It didn't. They didn't have to say that in the first place.

Employ them. That's what China will do. The two or three "lost generations" is a developed world problem coming from an uncompetitive labor force.

Because school kids would be forced to memorize a few hundred planets, if measures weren't taken. There was no reason to care that there were a lot of new planets. That's actual science. Now, our "scientific vocabulary" includes "dwarf planets" that aren't "planets". It's just dumb.

Exceptions like "this rule only works for one star system"?

Hasn't been a problem so far.

I'm speaking of 50 years from now, assuming we don't place a higher priority on global warming than we do on overpopulation and global poverty.

You know, it's not that hard to set up betting markets to pay out for this kind of stuff. For example, the US DARPA tried to create such a market, the Policy Analysis Market for a variety of foreign policy events, including climate change related stuff. They got shot down hard by a couple of political clowns because it was going to cause political assassinations or something.

Punishing people for having the wrong opinions seems all too common in this debate, but if you want sensible argument then throw some securities on a stock market which pay out one way, if climate change predictions come true and pays out a different way if those climate change predictions come out false. I think that will give you the best possible predictions for this sort of thing.

And I can imagine that it won't. After all, those hundreds of millions of people are going to move and rebuild infrastructure several times each over that period of time. Some of those moves will just be uphill.

Overpopulation has been a factor probably since the dawn of humanity. It's not that hard to reproduce to the point where you've reached the carrying capacity of the local environment.

Similarly, we've probably been affected by climate change over that same interval. It's just now that part of that climate change is human induced and maybe a bit faster changing than before. It's not otherwise significantly different.

We made a best possible world. If I'm still alive then, I'll ask in turn, why do they think that a climate fixed at 1850 would somehow be better than the very concrete advances that have been made in the past 50 years. For example, we're in the eleventh year of New Earth, the first time in humanity's millions of years of past, where the population of humanity has declined, year to year via mostly peaceful, prosperous, democratic means rather than via the sword, disease, and death. This trend wouldn't have even started, if we had sacrificed our prosperity for a temporary environmental stability.

Similarly, we're in a situation where less than 100 million people can barely afford to eat. That used to be a billion people 50 years ago. Are you going to tell me that 50 years ago was better?

We were told that we were going to lose a lot of arable land. We sort of did. Some of it is under water and some of it takes more irrigation than it used to. OTOH, we have more arable land than we did back then.

Global trade is another area where things have gotten better. Due to the passage over the Arctic Ocean, those poor, suffering nations of Europe now have two weeks better access to Far East products and the greatest economic engine of the world, than they used to. Just imagine how much worse off they'd be, if we were still shipping products to them via the Panama Canal.

I'd also play a game of "where are we now"? The areas which embraced environmentalism at any cost, such as California or the EU, faced decades of economic disaster and corruption. They're still around, but they're significantly inferior in their economies and even in the actual quality of their environments(!) to the eastern coast of China, which need I add, had pollution so bad that you often couldn't see the sky. That's a pretty big change for 50 years.

I find it amusing at this point 50 years in the future that there are still lots of people throughout the world advocating for radical climate restoration back to that long ago year of 1850 even though we now have 50 more years of evidence that it's simply a very bad idea, both for us and for the environment.

There, you go. That's what I'd tell people 50 years from now. And need I add that if we do the same exercise as the grievance-seeking generation for the past 50 years, we'd be hard pressed to find someone to blame for not making our current world better than it could be. I'd go with the Communists, but aside from that, the results have been pretty damn good.

The two videos you link to are both remarkably stupid and wrong. For example, the first video asserts without thought or evidence that a "global depression" is better than elevated levels of extreme weather. No, you have to actually evaluate those costs to see which is worse. Deliberately inducing a permanent global depression is not necessarily the lower cost - especially if you continue to double down by using that same broken decision making process to make more such dumb decisions. The big missing decision is that we can gather more information and evaluate these actual risks rather than merely listen to what the worst predictors have to claim.

The second video asserts that a variety of disasters due to US mismanagement of resources, poor flood insurance policies which encourage building in flood-prone areas, and a century of aggressive forest fire control is all due to global warming.

Funny, you should mention "meaningless playing with words". You redefine three important concepts: "intelligence", "existence", and "self-awareness" in ways that just aren't relevant.

"Existence" is the most broken concept. I'm currently sitting in a chair. By that observation, I can determine that the chair exists. Since it exists, then it must have in your sense enough "self-awareness", which puts a really, really low threshold on the amount of self awareness and intelligence that a thing needs in order to exist. None seems to be the absolute minimum threshold here.

Similarly, intelligence is not the capacity for self-awareness. Instead, it is:

If we are to speak of the narrow category of the things having to do with learning or understanding aspects of oneself, then I suggest that wisdom is a closer label than intelligence.

And of course, this brings up the obvious point that if we have a machine that can fulfill the definition of intelligence far better than humans can, even if it has absolutely no self awareness (say due to deliberate programming of that blind spot for safety, efficiency, or ethical reasons), then of course, it is more intelligent than we are.

Let's not get ahead of ourselves. It's kind of like someone claiming they know all about human conflict or perhaps making an aircraft carrier just because they play checkers.

Your argument would be reasonable, IF we didn't already have thousands of years of evidence of human technology improving human intelligence. But since we do, well, there's no point to your argument.

Humans don't need to be self aware either. But it happened.

Unless, you know, it isn't. You don't need a module to do heuristics.

Religion doesn't work that way. God's steering development, so the AI is going to be more perfect.

Like driving on one side of the road is a religion?