(October 16, 2018 at 5:49 am)Fake Messiah Wrote: But I guess my true grudge on Stephen Hawking about this is how much this problem is trifle compared to truly compressing problems for humanity like pollution and climate change. If anything people should press politicians to work on solving these problems. Not to mention that Hawking should have worked that smarter people, like him, have more important role in today's politics, because what does it mean to be smart scientists today? - Almost nothing.
Or another so called problem that Hawking and some other prominent people worry is AI. I mean really? Even today if there was some real war it would be brutal with devices like drones that the enemy would truly seem invisible and deadly.
This is my gripe as well. People extrapolate the curve and expect the future to be what it is now but more so. But they don't take into account that any exponential curve will eventually hit a limit on resources and look more like a sigmoid function.
Moore's law is an excellent example of this. The cost of building each new factory goes up exponentially. The resources required for the chips, the rare earth materials, are being depleted exponentially while demand from for them from other parts of the economy are increasing exponentially.
Moore's law is already flattening out and the exponential curve is starting to look more like an S. Not mention that Intel themselves have said that it is not economically viable to continue beyond something like 5mn (we're currently at 14nm). Apparently we're supposed to be able to buy PCs with the processing capacity of the human brain next year according to the early predictions made by Ray Kurzweil., oh and AI will be demanding equal rights with humans in just over 10 years time.
Yeah right. Yet people still listen to self publicising hacks like this.
When the reality is we are likely in peak oil right now. Narrow AI is being abused by governments and corporations. Strong AI probably won't ever exist because society will collapse before then. The same is probably true for genetic engineering. The threat probably lays with the insurance industry, governments and corporations abusing data about us rather than super-humans being created.
Climate change, sea level rise, pollution and resource depletion are very real problems that we need to concentrate on now rather than something imaginary.
We have one chance at making the transition to a sustainable society and we're not working on it fast enough.
