This from Daniel Lemire is a good response to the Ceglowski essay that I also wrote about recently. It takes a different tack as compared to my response but also makes some points related to mine.

Cegłowski would keep the technology as it is… “Why do we need to obsess on artificial intelligence, when we’re wasting so much natural intelligence?”

Technology is fine today. Let us work hard to keep it as it is.

I could not disagree more. We urgently need to improve our technology. The web as it stands today won’t be good enough in 30 years

Robotics and the speed with which this and AI as well as AI-approximate technologies will come to dominate society are going to utterly surprise people like Ceglowski.

Things that are inevitable within ~100 years if tech society continues:

Extensive DNA modification/improvement.
Ubiquitous robotics and AI.
No more livestock– all meat lab-created.
Artificial life.
Artificial wombs.
Children with 3+ parents (already happening!) or no parents.
Neural implants.

I’d bet every cent I have on at least those seven things happening. They are baked in. What else, though? There will be more. People like Ceglowski can’t even imagine those things, just like people in 1920 couldn’t imagine the internet or ICBMs.

Reflections on Amandla Stenberg “Calling Out” Kylie Jenner for Cultural Appropriation.

My reaction to calling out other folks for cultural appropriation is mainly to laugh, and then to sigh.

Do they not understand, I wonder, how contingent and how young so very many “ancient” cultural traditions are? How quickly they spread? How human cultures always have and always will borrow, pilfer and adopt bits of other cultures?

Always have, and always, always will.

This whole cultural “appropriation” obsession and calling out people for it is at best a distraction to anything useful and at worst actively harmful — especially when you use it to bully and shame young people.

This is a good piece for the most part, but I don’t agree that things like an AI are not a threat. I think this view is pretty daft and ahistorical, actually. And I disagree with the idea that technological progress has halted. Plateaued for a bit, yes, but not halted.

About the AI question, the reason it is worth pondering is that even threats with a very small chance of coming true if they have a very large — potentially life-ending — impact still deserve thought and mitigation even if the odds of any particular danger materializing are quite small. A lesson we are about to learn the extremely hard way due to climate change, by the way.

But think of it this way. From the time humans started making war until 1945, we had at most a bomb that could destroy a city block.

By late 1945, we had a bomb that could singly destroy an entire city. One plane. One bomb. An entire metropolis, wiped out. Not science fiction. Hard reality.

By 1952, we had a bomb that could destroy an entire region. One bomb. Urban New England, just gone.

Not all progressions are linear. Some of the most destructive ones are in fact extremely non-linear, and since an AI is not likely something we’d create but rather something that would start to evolve on its own, it’s fundamentally unpredictable and worth mitigating against a hostile AI or even worse an AI so powerful it didn’t care about us at all. The idea that we’d “create” an AI is pretty stupid, actually. It’d most likely create itself without our noticing. And even if we did kick it off, it’d most likely be a much-accelerated process of evolution so that just like our own brains we did not understand the result. And perhaps could not control even a little bit.

I’m not a Singulatarian or a technological utopian but I do believe — and history demonstrates this — that humans can create very destructive very powerful things without really understanding what they are doing. Evidence shows this. Thinking about it and working to prevent it is worth something. Worth quite a lot, actually.

Given that there is at least a small bit of risk for instance that in the future some rogue AI will decide to disassemble the sun to travel to another galaxy, spending a few million now to understand the possibilities seems worth it, yes?

About technological progress, like a lot of folks this person is fairly lacking in historical knowledge. Though I agree that we’ve picked most low-hanging fruit, there are possibility spaces we’ve hardly even begun to explore. And some we still probably have not even discovered.

Another thing. I saw a chart a few months ago that I can’t find right now, but when I do find it I will post it because it was great (and I will find it). If I remember right, for the first 190,000 of the 200,000 years of anatomically modern human history, economic growth per capita/yr was something like 0.00000167%. Or, basically, nothing.

Then this happened:

Like with regular bombs vs. hydrogen bombs, some progressions are hugely, staggeringly non-linear.

Technological history moves in spikes and plateaus. Anatomically modern humans used stone tools for 150,000+ years. Then they didn’t. They used bronze for maybe 8,000 years. Etc. Right now I’m perfectly content to admit we are at a plateau. But as history demonstrates time and time again just when everyone is convinced that nothing else can possibility be invented, a wave of invention comes along.

There is a limit to this, of course. But have we hit it? Really doubtful. Really, really doubtful. We are young and the universe is vast. We are clumsy puppies stumbling over the living room entryway, not even having made it to the front door and thinking we’ve seen it all, the entire house, not even realizing that there is an outside.

Running Windows 10 in a VM at 4K.

I’ve confirmed that it does not in fact properly support 4K.

What in the hell. This is a brand new OS. 4K has been out for three years now.

Microsoft is smoking all the crack.

Ok, 4K is pretty cool. Both my partner and I have 4K monitors now. Mine is my secondary monitor, hers is her primary.

But my main monitor and machine is a 5K iMac. Here’s what 4K looks like inside the 5K iMac (both scaled correctly).

Oh, little 4K, don’t cry in the face of the awesome power of my fully-operational 5K battle station.

By the way, a 27″ 5K monitor has nearly twice the pixels of a 4K monitor — 14.7 million vs. 8.3 million.

The world is going to change over the next 100 years more than any time in the last couple of thousand.

It might not be an apocalypse by some definitions but to the people living through it, it certainly will feel like one.

Even people on the left have no idea. They really just do not, probably because it is too painful to think about, to realize that their children are quite likely to have far worse (and shorter) lives than they themselves enjoyed.

So check this out. Say Hansen is only a quarter right (which is by the way below the consensus estimates of sea level rise).

That still means tens to hundreds of millions of people displaced, huge amounts of climate change. Drought. Famine. War.

Sad that nukes haven’t been used since WWII? Well, you won’t have to be sad for much longer! I can nearly guarantee that they’ll be used in the next ~50 years in nearly-inevitable resource wars as a result of GCC.

People just have no idea. They really don’t. Even the ones who believe don’t really understand.

The Fat Acceptance/Fat Celebration movement is chock full of morons at all times, but they really deeply disturb me when they start harming children. I’ve seen other examples of this including many people postulating that it is abuse to regulate your child’s diet, but this is just one I found today.

Despite what the article claims — wrongly — the evidence is pretty clear that being an overweight or (especially) an obese child makes later adulthood obesity more likely and leads directly to other health problems.

More evidence here (check the citations, too.)

This is just unconscionable. These people are fine when they harm themselves but when they start hurting defenseless people is when they should be made to shut the fuck up. And perhaps be arrested for child abuse.

Well, looks like geoengineering or space engineering it’ll be.

Humans only do the right thing after all other ways are attempted, so soon that’ll be the only choice.

So that’s what we will do.

The next 100 years of human history are gonna be frickin’ crazy like you can’t even imagine. Like Justin Bieber riding on a manatee shooting AK-47s into the sky kinda crazy.

Yeah.

Health care costs set to rise 25 to 50%.

PPACA is not bending the health care cost curve downward as promised.  It is sending premiums into the orbit.   NYT reported:

Health insurance companies around the country are seeking rate increases of 20 percent to 40 percent or more, saying their new customers under the Affordable Care Act turned out to be sicker than expected.

But the useful idiots of the left like Kevin Drum and Amanda Marcotte assured me this was absolutely impossible and all merely evil right-wing lies and propaganda!

When in fact it was utterly predictable and predicted by me and many, many others possessed of even a tiny lick of sense.

Interesting facts about me:

1) I have terrible balance. I can’t roller skate, use a skateboard, roller blade or anything like that. Also I fall or nearly fall up and down stairs a lot. No medical condition indicated. Have been this way all my life.

2) I (and many other people) set a world record in 1997 for the longest-distance non-stop parachute operation in the world. Two mid-air refuelings, 19 hours flying. Then the jump. This record likely still stands though I haven’t looked into it.

3) Dogs freak me out in some metaphysical way. So needy. Cannot deal.

4) I tried lucid dreaming in the 5th grade. Got hooked on it. Thanks, Omni magazine.

5) By the time I was 10 or 11, I’d subscribed (thanks to my grandparents) to Scientific American, Omni, Newsweek, US News & World Report, Popular Science and some other magazines. Also read National Geographic cover to cover starting when I was six. Nerdiest kid alive? Hell yeah.

6) I once asked for a strange girl’s number in a Waffle House in the middle of the night. This is something I almost never do, but I got it, and it was I think real. I never called her as my life was just too busy at that time.

7) If I had a superpower, I’d want it to be the ability to speak, read, write and fully understand any language fluently without training.

8) I used to be able to hold my breath for more than two minutes while swimming underwater. What living on a clean river in Florida will do for you. Used to freak people right the hell out.

9) I used to read 9-12 books concurrently.

10) I don’t naturally have much empathy. Think I was just born this way. I try to rein it in and not become a complete sociopath but it’s a lifelong battle.