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I think you’re right about the repeatable nature of innovation, but this isn’t just about individuals. It’s about the overall impact of innovation on society.

Look at medicine, which I think has clearly shown how innovation can benefit humankind. We lock it up behind capitalist roadblocks, and it’s become a carrot, driving us to exhaustion on low-wage treadmills.

The only innovation accessible, and unencumbered to the masses are useless distractions, driving alienation, and selling u healthy lifestyles.

Meanwhile, money flows upwards to innovators while the majority flounder.

Technology was supposed to democratize success. It seems more like it Feudalzed it.

First and foremost, stop reading stuff that tells you that you are doomed and there is no hope. That stuff is not there to give you a realistic understanding of the world. It's there to make you paralyzed and perpetually clicking on things while exerting no actual effort toward any kind of positive change in the real world.

I'm not exaggerating. Doom-bait is engineered by marketing firms and algorithms to give you all the thoughts you just wrote out, and to do nothing about any of it. That's not a metaphor or hyperbole. They literally sit around and figure out how to achieve this effect, because it makes you more profitable to them.

There is even a term for this in the social media biz, although I forget what it's called. Induced amotivation or something?

So first things first, if you're drinking poison, first thing you do is stop drinking the poison. You don't need to answer the question, "well but how is this poison going to get drunk if I don't drink it?" or "how will I find other poison to drink if I stop drinking this poison?"

You are allowed to just stop!

Next, you are already interested in energy and climate change, there is a huge amount of work to do there. And there is a huge amount of work already going on. Who near you is working on renewable energy? Maybe you can volunteer to help them with what they do. Whether it is political organizing or literally setting up solar panels, anything you learn and any experience you gain will be helpful. Maybe there are other defossilization efforts you can be a part of. You do not need to build by yourself a huge space mirror 1000km wide that saves humanity or whatever. You will at least need a university degree first, in order to do that!

For now you can start smaller.

Big changes are possible. They happen. The thing is, they usually involve the work of many thousands and hundreds of thousands of regular people all acting toward a common goal. Eventually you get treaties and people in expensive suits signing things and shaking hands and so on but those moments are built on top of the foundation laid by regular people each doing small work over time.

So you can start by being one of those people, in your own small way. It all counts.

(And don't forget to stop drinking the poison.)

The social media boom has largely failed to acknowledge that at the end of the day, everything happens in the real world.

The social media tech sector is almost its own foreign nation, and it's luring the best and brightest minds away with the (fickle) promise of work-from-home and the (relative) safety of job-hopping from one wild venture to another. It's been this way consistently since the dotcom boom.

The result is severe understaffing in the jobs - college-educated, far from brute labor - most needed to fix physical problems. Welding and weld inspection, CNC machining, engineering, architecture, data science - these fields need smart people, and they're already being poached by oil companies and the military-industrial complex before the promise of a work-from-home job lining Zuck or Bezos' pockets. This leaves precious few new members in the trades needed to fix our cities, bridges and railroads.

In the promise of the Metaverse and the social media sphere writ large, it's safer to avoid the ugliness and weight and cost of the physical world and opt instead for a code-monkey 9 to 5 and Minecraft on your time off.

You need to take a longer view of history. Is life better now than 20 years ago, what about 50 years ago? We are actually living through the most prosperous time in the entirety of human history. If you live in a developed country, you've got access to things that king's would dream about a few hundred years ago.

All this doom and gloom is just clickbait.

Every couple articles is about how AI is going to change the world but Tech firms can't change the world?

I don't think you can have it both ways!

all of these click-bate articles end the same way:

> However, more research is required to fully understand the physics behind the interaction between perovskites and metal and dielectric substrates..

No they can't. I think a fair metric is to judge the rate of robotic progress by the state of robotic vacuum cleaners and it's not that impressive that you're going to come anywhere even remotely close to having like 39% of jobs potentially on The Chopping Block no less that you would actually have the robots made in enough Surplus in 10 years to threaten those Industries as the headline might suggest.

Also if you're just talking about fake AI/maxhinr learning using code to replace white collar workers sitting at desks then you're not talking about robots you just talking about better apps.

Well, I say, start with delivering certain hot cocktail to everyone in top 1%, maybe top 5%, and lets not forget about politicians either, then we can redefine whole socio/economic system, redistribute public budget more towards education, environment, infrastructure etc. instead of military.

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The following submission statement was provided by /u/nastratin:

The Environmental Protection Agency recently gave a Chevron refinery the green light to create fuel from discarded plastics as part of a “climate-friendly” initiative to boost alternatives to petroleum. But, according to agency records obtained by ProPublica and The Guardian, the production of one of the fuels could emit air pollution that is so toxic, 1 out of 4 people exposed to it over a lifetime could get cancer.

>That kind of risk is obscene,

said Linda Birnbaum, former head of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

>You can’t let that get out.

That risk is 250,000 times greater than the level usually considered acceptable by the EPA division that approves new chemicals. Chevron hasn’t started making this jet fuel yet, the EPA said. When the company does, the cancer burden will disproportionately fall on people who have low incomes and are Black because of the population that lives within 3 miles of the refinery in Pascagoula, Mississippi.

Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/11da9s2/this_climatefriendly_fuel_comes_with_an/ja7f6ap/

I've wanted a robot butler since the Rocky movies came out!

"I wanted a sports car, not no walking trash can!" ―Paulie

Then what’s all the hullabaloo? You don’t hear people up in arms about automated cooking, cashiering, everything… nobody is defending those workers. But AI in art? Everyone loses out.

What exactly are they beating?

Those ideas and the best and most innovating techs usually comes from universities or government agencies like DARPA or NASA.

Im curious as well. I could see sometime down the road, the Star Trek idea. Positronic brain, though with technology we have. I would think more of a quantum brain but that’s so far away it’s laughable. So with what we can do, I’m extremely curious as to what would become.

We assume it will have a motive, why? Our drive is organic, the need to further the species. What does a mind without ANY emotion need or want?

I’m not sure we can even comprehend what the singularity will be like. I feel like we are very close. Often wonder if we will even know when it happens. It’s a confusing idea personally.

DHL already ordered the robot arms for unloading trucks from Boston dynamics and their robot dog has been available for purchase for over a year. These things will only get cheaper over time and competition will catch up and lower the price.

The Environmental Protection Agency recently gave a Chevron refinery the green light to create fuel from discarded plastics as part of a “climate-friendly” initiative to boost alternatives to petroleum. But, according to agency records obtained by ProPublica and The Guardian, the production of one of the fuels could emit air pollution that is so toxic, 1 out of 4 people exposed to it over a lifetime could get cancer.

>That kind of risk is obscene,

said Linda Birnbaum, former head of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

>You can’t let that get out.

That risk is 250,000 times greater than the level usually considered acceptable by the EPA division that approves new chemicals. Chevron hasn’t started making this jet fuel yet, the EPA said. When the company does, the cancer burden will disproportionately fall on people who have low incomes and are Black because of the population that lives within 3 miles of the refinery in Pascagoula, Mississippi.

The following submission statement was provided by /u/Maxwellsdemon17:

"Gradually, a certain sense has been percolating in Silicon Valley that might be described as a “strange shrinking of the Utopian consciousness,” to quote the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno. Just a few years ago, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt could still profess a belief that the right approach to technology could “fix all the world’s problems.” Mark Zuckerberg could still argue somewhat credibly for the potential of “connectedness” to fight climate change, pandemics, and terrorism, and the media could still enthuse about “Facebook Revolutions.” By now, confidence in those dreams has eroded. After all the disappointed hopes, deluges of fake news and hate speech, whistleblower revelations (including those from Christopher Wylie and Frances Haugen), and various antitrust lawsuits, it’s clearer than ever that tech firms have not found the answers to society’s problems, if they were ever looking for them in the first place. In fact, their surveillance-capitalist practices have frequently meant that they themselves are a problem. In this sense, the metaverse might be seen as a logical progression: if you can’t solve problems in the real world, why not create a new one without any? Perhaps it’s not actually the users who are fleeing to the metaverse, but the tech companies themselves.”

Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/11d9l0k/the_desert_of_the_virtual_the_metaverse_heralds/ja7bwdg/

Yeah, I don’t think there can be an AI with emotions like us. The whole assumption that it might like us and care for us. There are whole pathways in the brain that get stimulated by endocrine systems electrochemically that just don’t doesn’t exist in an electronic system.

I again, don’t think that AI consciousness will be even recognizable for us. We just don’t know how it would look and behave.

It might never develop some more organic tendencies. Why would it ever decide it needs to perpetuate itself, keep itself alive?

>Most parents will be retired before AI becomes a threat to jobs.

Oh, you sweet summer child...

AI doesn’t need you , you wrote a loooong and I’m sure boring ( I only read the first and last line ) Post about something that’s irrelevant to anyone.

I swear I saw an article on how Boards would be wise to replace CEOs with AI as all they do is guess the future and pretty much every current AI is better at that task than any human, their jobs are actually very likely to be replaced. Then boards and shareholders get THAT much more money, and they are the real decision makers. Personally I think CEOs are the biggest threat to their profits when compared to AI. Their jobs will be on the block as much as anything else will be.

I don't think that's the take I would make. Zuckerberg is trying to repeat his early success in introducing Facebook, and he just can't do it. Genius doesn't run on an assembly line and sometimes one great idea is all someone has regardless of the resources at their disposal.

I think using that to conclude that tech firms can't innovate and are stuck in a rut that is feeding a burgeoning dystopia is an over generalization. Someone will always come along with a brand new idea or innovation that will help push civilization forward. History is replete with examples.

My issue is, how would one replicate the endocrine system? The area where emotions come from. Imo that would be the hardest thing to do. “feeling” is hard to conceptualize

Super Stonk sub has the answers you seek. And much more.