The point is they had all of that to do by hand, and still managed to "work for hire" less time than us in a society where over 90% of the stuff is automated.
Peasants had at least a couple changes of clothes, plus the Sunday and festivities clothes.
Also don't forget that salmon for dinner didn't catch itself, you either spend the time, or it's lobster night again. And better remember to get some flour to the baker to get some bread made for the family, or it's lobster with month old moldy bread. Better hope the chickens lay some eggs for breakfast.
It's not about the amount of horse shit, it's about haw fast can you load it on the cart.
Once done, there is no more horse shit to load for the day. And if Timmy out there doesn't feel like loading his half of the horse shit one day, you were allowed to punch some sense into that thick skull of his.
"Scared" is a strong word... more like "curious", to see how it goes. I'm mostly waiting for the "autonomous rifle dog fails" videos, hoping to not be part of them.
Nukes are becoming a problem, because China is ramping up production. It will be just natural for India to do the same. From a two-way MAD situation, we're getting into a 4-way Mexican standoff. That's... really bad.
There won't be an "AI insurgency", just enough people plugging in plugs for some dumb AIs to tell them they can win the standoff. Let's hope they don't also put AIs in charge of the multiple nuclear launch buttons... or let the people in charge check with their own, like on a smartphone, dumb AIs telling them to go ahead.
Climate change is clearly a done thing, unless we get something like unlimited fusion power to start some terraforming projects (seems unlikely).
You have a point with insects, but I think that's just linked to climate change; populations will migrate wherever they get something to eat, even if that turns out to be Antarctica.
We used to run "machine learning", "neural networks", over 25 years ago. The "AI" term has always been kind of a sci-fi thing, somewhere between a buzzword, a moving target, and undefined since we lack a fixed comprehensive definition of "intelligence" to begin with. The limiting factors of the models have always been the number of neurons one could run in real-time, and the availability of good training data sets. Both have increased over a million-fold in that time, progressively turning more and more previously untractable problems into solvable ones to the point where the results are equal or better and/or faster than what people can do.
Right now, there are supercomputers out there orders of magnitude more capable than what runs stuff like ChatGPT, DallE, or all the public facing "AI"s that made the news. Bigger ones keep getting built... and memristors are coming, to become a game changer the moment they can be integrated anywhere near current GPU/CPU levels.
For starters, a supercomputer with the equivalent neural network processing power of a human brain, is expected for 2024... that's next year... but it won't be able to "run a human brain", because we lack the data on how "all of" the human brain works. It will likely become obsoleted by ones with several orders of magnitude more processing power, way before we can simulate an actual human brain... but the question will be: do we need to? Does a neural network need to mimick a human brain, in order to surpass it? A calculator already does, and it doesn't use a neural network at all. At what point the integration of what size and kind of neural network, with what kind of "classical" computer, can start running circles around any human... or all of humanity taken together?
And of course we'll still have to deal with the issue of dumb humans telling/trusting dumb "AI"s to do things way over their heads... but I'm afraid any attempt at "regulation", is going to end up like the case with "international law": those who want, obey it; those who should, DGAF.
Even if all tech giants with all lawmakers got to agree on the strictest of regulations imaginable, like giving all "AI"s the treatment of weapons of mass destruction, there is a snowflake's chance in hell that any military in the world will care about any of it.
The real risk is that humans will use AIs to asses the risk/benefits of starting a war... and an AI will give them the "go ahead" without considering mutually assured destruction from everyone else doing exactly the same.
It's not that AIs will get super-human, it's that humans will blindly trust limited AIs and exterminate each other.
three-way race between AI, climate change, and nuclear weapons proliferation
Bold of you to assume that people behind maximizing profits (high frequency trading bot developers) and behind weapons proliferation (wargames strategy simulation planners) are not using AI... or haven't been using it for well over a decade... or won't keep developing AIs to blindly optimize for their limited goals.
First StarCraft AI competition was held in 2010, think about that.
They went a bit too far with the argument... the AI doesn't need to become self-aware, just exceptionally efficient at eradicating "the enemy"... just let it loose from all sides all at once, and nobody will survive.
How many people are there in the world, who aren't considered an "enemy" by at least someone else?
Ukraine is way larger than Gaza, the EU has let millions of refugees in... and still Russia has leveled several Ukrainian cities to the ground, with soldiers shooting random civilians on the streets.
Right now, Russia is like Israel and Hamas put together, the only reason they've killed fewer civilians, is they couldn't find more.
Nazis didn't even "want" to exterminate the Jews... Gypsies yes, they shot those on sight, just like cripples... but all those Jews, Poles, Gays and similar, they "only" wanted to ship them all to Egypt or wherever in Africa... but those pesky Allies thwarted their plans, so "what were they supposed to do". 🙄
And look, Egypt is again refusing to let the "undesirables" in, only this time it's the Palestinians... and the ones pushing them out are the Israelis. 😒
Wonder what will the books end up calling this "operation".
This has been going on for 3 weeks already, they did do the "knocking" and warning for at least the first couple weeks. Phones have been working, on external batteries recharged from generators, up until this weekend.
The point is they had all of that to do by hand, and still managed to "work for hire" less time than us in a society where over 90% of the stuff is automated.