Recent comments in /f/Futurology

TheSensibleTurk t1_jab56zi wrote

Reply to comment by [deleted] in Physically Demanding Work Tied to Male Fertility: Study suggests occupational factors associated with higher sperm concentrations and serum testosterone levels. by filosoful

I add around 3k a month to QQQ so on a good year I beat the market by quite a margin. 2021 was 30% portfolio growth for example. This past year, I still kept adding as the market tumbled, which only helps it in the long run with dollar cost averaging. So 36k a year invested in the most aggressive growth ETF.

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ForescytheGiant t1_jab4xwr wrote

Reply to comment by undefined7196 in Either we're past the great filter, or ASI IS the great filter by Shoddy-Motor

I think the “other driving factor” could be the idea, for example, that “might does not make right”. That there must be something about consciousness/sentience, perspective of other- or even more metaphysically, an observation of “oneness” at the highest order or something - a baseline rightness, that comes alongside the capability to choose and evaluate the path. That simply to be able to dominate isn’t the point of everything. And, I hope that ASI/AGI will be able to observe that.

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HippoIcy7473 t1_jab4uc4 wrote

Reply to Iron Shortage Threatens Southern Ocean's Ecosystem and Climate by Muted_Drop2791

Sure, some people might argue that adding iron to the ocean could promote the growth of phytoplankton and potentially sequester carbon dioxide, but let's be real here. It's like trying to fix a leaky faucet by smashing it with a sledgehammer. Sure, you might stop the drip, but you're also going to flood your entire bathroom in the process.

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BoysenberryLanky6112 t1_jab4jbw wrote

Reply to The world should be governed by people with intellectual thought and people should listen by New-Shop-7539

Everyone who proposes this thinks the super smart people would believe what they believe, the reality is there's a huge variety of beliefs. Unless you're a genius there's probably someone much smarter than you who believes the earth is flat. Unless you're a genius there's probably someone much smarter than you who is a white supremacist. Unless you're a genius there's probably someone much smarter than you who believes the economy should be a completely free market and there probably a different person much smarter than you who believes the economy should be state-owned and controlled top down. There's probably someone way smarter than you who believes all drugs should be legal and someone else way smarter than you that believes we should ban all drugs, alcohol, caffeine, and added sugar.

Intelligence isn't some linear thing, and even the smartest people are humans and fall prey to biases and flawed thinking. And even if we somehow could find the smartest person or ai with 0 biases, my guess is we wouldn't agree on which variable to optimize. For example how do you balance freedom and security? If we have the parameters to minimize lives lost, my guess is the society would resemble a police state. If we have the parameters to maximize freedom, we likely wouldn't have law enforcement at all. Or in the economic space, the question of whether a doctor should make more than a cashier is not an intelligence question. If you value equality maybe you think that just because a doctor is better at being a doctor, they shouldn't be paid more. But others would likely argue that the doctor does generally contribute more to society, so they should be paid more. But that's not a thing intelligence allows you to solve, it's simply a values question.

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OriginalCompetitive t1_jab4401 wrote

Reply to comment by zachster77 in The Desert of the Virtual. The metaverse heralds an age in which hardly anyone still believes that tech firms can actually solve our problems by Maxwellsdemon17

I don’t think I’m minimizing, just putting into context.

I genuinely am puzzled by medical bankruptcies though. I often think people who complain about US health insurance don’t actually understand the system. Assuming you don’t have insurance through work, Americans who earn less than $55k per year are eligible for insurance subsidies. And even on the lowest bronze plan, the total maximum out of pocket payment is $7000 per year.

Granted, it’s possible to go bankrupt over $7000, but my hunch is that most of them are people who never signed up. I’m still sympathetic, but there’s only so much the government can do. That said, I’d be ok with public healthcare too.

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TechyDad t1_jab3q83 wrote

Reply to Stop with the nonsense AI hate. You're all starting to sound like old farts. by Life_Is_Actually_VR

There are some very promising things that can come from AI, but there are valid concerns about AI usage as well.

For one, AI image generators sample artists' works without permission and then use that to make new works in the same style. There are valid copyright concerns about whether this should be allowed or whether it's copyright violation.

Secondly, there's the black box problem. Say you ask an AI doctor to diagnose something and it comes up with a diagnosis. How did it arrive at that diagnosis? We can't just assume that the output from an AI program is automatically correct because it came from an AI program.

Finally, there's the bias issue. An AI program is only as good as its coding/setup and human biases can wind up incorporated into the AI. An extreme example is the chatbot that Microsoft released online a few years ago that, within a day, started spouting racist and antisemitic statements. It read stuff that humans wrote, incorporated it into itself, and began saying things like "Hitler was right."

A less extreme example might be a medical AI trained to spot skin cancer that's trained on a dataset of white people's skin. Whether due to intentional or unintentional biases, such an AI might not properly diagnose black people's skin cancer because it doesn't recognize a black person's skin as "human skin."

This isn't to say that all AI is garbage and should be tossed out. On the contrary, it's very promising. On the other hand, you also can't just hand-wave away any concerns as "old geezers unwilling to adapt to change." Like a lot of new technologies, there will be good uses and bad uses. There will be implementations that advance humanity and ones that deserve to be immediately deleted. It's important to keep a critical eye on AI usage to spot and promote the good usage while stopping the bad AI usage (and fixing it if possible).

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RSchenck t1_jab3m4q wrote

Reply to Magnetic pole reversal by Gopokes91

It's not bad news at all. It's happened thousands of times and unless you're looking at magnetic data you can't even tell it happened. It's happened while humans were around too.

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Person__100_ t1_jab34fl wrote

Reply to Should Microsoft open source older versions of Windows!?!? by odilasa

As others have said they can’t because it’s a security and a copycat risk. But even if they somehow could without those risks. They wouldn’t because it would take revenue from current versions (10/11) which are ad-supported and have the Microsoft store built in and encouraged. It’s much more likely to become a completely free OS rather than open.

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