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OpenAI researchers warned of AI breakthrough before CEO ouster according to Reuters. It seems that, disappointingly, there's more to the Sama exit than just petty politics.
I had found myself greatly reassured by the thought that, actually, this whole debacle was just (human) politics as usual - and not the eerie dawn of some new era.
Have other motizens noticed a substantial disconnect between their foremost worry the past while, and that of the normies in their life? Everyone else is chanting for Palestine, and I'm chanting sotto voce for a decade or two more of human supremacy before the singularity. And anytime I could comfort myself by the thought that, well, Serious People are not yet concerned, I see some preposterous headline from selfsame Serious People about how hillwalking is white supremacy, or equivalent bullshit. The illusion is bollocked.
Yes. But I word it differently. Russia acts like 17th century imperialist (or a whole timeline when people were afraid of Mongols and needed broad borders); Hamas acts like Bronze Age raiders; then you have the semi-normie rich neolib crowd that’s atleast modern; then there is this wtf is going on in the AI labs. I feel like on one timeline I’m seeing every civilization scale at the same time. Probably throw in some trads too. It’s like playing Civilization in the Bronze Age, the age of conquest, probably some renaissance, some modern, a little Cold War Taiwan shit and whatever comes after happening all at once. Does any of the rest of it even matter besides what happens at some 1000 person lab in Silicon Valley.
Well Putin can put an end to Silicon Valley in half an hour, he has that power. Taiwan is critical to the H100 production line. Neolib normies buying the latest Iphones are soaking up a great deal of top-tier silicon.
Many of the storylines are connected!
Though we've also got climate change as a red herring, a lot of strangeness is circulating on that front:
Lethal humidity? Really?
Link to quote source?
It's paywalled, so I didn't give the source: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/andrew-forrest-in-grim-warning-on-climate/news-story/8ef0bf2d852da37b88132cf0d6f8b6e9
I mean, wet-bulb exceeding 30-35 degrees is a thing and it does mean mass casualties if people are stuck in it.
And I'd generally expect fatalities from a USA-PRC nuclear exchange to be ~1 billion or somewhat less (I'm a pessimist on cities' ability to survive state/infrastructure failure, but consider nuclear winter to be essentially a hoax), so "something else can give higher casualties" isn't exactly a contradiction in terms. West-Russia would probably be a bit lower; West-Russia-PRC would be a fair bit higher, but still far short of "everyone".
But I think that in practice wet-bulb events will not wind up killing 1 billion+, if only because people will abandon areas prone to them.
How many wet bulb mass casualty events have there been so far? Now increase the temperature by 1 degree Celsius. How many will there be?
To say this is a near term threat comparable to AI is ridiculous.
Let's keep in mind that it's also a solvable problem but we CHOOSE not to solve it. We could use nuclear power, we could increase the reflectivity of clouds, we could fertilize the oceans. The same people who catastrophize about climate change refuse to consider those solutions. Therefore, the risks to climate change must be LESS than the risks of those things, which are minimal on a world historical scale.
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There's tons of places in south east Asia that get very hot and very humid. Yet they are absolutely packed with people. It heavily suggests to me that this idea - which let me remind you is being pushed by a billionaire heavily invested in green tech - is not actually a real problem.
"People will die at 35 degrees wet-bulb" is very much a real problem. The questions are the degree to which this will actually start happening (probably not a lot; we're looking at something like 3 degrees warming of GMST and the tropics/subtropics will get less than that) and the degree to which people will actually stay there to get killed.
The tropics don't normally get to 35 wet-bulb, which is not a coincidence - if they did, humans would have evolved with a higher body temperature to allow survival there. The highest Singapore's ever gotten, for instance, is something like 33.6, and it's usually much lower.
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They won't, because states will just start geoengineering.
Or even install air conditioning
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