@rotting
>Right, and where are the refugees from Brazil going to go?
I dunno, brazil is quite big. and I'm sure they'd be welcome in argentina, chile, uruguay, paraguay if it came to that (which it won't, brazil is colossally empty) I'm not claiming it's going to be cheap or painless, but its not gonna
break civilization
>I don't see why we can't be concerned about both.
proportions
>I doubt it. Climate change will bring a great increase in storms and unstable weather. It will also require us to change what is grown where every decade or so in a coordinated manner. There is currently no system I know of to let us do these things. You know what Guns, Germs and Steel says?
individual farmers aren't idiots: and those that are are probably gonna go bankrupt if they try to grow cold veggies in warm weather. they could make apps, coordinate through facebook, follow the "what to grow where" blog by elon musk.
I honestly don't understand this. I need you to explain to me the sense in which refusing to see a radical difference in the death of one person or a thousand people is not evidence of a murderous mentality. This assumption is ingrained in Sal's arguments that life for the inhabitants of the Sundarbans would not be radically worse with climate change as compared to what it was before.
I... can't. I don't know what's a 'radical difference' here: there's a numeric different in the death of a dude and the death of a thousand dudes. I don't know what that has to do with Sundaban people not being hurt too much by climate change, and I certainly don't see how that's murderous. can't help you here, brodie.
No, I don't realize civilization is a coastal phenomenon. Yes, many people will be displaced. No one is saying many people will not be displaced: consider, however, that that my not be such a big deal. I've moved houses a bunch of times, I'm currently weekend living in hotels and flying to atacama every monday, back to santiago every friday. And yes, its an unhappy, unfulfilling, lonely life, but it shan't be forever and, more crucially, i'm neither dead or become a savage (though don't get me wrong, I do get the occasional urge to pick up an axe and kill people, conquer some land and get the emperor to recognize me as thegn of a confederate state)
I do not believe that "Humans can do X, which computers can't." or "The reasoning employed by humans is not algorithmic." are viable objections against AI for the following reason:
1. I believe the human brain arrives at its conclusions through physical processes. If you don't believe that, fair enough. The rest of this argument doesn't apply to you.
2. Suppose there is a physical process X that can be encoded as a computation Y such that Turing machines cannot perform Y. If that were the case, then we could enrich the repertoire of computations in our theory of algorithms by updating our account of universal computation from "Turing machine" to "Turing machine + computation Y, as observed in process X". For example, if quantum events are allowed, then that slightly rejiggles the boundaries of some lower order algorithmic classes in ambiguous ways.
3. Is there a process X that cannot be incorporated into computation in this way? Well, not physical processes that compute results, but there are "oracles", information about what works arrived at by following sequences of law-abiding events to their conclusion. It follows that the brain cannot deduce their conclusions any more than a computer can. Oracles can be obtained from empirical induction over processes that followed the relevant sequences.
Okay, this is a solid case. here's why i find it unconvincing:
see, "in theory" all sorts of thing are possible which, in reality, simply aren't. take laplace's demon: in theory, if we knew the position, charge, and vector of energy of all particles in the universe and we had a unified perfect theory of physics, then we could know everything that will ever happen in future. _in theory_. but we shall never ever ever do so: for one thing, its not clear we can have perfect theories: i've never seen one, and i'm not convinced
prima facie they exist. furthermore, there's no way to know all the positions of all the particles, and even if we did learn them, it would be a huge faff to compute everything. in theory we could be in the matrix, in theory we could be butterflies dreaming of being ourselves, in theory I could be a taliban fighter who got brainwashed into believing he's torco, and the real torco might be dead. So while in theory you could replicate any physical process, its not clear that its practical to do so: or that you'd even want to. Within meat brains you hace a vast, vast range of possible minds: not only your mind is different from mine, but also minds can become psychotic, depressed, paranoic, delusional, hysterical, and all sorts of other things: its fair to suppose that those are all a small subgroup in the set of possible minds, and the variations that give rise to them are minute! human brains all, it just takes a bit of less dopamine or whatever to make a mind depressed (and depression is a very different state from non-depression, surely). How much more different what a mind made of silicon should be! sure, there's no good reason to believe its impossible to emulate meat minds perfectly, but if that were a convincing argument I'd be a christian and a muslim and a jew and a believer in santa claus, for that matter.
I cannot imagine left-liberals responding to smart Christians with, "Your religion is fantasy."
huuuuh... sure we do.
But I'm gonna go ahead and defend rotting's idea of an AI that organizes production, here. There's good reason to believe it would at least be more efficient than markets, which while they work decently well cause VAST waste, overproduction, health hazards from shitty but profitable food <google bliss point>, and countless wasted lives from addiction, the mental problems associated with having people spend countless hours in shitty, socially unnecesary jobs that they themselves need to stay fed and clothed, corporate control of government, and all sorts of other costs. Okay, soviet-planner-AI as a system will have its problems, but its not like markets are so wonderful either!