There are certainly those kind of irrational AI boosters out there. Though I strongly suspect the AI bubble is much like the crypto bubble, in that the true believers are vastly outweighed by fakers who don’t believe their own bullshit and are just hyping the product to make money.

When it comes to the billionaire caste, though, I think most of them know AI isn’t, and probably won’t, live up to the hype.

But the point isn’t to actually replace people with AI.

The point is to replace free people with serfs.

We’re already seeing AI being used as an excuse to replace American workers with foreign workers overseas. That is to say, American companies fire a bunch of well-paid American software engineers, “replace” them with AI tools, and then when the tools inevitably fail, hire much cheaper labor from India.

And the techbro support of Trump’s immigration crackdown has the same goal. They don’t want to bring foreign workers to the United States and pay them salaries sufficient to live in the United States - they want their workers trapped in countries with low wages and low cost of living.

Now expand that to, basically, every other working class sphere of employment. AI can’t replace workers. But if enough businesses can be convinced to fire workers and try to replace them with AI, we will get mass unemployment, economic collapse, and political turmoil - and, as always in a collapse, the ultra-rich will get even richer, because the unemployed working class will be forced to sell whatever they have at fire sale prices, and the billionaire caste will be able to buy up land and houses and businesses cheap, and consolidate even more wealth in their caste.

And when the dust settles, the unemployed masses will be desperate to work at whatever wage and conditions the billionaire caste wants to set.

I mean, if saving seeds wasn’t dangerous to the powers that shouldn’t be, Monsanto wouldn’t have made it illegal.

God, fuck ethanol. Last I checked it literally took 1.5 gallons of oil/gas to produce 1 gallon of ethanol. It turns more fuel into less fuel and pisses away soil fertility doing it.

I read an article some time ago arguing the purpose of ethanol (and ag subsidies in general) is, consciously or unconsciously, manifest destiny - we have to have a “use” for all the land we stole, we have to do something with it even if that something is a complete waste, because otherwise, people might start asking why we don’t give it back. Seems more likely to me all the time.

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I like to ask bloodmouth concern trolls “what would convince you to go vegan?”

And when they come back with some soft appeaser bullshit, “you clearly know that information, so why hasn’t it convinced you to go vegan?”

messy and expensive.

Expensive for whom, though?

The American people will pay the cost, in blood and tax money, for occupying Venezuela.

Big Oil, weapons manufacturers, and the Trump crime family, will reap the profits from it.

(Edit: and yes of fucking course the Venezuelan people will suffer far more than Americans safe in the imperial core. I thought that was so obvious it didn’t need to be fucking said.)

Every American invasion and occupation is another massive wealth transfer from the poor to the rich.

Socialism for the rich, rugged capitalism for the poor, isn’t that the saying?

That’s actually a part I don’t disagree with. Local short-term problems still do need to be solved. They are the symptoms of the underlying disease that is the global capitalist economy, and we have to fight the disease instead of just fighting the symptoms - but if you don’t treat the symptoms, you might end up dying before you can treat the disease.

And, also, the personal is political. People will see the impacts of climate change on their communities, and people will commit the time and effort to adapt to those impacts locally, and that will make people more willing to vote for the national and global collective action we need even more badly.

Credibility and popularity are necessary. Getting people involved and committed on the local level is the first step to getting people involved and committed on the global level.

If climate leaders lead people in that transition instead of stopping at the local level and saying “hey, we rented some solar panels from this fossil fuel megacorp that branched out into solar power, everything’s good now, go back to consuming as usual”.

I think it underestimates the value of climate mitigation. A focus on reducing emissions may not save us from a 3 degree world - and a 5 degree world after that, and a 10 degree world after that - but it could delay those milestones and give us more time to adapt. For example, I think a 40-foot rise in sea level is inevitable in the next few centuries - even a two degree rise guarantees both the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets melt - but delaying that 40-foot rise from 2080 to 2150 makes a huge difference in our ability to prepare for it and in the lives of people living in the flood zone now.

I also think climate change is a symptom of the underlying disease of capitalism/technofeudalism. Local and community resilience efforts treat the symptom but leave the disease free to run rampant in new and horrible ways.

(Imagine: a city puts in battery backup in case of grid failure, but the megacorp manufacturing the batteries forces them to use its proprietary software and pay service fees, and when the grid goes down the megacorp hits the city with millions in extra fees and threatens to turn off the power if they don’t pay.)

Why do people act like not using a gas powered stove is akin to stripping away some fundamental right?

Because change is bad.

I’m not (just) being snarky. People get defensive when something important to them changes, even if the change is for the better.

And food, and cooking food, is extremely important to most people.

I agree with you, and that’s why I think the US government specifically will let the AI bubble burst - so that the feds can buy up all those data centers for pennies on the dollar (and a promise to look the other way at all the pumping and dumping and insider trading the hyperbillionaires did to come out ahead in the AI crash).

“Hydrogen economy” believers.

Factual accuracy.

Pick one.

I’m just hung up on the proffered idea that LLMs are actually going to replace anybody in an efficient sustainable way, or even reach AGI someday.

I share your concern with that point, to some degree. On the other hand, Cory Doctorow makes a great point: an AI cannot do your job as well as you can, but a salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI, because it’ll make your boss money:

The promise of AI – the promise AI companies make to investors – is that there will be AIs that can do your job, and when your boss fires you and replaces you with AI, he will keep half of your salary for himself, and give the other half to the AI company.

And even if AI is shit at your job, the cost savings from not paying humans means corporations will still make more money providing a shitty AI product than a good human product, just like corporations make more money now selling shitty mass produced plastic crap than they do quality products from skilled workers.

And from there you get mass unemployment and all the social and cultural impacts therefrom.

(What is your view on why billionaires are pushing AI? I think it’s a combination of “number go up” and an excuse to build the data centers the surveillance state needs for mass real time facial recognition, travel monitoring, and conversation recording/sentiment analysis, but that’s just me.)

I think not violating people’s privacy with technological data collection is a technological issue, not a political one. Because you can have a society without capitalism or the state, you can have incredibly strong social norms governing privacy and the use of people’s data, but as long as that society is collecting and storing information about individual people, that information can still be leaked, stolen, or misused by whoever controls it.

(I mean, imagine somebody in smart city IT has some sort of personal issue or conflict with another citizen and decides to abuse their access to data collection to gather information about that citizen. Even in an anarchist utopia we’d still have stalkers, domestic violence, controlling partners, child custody disputes, and all the ways people in relationships hurt each other that come with humans being human.)

The only way to guarantee data collection doesn’t violate people’s privacy is to not collect data capable of violating people’s privacy - that is, don’t deploy systems that can collect that data at all.

And that restricts the type of data that can be collected so much that, I think, it rules out most of the benefits of a “smart city”.

Open source code for public infrastructure is extremely important, I agree. But it’s not sufficient. If data about individual people is collected by a smart city at all, or even capable of being collected by the hardware the smart city deploys, no matter what the laws are around it or how much you trust the current government, it could be exploited by a future, less ethical government, or stolen by third parties.

I think the examples you gave would be good ways to gather data for smart city management without collecting data about individual people that could be misused, but the way surveillance is implemented now, that sort of data collection is dangerous.

For example, a sensor that triggers a traffic light is great, but currently just about every major intersection in every major city in the US already has license plate cameras for traffic enforcement. So any smart city program is going to incorporate those license plate cameras, because why would they spend money installing new sensors when they already have perfectly good cameras? And then those cameras will be used for police and immigration enforcement and other privacy violating data collection even more efficiently than they’re already being used.

One aspect of a “smart city” is a system to constantly monitor a lot of data streams about its residents and use that data to allocate the city’s resources more efficiently in real time or better plan future upgrades to city infrastructure.

This obviously raises a lot of surveillance concerns. Some of it could be done in a manner that respected people’s privacy, with, for instance, extensive algorithmic anonymization of data and strict limits on what data is permanently recorded, but that requires a lot of trust and oversight and, I think, the benefits are likely not worth the risk of having that data collection system in place.

Another aspect of a smart city is enhanced local participation through e-governance, making it easier for people to know about, suggest, and weigh in on policies impacting their homes and communities. This aspect could be implemented without any kind of surveillance apparatus and has some appealing qualities imho.

So, you know, it depends on what benefit you’re talking about.

I’m not a big fan of leadcore, no.

A really simplified explanation: the wind pushes the kite, which unreels the kite string, which spins the generator shaft to generate electricity.

When the kite string runs out, the kite folds up or changes its orientation so the wind isn’t pushing it anymore, and the generator reels in the kite string. This takes less power than the kite previously generated because the kite isn’t pushing against the wind while it’s being reeled in.

When the kite string is reeled in far enough, the kite catches the wind again, the kite string starts unreeling again, repeat as long as there’s wind.

It’s actually, I think, a really creative implementation of wind power.

If you want to send a vehicle to Mars and then have it come back to planet earth, you have really have to take double the fuel on the trip.

I think the technofuturists most publicly masturbating about a manned Mars mission were openly talking about making it a one-way trip. They imagined there’d be no shortage of people willing to die on Mars - and had no qualms condemning people to certain death for what would have been the world’s most expensive publicity stunt.

One of the silver linings of the general collapse of, well, everything nowadays, is that the American public no longer cares about manned space travel. We have so many real problems on earth that pissing trillions into the void doesn’t catch the world’s imagination anymore.

And that’s the “no ethical consumption under capitalism” issue. Sure, you need a house to live in, and goods to purchase, and places to buy those goods (ie, malls and other commercial stuff). But how can you absolve yourself from blame for purchasing necessities and not offer that same grace to the companies that produce those necessities for you?

Pointing fingers and placing blame is a distraction. The right thing to do is for you to reduce your environmental impact where you can, purchase goods from the least bad producers, and encourage others to do the same.