While the title here isnt exactly inaccurate, I will say, for the people that read the headline and not the article, that this doesn’t say what I would have expected to, with that title. I was expecting it to be about the simulated climate effects of a geoengineering effort being worse than expected, ie “the side-effects are underestimated and show up when we gamed things out”, wheras the article barely even touches on what the simulated results for the climate were, and is instead meaning more “people proved unable to cooperate on this and powerful countries preferred to develop their own geoengineering programs and sabotage efforts to make them work with their rivals by lying about everything”

With how many people out there are lactose intolerant, you’d think they’d have found a way to make cheese substitutes actually taste like cheese, or at least good, by now. Been trying to cut cheese from my diet recently for other reasons and have yet to find fake cheese that doesn’t have a terrible taste and worse texture.

I suspect it would be since it would contain the same information, however, unless I was misinformed last time I looked into that (for scifi worldbuilding, so not terribly serious a search admittedly), the computational requirements to run a full physics simulation of a brain at that detailed of a resolution are probably just too high to ever be practical.

That being said, I really doubt you need to simulate one to the subatomic level, since the basic unit of a brain appears to be the nerve cells, and stuff more fundamental than that just provides the physical basis for those cells to work. Simulate the behavior of neurons accurately enough, and arrange them in the right way, and I’d personally be willing to bet theyd be sentient even if the simulation doesnt model every subatomic interaction within each neuron and just simulates something with the same output for a given input as an average neuron of the relevant type. The difficulty of that shouldn’t be understated, I would not be surprised if theres important but subtle behaviors in biological neurons that we’ve not discovered yet, and even if there arent, we’d want to be sure of it, and more importantly, “arranging them in the right way” is not (I would bet at least) a trivial problem, your brain is after all more detailed than just a lump of identical neurons that form connections at random, it has distinct structures that do distinct things, and that makes me think that the stuff we care about, like consciousness, is probably something resulting from arranging neurons in a specific kind of way, rather than just “thing that happens if you connect a large enough of them together”, else thered be no pressure for those structures to evolve.

On the other hand, I dont see any particular reason to assume that our brains are the most efficient or only way to do sentience. They exist because of a process of evolution acting on random mutation, not directed design, and while that can make some pretty efficient things, it wont find every solution, because every intermediate step has to be evolutionarily favorable as well and some things wont be that helpful half-made. As such, brains surely must represent at least an upper ceiling on the minimum resources required for sentience. A sentient thing using the amount of energy and matter that a human brain uses is definitely possible, because we observe them, but we have no indication that one smaller or more energy efficient cant exist. Maybe there are some processes that neurons do that have affects on their output, but which arent big enough to have an impact on sentience and can be abstracted away, for example. Im not sure exactly how that translates into the amount of compute you’d need, because brains are of course not digital computers, and simulating one with a digital computer is an extra step over just making a structure that directly does the stuff brains do.

Im not an neuroscientist or an AI or computer science expert and I imagine the intersection of those fields is where youd find the kind of person that could really give a useful answer. My gut feeling is that, given that humans dont need such massive amounts of energy to run or all the world’s information to train our minds, that our current way of doing AI is fundamentally extremely inefficient, and if some way can be found to create sentience with the technology we have, theres probably also a lot of room for making it more efficient too, to the point that I would be unsurprised if we have the compute needed already and just dont yet know how to actually use it to create that result. I kind of hope that its not figured out for awhile though- not because I think that a sentient AI would take over the world or something but just that, well, an actual sentient AI would hypothetically be a person, by many standards, and I see no way that, being created by corporations seeking a return on investment and with no legal rights whatsoever, it wouldnt just be a very high tech slave with all the ethical issues that poses and more. So, I hope that it takes long enough to figure that all out for the system that develops that technology to be replaced with something different, and hopefully more thoughtful for the ethics of it all. Thats probably wishful thinking on my part, but its something thats worried me about the whole AI boom. I dont think that what’s currently being sold is really as smart or capable as the marketing makes it out to be, but also that if it was, it wouldnt be ethical to use it as just a tool, and either way that doesnt paint the AI industry in a good light. Not that I really need to convince lemmy that theres something rotten there given its general sentiment towards AI.

Any intelligent system that exists within our physical universe is going to ultimately be some material object that behaves in a manner that can be described with math, but that does not mean that any math that can be used to create human-readable text represents a humanlike intelligence, its gotta be the right kinds of math to get the specific set of emergent properties that result in our consciousness, and when we dont even entirely understand how it all works and what all you need for it in humans, replicating our internal experience at this point in time would require our attempted approximations to hit upon all the right answers for it more or less by accident, which seems unlikely.

(I know you were being sarcastic but on the surface “brains are also just thing doing stuff” isnt an absurd response to this kind of meme so I thought it could use a reply anyway.)

Lately I’ve come to have doubts about the ethicality even of prison, though I don’t yet know what I’d suggest instead. In general Ive come around to the idea that the very notion that causing suffering creates a “debt” that must be repaid with more suffering on the part of the perpetrator is itself toxic, because if some way can be found to cause a person to live a life that will not inflict more harm without hurting that person, then that method would be better, at least in a utilitarianist sense, than something more “fair” relying on punishment. The challenge of course is in finding that way is.

I assume that psychological issue would apply to any sort of executioner regardless of the method, there’s not really a way around that if you’re killing someone, there has to be a person, or likely several, that actually does the deed, or at least is the last human to be involved in it. I don’t think its humane either, I just meant that in the relative sense where anything can be said to be if the other thing being compared can find a way to be just a bit worse.

I’ve seen it argued that it might actually cause less pain and therefore be more humane than lethal injection even if it looks less clean, though not being an expert in how people die or how quick it is when someone is shot, I can’t verify that. Personally though, I agree, I just dont feel like death can be a good thing and if you can execute someone, you sorta definitionally have them captured and under your control anyway, making justifications like preventing future violence irrelevant.

At some level I think, both are true, the frog’s part is pretty obvious, but I do think there are a great many things that I would not have known, or even known enough to be curious about, without the internet, along with people, to include a number that I now know in person and am very close to, that I never would have met. Humans are biased to notice the bad side in something more than the good, and it’s easy to take the benefits of the internet for granted as part of the “default” way things are, while noticing the harms it brings because, well, they hurt.

More to the point though, I think now that anything that does the blue part, will also get you the green part. The trouble is that the world is simply too big to comprehend. There are too many things to know, going on in too many places, to be well informed about more than a fraction, and too many people to know or feel kinship with all of them. Therefore, increasing information available and the number of people one can talk to will, and inheritly must, change you in a way that leads to a different sort of division.

Every faraway or global problem you become aware of and come to care about takes up time and attention from some other thing you would have done or learned or cared about instead. Every person you come to know takes up slots in Dunbar’s number that otherwise would have been filled with someone else, and the fact that you get some choice over what slice of the world you come to know means that those people you associate with are likely to care about the same problems and ideas as you, and those who dont will seem almost alien by comparison, caring for strange and seemingly irrelevant or problematic things while seemingly being unable to understand that which you find so obviously important. You probably seem the same to them.

I don’t even think anymore that this is necessarily a bad thing. The same happens without online connection after all, it’s just defined by geographic region more than by the people themselves. Existing in a “forced” space with no alternatives can be problematic for those people who do not fit in well with their family or neighbors, who nowadays at least can find community with others like them, and when people from different “tribes” do have to work together due to physical proximity, the diversity of knowledge available in that group is greater than if they all shared one perspective.

There are of course genuine problems to be addressed with attention driven algorithm or with platform owners manipulating social consensus with their power, but doing so wont suddenly make humans not tribalistic, or suddenly all informed about everything, or even everything you, or me, or any other individual person finds important. They are worth solving, but realistically the benefits of doing so aren’t creating a single global community whose members understand everything that it’d be beneficial for them to understand. Humans just don’t have the bandwidth and time to facilitate that.

Aand now after typing on my phone for half an hour Ive noticed this is the shitposting community and I’m way overthinking it. Oh well, that’s what I get for never bothering to pay attention to what community things are on I guess.

Be the richest person ever, buy them, and then shut them down.

but if they auction off the zeppelin navigation bands, how will the zeppelin NT avoid getting lost?