For so long human progress has been limited by population size.
A large part of the reason we lept so far over the past century was the huge increase in population size which allowed for greater subspecialization.
But that population growth is unsustainable if not already well past the practical limit.
If we can successfully get to a point where we have exponential gains in productivity unseen in human history while also decoupling that progress from the massive resources it would require from more humans, we might be able to outpace the collective debts we've racked up as a species without obsessive focus on procreation (like Musk) as necessary to burden the next generation with our fuck ups.
33,000 homes is way less than I'd have thought given the degree to which it is being used. And the promises of future hardware revisions like with photonics means we'll be looking at exponential decreases in energy consumption while also seeing increases in processing power.
Most of those internal threats are being instigated by external forces if you actually look into it.
And typically nationalist rhetoric and authoritarianism go hand in hand.
Arguably it'd be far more productive to recognize one's tribal group as humanity at large rather than artificial divides around where you work, what you look like, who you love, or where you live.
So while we can discuss national governments as distinct entities much like we'd discuss corporations, the people making both up are probably better discussed as people rather than any given subgroup.
I mean, just at Munich a few days ago the secretary-general of NATO was pointing out Europe's dependence on the US's nuclear threat and that without US aid to Ukraine the other NATO countries can't make up the difference.
This is the first year in decades Germany is meeting the 2% military spending goal for NATO (a goal now generally seen as outdated and insufficient). There's a lot of scrambling to modernize military capabilities across non-US member countries but in most cases that's 5 to 10 years away.
If you think that Europe doesn't depend on the US's military and intelligence to offset Russia and China you might want to look a bit more into the topic before assuming it's just 'Murica exceptionalism.
Watching a world where we are running two 80 year olds against each other to lead a nation critical to a balance of power keeping democratic ideals alive in the West against increasing authoritarian pressures from the East where one privately promised Wall Street "nothing will materially change" and the other openly promises a Fourth Reich, all while the Earth is increasingly being poisoned to the point it's becoming borderline unethical to condemn new lives to inherit the burden of those environmental consequences...
I'm fairly baffled by the resistance to the notion of intelligence which exceeds collective humanity being unable to be controlled by us.
We're really doing a piss poor job. Maybe new management is exactly what's needed.
Wait - X-men has storylines regarding being different from the norm?
What is this woke garbage.
Next thing you'll tell me is that the whole concept of being a mutant is a metaphor tied to acceptance of different races, sexual orientations, etc.
I bet with their woke agenda they even do something ridiculous like have some plotline about ableism and have their most powerful mutant be in a wheelchair.
I don't think you're wrong, I have been thinking the same thing.
Everyone has been worried about "AI misinformation" - but if misinformation becomes so commoditized online that someone convinced the moon landing is fake finds two dozen different AI generated sources agreeing with them but disagreeing with each other (i.e. a video of Orson Wells filming it but also a video of Stanley Kubrick filming it) we may well end up in a world where people just stop paying attention to the bullshit online that has been destroying people's minds for years now.
Couple this with the advances in AI correctly identifying misinformation and live fact checking it with citations to reputable and/or certified sources, combined with things like Elon Musk's 'uncensored' Grok turning around and calling his conservative Twitter fans racist and small minded morons while pointing out why they are wrong, or Gab's literal Adolf Hitler AI telling a user they were disgusting for asking if Jews were vermin - and we may just end up on a narrow path out of the mess we've found ourselves in well before AI was suddenly a thing.
I had been really worried about the AI misinformation angle, but given some recent developments in the past few months I'm actually hopeful about the future of a better informed public for the first time in years.
I mean, at a certain point this kind of thinking becomes like the MPAA's math around thinking every person downloading a movie from a streaming service was a lost sale.
Yes, this would mean a massive expansion of translated audiobooks without the labor that traditionally would have gone into creating them.
But we don't have translations for the majority of audiobooks in the majority of languages because the costs of that labor has historically outweighed the benefits of a potential expanded audience in niche languages for the long tail of audiobooks.
Personally, I'd rather live in a world where there's broad accessibility to information for all people regardless of their native languages, rather than one in which humanity tears down its own tower of Babel to artificially preserve the status quo.
The idea that they'll be creating an unofficial sequel to your audiobook and selling it without your permission or something is a pretty ridiculous leap that would be very unlikely to actually hold up in court.
This is probably so that they can create translated versions of them, so if your audiobook is only in English and you upload it you can check a box to have it also be available in other languages you'd never have been serving otherwise.
It's almost certainly expanding on the same service they added for podcasters:
The word being translated as "sun was darkened" is ἐκλιπόντος (eklipontos).
The other Synoptics do not use that word.
John, claiming to be based on eyewitness testimony, does not mention anything about darkness at all.
(As I mentioned above, the three hour lunar eclipse which saw the sun's light reflecting off the moon darkened when the Earth eclipsed the sun - a known mechanism of lunar eclipses at the time - on Passover of 33 CE was not visible in Judea.)
If you watch the entire interview with him, I don't think it's at all misleading to portray him as highly suggestible.
The dude falls over himself agreeing with whichever way the wind blows in an interview about how he keeps being taken advantage of by scams.
In that broader context, him shuffling off several steps in the direction some guy jokingly told him to head off in really shouldn't be discounted with a parenthetical.
You can watch as the person interviewing him about falling for scams over and over jokingly tells him to walk off in a given direction - and then the dude just starts to, until he realizes his car is in the other direction.
Exactly my thought too.
For so long human progress has been limited by population size.
A large part of the reason we lept so far over the past century was the huge increase in population size which allowed for greater subspecialization.
But that population growth is unsustainable if not already well past the practical limit.
If we can successfully get to a point where we have exponential gains in productivity unseen in human history while also decoupling that progress from the massive resources it would require from more humans, we might be able to outpace the collective debts we've racked up as a species without obsessive focus on procreation (like Musk) as necessary to burden the next generation with our fuck ups.
33,000 homes is way less than I'd have thought given the degree to which it is being used. And the promises of future hardware revisions like with photonics means we'll be looking at exponential decreases in energy consumption while also seeing increases in processing power.