the ~50 companies who are responsible for most of the global CO2 emissions and/or trillions in climate related damages without causing the entire global economy to grind to a stop or collapse (as much as they'd love for us to believe otherwise).
The greatest societal behavior that needs to be changed is the way we allow a very small number of people get away with making insane amounts of money by causing insane levels of harm. Until that changes, the harmful systems that those people have created for themselves to profit under won't change either.
Yes of course. Unfortunately many of those decisions get distorted and captured by bad actors, creating a reasonable skepticism.
If you care about solving climate change: instead of yelling at climate change denialist you should direct more effort into advocating for policy and messaging that acknowledges and mitigates the harms while keeping you expect people to endure
It doesn't sound to me like you contribute any valuable argument that would improve the "PR" for the goal of protecting environmental living conditions for humans though.
So to paraphrase, some people don't like some of the proposed solutions to climate change to choose to pretend it isn't happening rather than confront the problem?
> it’s not world ending yet but we should get ahead of it,
Sure there are fanatics spouting end-of-the-world-is-nigh stuff but fundamentally I think the problem here is it's unknown - both in terms of the physical changes [1], and perhaps more importantly second order effects due to mass migration. It might become a real problem a lot sooner than you think - we simply don't know - but I think it's certainly wrong to view the effects as a gradual rise - that average hides a lot of local/temporal variation.
[1]in terms of potential for positive feedback loops like methane release, or compensating stabilising effects like cloud cover.
[2] For a region to become uninhabitable, you don't need it to be uninhabitable every day of the year - just one or two days a year may be enough - enough to kill people or crops. What's important is the occurrence of extremes during the year, not the average gradual rise.
We can barely even meaningfully define UPFs, and they aren't cleanly correlated with junk food.
Potato Chips are not UPFs but tortillas with an added preservative are.
Ice cream purchased at the store that has emulsifiers is a UPF. Homemade ice cream is not. But I think we'd agree that it is the fat and sugar in the ice cream that is the bad part to feed to kids.
I will go further and say that eating some ice cream does not hurt kids at all. No, you are not a bad parent because you gave your kid ice cream. And fat is completely legitimate part of food. Likewise sacharides.
funnily that sentence is written very AI-ish. It's a really common pattern of "it's not x, it's y" and specifically the phrase "You're not imagining it"
Honestly this sounds like a Luddite mindset (and I mean that descriptively, not to be insulting). This mindset holds us back.
You can imagine the artisans who made shirts saying the exact same thing as the first textile factories became operational.
Humans have been coders in the sense we mean for a matter of decades at most - a blip in our existence. We’re capable of far more, and this is yet another task we should cast into the machine of automation and let physical laws do the work for us.
We’re capable of manipulating the universe into doing our bidding, including making rocks we’ve converted into silicones think on our behalf. Making shirts and making code: we’re capable of so much more.
People are animals like any other. That’s not a slight. Managers respond to incentives much like dogs do too, and so do execs, and board members, and every human.
Who says that burning more fuel is a good goal? Productivity is a tool for people in charge to make you feel like you lack something and you have to burn to be valued. Get some therapy instead: all that stuff is toxic and unneeded. Feel free to burn your lives to capitalism and big tech, for no gain
You have to look a level deeper. Life has always been productive, it’s the only way you maintain negative entropy and thus life itself. If you found a species that stopped being biologically productive, you would recognize that as a maladaptive deviation from the norm (and that species would quickly go extinct).
You should work hard to be productive for humanity, not owners, who themselves are also subject to their own biological drives and pressures that channel them just like these same drives channel others.
If you feel exploited, then be productive in ways that circumvent your exploitation. Working hard and being productive is far older and more fundamental that capitalism though, and for your own sake and humanity’s sake you should embrace it.
Your definition of good doesn't apply to me. The more "productive ways" are to me, actually non-factive. Like, contemplation, art for art sake, playing, meditating. And this comes from reduced time spent on producing material things. So going faster and doing more to me is a dis-value. Life is not measured with negative entropy. Life is not measured, not quantitative.
Humans are left deciding the direction, choosing what matters and what to spend attention on, and making judgement calls on the edge cases.
In the future, everyone is a CEO. How many CEOs are there though in that future? Probably not 8 billion
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