It is critical to know the inner reasoning in order to determine whether something understands. A parrot can speak but I do not think anyone believes that it understands what it is saying.

If you understand the concepts behind the words rather than the pattern the words make then you can use logical reasoning to determine new information. An AI trained on word patterns cannot do this and so, faced with a new situation has no clue how to respond and is far more likely to get things wrong. This is why ChatGPT performs so poorly on even simple, first-year university physics questions when asked to explain observations or results...and this is with situations that are known and have happened before. Being able to take concepts and using them to logically extrapolate what will happen in different situations is a key hallmark of intelligence and that is something that current AI simply cannot do.

What do you mean by "long periods of time"? Various models of resource allocation, some of them egalitarian, managed to sustain themselves for ~200,000 years before capitalism came along. Capitalism has been around for maybe a few hundred years (depending on how you define "capitalism"; if you're thinking of industrial capitalism in particular, even less time than that), and there are already serious questions about whether it can avoid exhausting the resources that made its growth possible. Will capitalism as it exists now really be able to survive for the next 200,000 years?

The point _was_ made: "constant rate" means that the rate of expansion remains the same with time. What you are talking about is a _common_ rate of expansion. The summary says that they are considering variations in the rate as a function of position but, by saying that the rate is constant that inplies that it does not vary with time and that is wrong: we know from multiple supernova studies that the expansion is accelerating. This even gave is a new possible "end of the universe" scenario: the "big rip" where in the incredibly distant future if the expansion keeps accelerating then possibly at somepoint the causally connected region of the universe might shrink to the planck scale at which point space-time itself will become impossible although this is all highly hypothetical since we do not understand what is driving the expansion.

Then we would know because while the universe refuses to define a common zero for velocity (velocity is relative), it absolutely does define a common zero acceleration.

The models have errors and uncertainties, including about when we might hit various tipping points.

The fear is that the "alarmists" were wrong, and the climate is warming faster than they thought.

Atmospheric CO2 takes a very long time to drop (and we're still adding more) and when pollution dropped more sunlight got through and raised temps slightly.

Sorry if that's too complicated for you.

Don't worry, the average intelligence jumped way up after you dropped.

The prof was assuming you were smart enough to understand that everyone would know the sun warms the earth.

He was saying that sun's output was constant enough to have no effect.

I hope you can take some solace in the fact that the average person is still apparently much smarter than you.

The world is full of folks with impressive credentials, it's inevitable a few of them will dive headfirst into crackpot theories for a variety of reasons.

Not to say this guy is a crackpot, but what he's claiming should be pretty easy to demonstrate to credible outside experts. That he hasn't done that rings many alarm bells.

I'm baffled by people who insist on taking statements completely literally when it's obvious that's not what the speaker meant. Especially when the person in question actually explains what the statement means!

"What if the statistical connections that we are basing our predictions on are no longer valid?"

ie, the scientist who obviously understands that nature changes, is worried because this current change isn't really predicted by current models. If the warming keeps up that means the models are wrong in the way we really don't want them to be wrong and that's bad news.

California has level 4 taxis (which have had problems) but few (if any) level 3 consumer cars. So I'm not sure what data you think BC should be using.

You really need folks to spell out the concerns with untested level 3 cars?

For someone complaining about data it seems to have eluded you that level 3 vehicles are so new that they haven't even made it to the Canadian market.

It means common sense. Before deploying level 3 cars on public roads they want more data.

When reasonable people have a reasonable expectation that the new product may be more dangerous and they don't want to wait for a bunch of fatalities to occur to stop it.

I'm not sure your intuition is correct. Sure the supply of work isn't infinite but it does increase when productivity goes up.

Look at a website designer, in the early 90s you were writing HTML and CSS by hand, drawing icons with crappy editors, etc, etc.

Now, you've got crazy libraries and full-fledged website builders, I'm guessing a modern web designer is MUCH more productive.

The result? There's waaay more website designer jobs out there, that's partially because the Internet is bigger, but also because you get way more value for your cash buying a website designer now.

Some of the same will be happening with software dev. Sure, some companies that doesn't see any need to do more than they're currently doing may cut staff, but a lot of other companies will realize that the software project/product they were thinking of is now viable.