I don't trust Apple anymore. Transitioning out. The thumb scans, then face scans, and then making Little Snitch not fully effective, and now they make their own chips so zero accountability as to what kind of functions are in those chips in a world with satellite internet.
Seems every generation have a new thing to fear. Eventually it subsides into background, the heralds of doom then move on to next big thing, and the real dangers are quietly and thanklessly mitigated by more competent people.
We had this pattern with the following ones:
- Nuclear war
- Peak Oil/Resource Depletion
- Ozone hole
- Y2K Problem
Seems like "Climate Change" is on the way out and "AI Doom" is on the way in.
Here's hoping nuclear war IS indeed 'out'. Peak Oil sure as heck ain't, and even if you forget about climate change it isn't forgetting about you.
It would be a shame if (culturally, as is your framing here) it is on the way out and AI Doom is on the way in… because there's nothing inside the AI Doom box other than the ability to displace human labor. Any hard drive already surpasses human memory for scope and accuracy. We have to get used to machines out-scoping us on technical grounds. We can't run as fast as cars, either, but we're still around to think about and sometimes even attempt 'walkable cities'.
Reality always gets a vote. With 'AI Doom' the vote isn't what you think it is. It is a Jacquard loom of words. Some things change hugely, and others aren't even touched.
Yeah that was what I meant! It wasn’t a miracle that happened all by itself. It proves exactly that opposite that humans did it though massive cooperation after listening to scientists.
- Peak Oil: happened. EV's are mitigating the consequences.
- Ozone hole: treaties banning the world-wide production of CFCs solved the problem.
- Y2K Problem: billions of dollars were spent fixing that problem. We did such a great job fixing that problem there are now a bunch of deniers stating the problem never existed in the first place!
See a pattern here? These problems just didn't up and solve themselves. We took action and solved them. Since there's no point dwelling on old problems we move on to new problems to solve. That process is otherwise known as advancement.
it’s a pity it doesn’t warm everywhere equally. Here in some places the nordics summers are getting colder and wetter. We don’t get to enjoy warming but would pay for it anyway.
> and the real dangers are quietly and thanklessly mitigated by more competent people.
With all your examples, the mitigations were not quiet at all.
- nuclear war, well, that one got resolved by an entire empire outright collapsing after engaging in a decades long financial war with both the USSR and the US spending hundreds of billions of dollars every year.
- Peak Oil was ... mitigated by making an example out of Iraq and Libya: don't fuck with our oil, or else. On top of that, governments (most notably the EU) instituted strict emissions controls, much to the chagrin of the car establishment.
- The ozone hole was mitigated by globally banning CFC gases, again much to the chagrin of the refrigerant industry.
- the Y2K problem was mitigated by investing 300 billion dollars in preparation efforts (updating and especially testing), and a further 308 billion dollars in remediation costs worldwide [2].
> Seems like "Climate Change" is on the way out
It's certainly not. The "war for attention" may be (as it's being replaced by the Russian War and now the I/P clusterfuck), but this year was among the hottest on historical record, and natural disaster severity and frequency keeps increasing.
Unfortunately, this time we can't trust that those in the background will continue to mitigate the problem of climate change. Germany is being politically ripped apart with the only thing keeping the country together being the knowledge of the coalition that a new election would see them replaced by a conservative "trickle down" moron and a ragtag band of Nazis. The Netherlands struggle with the fallout of a few court decisions impacting the agricultural sector. And in the US, Trump is looking to make a comeback, with his fanbase deeming climate change an outright hoax.
Even completely ignoring the current AI hype cycle, considering the terrible state of software quality nowadays a proper Butlerian Djihad might be a good thing if that's the only way to reset the status quo ;)
