The only Zen 3 chips are desktop class, so Apple’s first generation ultra book oriented processor is trading blows with the best line of desktop processors. That’s a pretty big deal!
Lovely stuff, our society may be imperfect, but our material well-being is not something to be dismissed. Our secure food supply, sanitation, clean drinking water, medicine, and ability to adjust the climate to a comfortable level are absolutely marvellous achievements and dependent upon resource extraction. I’d hate to think anyone would suggest we should regress a millimetre away from that.
We need to find ways to satiate our hunger for resources in a sustainable manner (or find a way to import them from a nearby object in space), but we shouldn’t be ashamed of the progress we’ve made.
There's this basic assumption that the current level of our basic needs and creature comforts cannot be replicated with alternate paradigms. Some of the way we do things now are ineffective or even, inefficient.
Let's take clean drinking water and sanitation. We have buildings and machines that take river water and aquifer water and purify the water to drinking level standards. We then pipe them (and sometimes those pipes have toxic buildups), introduce chlorine to help maintain its safety when delivering water.
But then we use that drinking-level standard water to (1) water our landscape and (2) flush the toilet.
That's kinda like that use of a microchip capable of running Doom to read the a paper strip on a preganancy test. (It made its round on twitter last couple of days).
To look at it a bigger picture and more abstractly, we're cleaning our human wastes using the hydrological cycle rather than the carbon cycle.
There's a community outside of Taos, NM that experiments with what are called earthship designs. (There are actual people living for years inside these earthships). These earthships are designed so that waste water cycles through the system three times before feeding a leach field, using landscaping plants to clean the waste (carbon cycle). By that I mean, clean water for drinking and washing gets reused as grey water, cleaned by plants, and then reused as toilet flushing water.
That integrated greenhouse is also a part of a passive heating and cooling system that keeps the inner environment a comfortable 70 - 80 degrees, with vents that can adjust the temperature. It maintains that temperature range in a high desert. In addition to temperature regulation, greenhouse provides supplemental food, part of the water purifications system.
That covers sanitation, adjusting climate, and some answer to a more secure food supply. I can deep dive what it means to have a distributed, decentralized food supply (in which compared to our centralized food supply that is fragile, ecologically disasterous, and not really nutritious for humans).
Our medical system is very good at treating acute problems, but very poor at treating chronic issues. It is generally not holistic, and there are blinders in the paradigms that prevent researchers from looking into effective treatments. Furthermore, in the US, medical care is in a runaway feedback loop between insurers and providers, significantly increasing costs for everyone. (Except say, the Amish. They get significant discounts from the hospitals because they always pay a large upfront deposite in cash before service, pay their bills, and have a religious sanction against suing the hospital and doctors). I can also deep dive on this, though the solutions here are murkier than what I can say about decentralized food systems.
But the main thing is: sustainability is _not_ enough. That is essentially saying, "do less harm". Baked into that paradigm is that the harm from our current practices is inevitable, so we should strive to do the least amount of harm with that inevitability.
Instead, we should be looking at regenerative practices, and one that is not anthropocentric. It requires a different way of seeing. We don't have to "regress". We can do a lot better.
> But then we use that drinking-level standard water to (1) water our landscape and (2) flush the toilet.
Doing otherwise would require a massive duplicate water distribution network for non-drinkable water.
> There's a community outside of Taos, NM that experiments with what are called earthship designs. (There are actual people living for years inside these earthships). These earthships are designed so that waste water cycles through the system three times before feeding a leach field, using landscaping plants to clean the waste (carbon cycle). By that I mean, clean water for drinking and washing gets reused as grey water, cleaned by plants, and then reused as toilet flushing water.
There are more scaleable to recycle water, but I am generally in favour of the concept.
> That integrated greenhouse is also a part of a passive heating and cooling system that keeps the inner environment a comfortable 70 - 80 degrees, with vents that can adjust the temperature. It maintains that temperature range in a high desert. In addition to temperature regulation, greenhouse provides supplemental food, part of the water purifications system.
That sounds labour intensive and non-scalable. How big would this green house/ water recycling solution need to be to power a single apartment building? How many people would be required to keep it up and running? What’s keeping this green house warm?
> Our medical system is very good at treating acute problems, but very poor at treating chronic issues. It is generally not holistic, and there are blinders in the paradigms that prevent researchers from looking into effective treatments. Furthermore, in the US, medical care is in a runaway feedback loop between insurers and providers, significantly increasing costs
I wouldn’t use the American system as a basis for a critique of modern medicine. Every other developed country is able to avoid the mess you described.
> But the main thing is: sustainability is _not_ enough. That is essentially saying, "do less harm". Baked into that paradigm is that the harm from our current practices is inevitable, so we should strive to do the least amount of harm with that inevitability.
> Instead, we should be looking at regenerative practices, and one that is not anthropocentric. It requires a different way of seeing. We don't have to "regress". We can do a lot better.
You are going to have to be more concrete than that. Every living creature consumes resources from their environment and every creature will destroy their native environment unless held in check by predators or some other external limiting factor. Humans are the only animals to understand this, so we have the ability to moderate consumption.
>> But then we use that drinking-level standard water to (1) water our landscape and (2) flush the toilet.
> Doing otherwise would require a massive duplicate water distribution network for non-drinkable water.
No, we don't. Water can be cycled onsite for other uses. It does not require anything massive or a duplicate water distribution network. For example, a Y-switch can be used on the outflow from a washingmachine, with one fork distributing it to the landscaping.
> That sounds labour intensive and non-scalable. How big would this green house/ water recycling solution need to be to power a single apartment building? How many people would be required to keep it up and running? What’s keeping this green house warm?
It's mostly automated, using low-tech, passive methods. The water cycles through the plants on its own. It has the added benefits that you can get fresh food. You would plant perennials, not annuals, that are selected to form cooperative interactions (plant guilds). That significantly reduces the amount of labor to maintain it, though labor is involved for harvesting.
I think you are misunderstanding what the greenhouses in those earthships do. You have to first understand it in context: New Mexico high desert, with extremes in heat and cold. The greenhouses acts as a passive buffer to regulate temperature of the main living areas, and does not require active cooling or heating. Between the sun, the trapped moisture, and the plants own heat regulation biomechanism, it reduces the volatility in temperature extremes.
This type of system does not work without the construction method to build these houses. For other sites, you'd have to come up with different solutions. I don't know, for example, if earthships work in temperate (Mid-West), or extreme colds (Alaska). But I know they will work for most of the Southwest US.
As far as scaling up to something the size of an apartment building, I have no idea. The earthship designs share similar ideas with Arcosanti (in Arizona), which is probably one of the largest scale implementation for passive heating and cooling.
Generally, within a larger pool of people, there are going to some people who are interested in tending the plants. As far harvesting, I think you'd be surprised by how many people would be willing to participate in being able to harvest free, fresh food close to where they live.
> You are going to have to be more concrete than that. Every living creature consumes resources from their environment and every creature will destroy their native environment unless held in check by predators or some other external limiting factor. Humans are the only animals to understand this, so we have the ability to moderate consumption.
That's a false assumption. Although there are plenty of examples of species that will run without check, there are also examples of species that cooperate with each other.
As far as being concrete, what I was talking about is the lens, or the paradigm in which we interpret facts and understand the world. That isn't something concrete.
> If you want to really take meaningful action, choose taking CO₂ out of the air over carbon credits. Even if we reduce to zero tomorrow there is still an excess of carbon dioxide already present in the atmosphere today.
Why not both? Allow companies to buy additional carbon credits from co2 sinks? Allow companies to decide between stopping a harmful industrial process or paying for its externalities.
Fundamentally I agree but only if choosing to do both, not either or.
To truly reverse the emissions an individual or company has, Carbon Removal is really the only way.
Carbon credits _can_ encourage businesses to reduce their emissions (and if a company has money to help - great!) but reducing a third-parties emissions is not a green-light to justify my own wrongdoings.
If I emit a ton and pay credits to offset a ton, a ton is still out there. If I emit a ton and remove a ton I am at net zero emissions.
> If I emit a ton and pay credits to offset a ton, a ton is still out there
The basic idea is to allow companies to ramp down their emissions by releasing fewer credits each year.
I could see a compromise being that one carbon credit is worth a tonne of carbon emissions, but two tonnes of sequestered carbon. So companies would have to pay for the removal of some factor of what they produce.
I disagree, Humans already have a neural interface with AI via the visual cortex and the auditory nerve. You are forming a neural link with an AI when you have a conversation with your Google Home.
I imagine a electrode neural link would with much the same way, but faster and less disruptive. Humans would off load tasks like: information discovery, complex mathematical calculations, and making arrangements for holidays to their AI companion.
The kwown argument that <<you're already a cyborg>> seems to fit nicely with the current status of humanity. The problem I see lies when you decide to integrate these machine learning models (not "sentient" AIs) as part of neural substrate at a convinient broader bandwidth. We are already seen the disasters of biases, filter bubbles and many more to come. There is a huge gap between a cyborg (or Augmented human) and an AGI. The latter doesn't exist yet but we are slowly building it through the links of our mind. That is both the real summoning the demon and quantum leap of faith in evolution.
I see the topics of biased information and neural input bandwidth as unrelated as the current rate of bandwidth is sufficient. As you mentioned, humans have repeatedly demonstrated the ability to whip themselves up into a frenzy throughout all of recorded history. So it’s a bit strange to suggest we shouldn’t adopt a technology on the basis that it might encourage us to do what we are already doing.
Also filter bubbles in media have generally been created by quite basic algorithms that only meet the definition of AI when you really stretch it. You might argue that a more advanced AI might create more toxic bubbles, but it seems to me that our society has just about perfected toxic bubble creation and any further advancements in the field would suffer severely from diminishing returns.
Taking very Elon's words: “This was futile. I tried for years. Nobody listened.”. If going backwards is just not an option, we must be more conspicuous of the dangers of new high tech deployments. I think everyone here share the same feeling: thrill but chilling at the same time. It's Inevitable by the way, on the Kevin Kelly's sense of the word: this is our technium taking shape and we better learn how to deal with it fast, like it or not.
Big difference is that devices that work with these interfaces (i.e. screens and speakers) are loosely coupled and maintain context with the rest of the environment. You can remove yourself from their influence in an instant.
We’ve actually had ways of observing neural signals for quite some time. In order to identify the regions of the brain requiring surgery for epilepsy, patients get electrodes implanted and spend several weeks in hospital. Various researchers have recruited volunteers from this cohort for neural signal studies. A team recently managed to decode speech from neural signals from such a study!
