What do you say to the people who claim that we need gas because it is flexible and fast enough to cope with the high variability of renewables and we need nuclear because we're always going to need base load in quantities that are hard to get otherwise?

Europe has the kind of choice where everything comes with spam. Yes also a Europe citizen.

Yes, I was going to add that, after all, probability is something we conceptualised, as humans, and then we built machines that work on that principle! we worried that the robot will want to kill us and what's the first thing we do when we can build drones? Use them to kill.

I agree that humans mimic LLMs with respect to probability judgements. Marketers know that if you see a "fact" written in a few different articles or sources, you come to assume it's true, for example. We rely on what our culture feeds us and we internalise it as beliefs.

But the other words you mentioned are actually very difficult and deep questions which smart people throughout the ages have wrestled with and we still don't know the answers today. Sentience/the ability to have an experience is the most obvious and direct reality we each have, yet nobody knows how that works.

Yes our minds can remember things we've heard and repeat them like a photocopier or an LLM, but we don't know what is experiencing the whole show.

A carbon price built into the economy, perhaps that means, eventually, resource rationing for every human being. Most of what we do causes pollution or just using something up, even if just fresh water. This is the look in the mirror moment.

We kinda use money but it's so abstract now that it has no connection to the natural environment. And yes what's sand until someone invents a process to coverts it to something useful. But many processes deplete.

Some regenerate, like soil regeneration. So maybe the concept of money creation should be environmental creation insofar as the environment in the end supports humans. If we don't need pandas or house cats then they're not part of the equation except as liabilities. Some environmentalists say we should eat the cats and dogs.

But regenerative farming would be actual wealth creation, as would any environmental intervention which supports our ecosystem for eventual human life.

I imagine this how eventually it'll have to go.

  And having children would have to be costed in as well. Are your children going to be a net contribution to our economy of ecology, or a net drain? It may be that you have to borrow theoretical credits to have children and then train them to be, as an example, regenerate farmers, so they can repay your debt.

So you'd have to show you could train them well in that and that their skills are needed where you live. Dense cities might become a kind of weird luxury as they are mostly consumption machines.

Sounds crazy but the notion of externalities is ultimately about how our money symbols don't represent the environment but a weird story about who is permitted to make promises.

The science around climate change, because it involves complex systems, is so convoluted, that it's going to keep many expert witnesses well paid for a long time to come, if in any way the law has to establish whether it is "true" or not. It's one of the reasons the anti-climate change voices will never go away -- ultimately it is too complex and people simply take a view on what they think is the more likely truth.

Sounds like an emotional reason, so maybe that is the right answer. Often people don't care to admit the real reason as that's a different part of the brain. But who knows.

Everyone now focus on compromising the device instead.

The word communication gets vastly overused, as if the environment will force you to communicate and that'll just work.

What's really meant is empathy, intelligence, and buying into the values and goals and attitudes.

If people are already compatible then you DO NOT NEED TO BE IN THE SAME ROOM. You'll naturally find each other online or on calls as and when needed.

If you have to force people into the same airspace in order to get white collar work done then you don't have a team, you have reluctant and undriven and incompatible people.

That's an extreme example. How about an ordinary example? She seems great, and I feel in love (factually I don't know her whole life story, nor whether she has the genes which make her prone to addiction, nor what psychological damage is lurking in her sub personalities, nor whether she will have fertility problems etc.)

My point is we rely on narratives far more maybe than we realise. Which is why everyone who wants to manipulate, can just focus on using narratives. Hence more "valuable".

That's how I use it and I find it works really well as a lossy search engine.

The brain is not one model trying to do everything.

I think maybe the big mistake that's been made is imagining that intelligence is just one model.

You only have to introspect a bit to realize that when you go through your day you're flipping and changing states between what I guess would be different intelligences.

It probably makes no sense to think of the brain as being a single model.

We have lots and lots of models which are all "trained" or good in some way at doing certain things.

We have mathematical intelligence, emotional intelligence, physical intelligence, and so on.

That's probably because the brain has all these different specialist regions, and there's some interesting new work on the left and right hemispheres as a whole representing two entirely different modes of attention -- ways of attending to the world.

(The old left-right brain thing apparently got it wrong but the new research thinks they've got the real answer.)

I think AIs should be designed as highly specialist models which are really good at doing specific things.

I'm sure it has an uncanny ability to recognise patterns where humans can't see them, given enough training.

Maybe these models are breaking down because they're trying to bring together too many disparate things and they lose structure because there is no one structure which can do them all.

Specialist models with specialist real world problems. The AI "apps".

Narratives are often more valuable than facts. Why did you marry X rather than Y? Why buy brand A rather than B? Why vote for J rather than K? Etc. Most of our lives are a continuous need to make meaning. That's why we're so easy to manipulate.

If material could never be reproduced (reading and remembering) then the material would be worthless to everyone. But if it could always be reproduced with no benefit to its creators, then they could not feed themselves and survive. Where to set the balance is full of detail and difficulty.

LLMs may well need their own special rules. For example, I for one gave up my O'Reilly subscription because now I can get most of that quickly looking up the basics of some tech thing quite quickly from an LLM -- so somehow the AI companies are benefiting and the original publishers are suffering. Those kinds of balances need to be addressed.

Great reminder how often we read something and assume it's true even when it seems outrageous.

I think I should've said in my post that I'm talking about the long-term, and in the long-term technology giving people a slight edge towards the good.

For example, pick any favourite great good person from history, so for sake of argument I'm going to pick the Buddha. He lived 2500 years ago, and explained to people how to develop themselves. And yet, that was thousands of years ago.

Then take an event like the invention of the Guttenberg press. Take the ability to mass print books. Take the invention of the washing machine.

We are all living in a material world, and as important as what is in our hearts is, we're all ultimately constrained by the environment that we live in.

People say trust the science, but every scientist has to keep their jobs and keep feeding their families and do what their funding constraints them to do and report. They're bound by the physical material constraints of the world we live in.

Make communication easier, make survival easier, and it becomes easier for people to do the right thing, rather than just being an impossible task.

Yes, I completely agree that those in power will manipulate technology to their advantage, and if they could put a chip in our brain that controlled our thoughts they would do it, and yet over the centuries and millennia we do seem to gradually creep forward towards the good, not withstanding all the stuff that we still see is terrible in the world today, generally speaking, the past was worse, way worse.

There are billions of people communicating mostly freely on the Internet today. I understand that is this is making all the horrors in the world stand out even more, but there is a saying, that awareness is very helpful.