Yep - I like to phrase it as "AI is better at most tasks than most people". AI will still be beat at experts at specific tasks, but in general I find it to be better than me at the areas where I have no expertise. It's the ultimate generalist.
It might be cheaper when internalizing the externalities of CO2 emissions. Once/If we start properly taxing the impact of these emissions, this plane could offer much cheaper flights then fossil fuel driven competition.
I agree that it's not easy, but we could in theory use solar energy, which is abundant and cheap. I.e. We can use different energy than the one we got out of the fossil fuels we burned.
> I.e. We can use different energy than the one we got out of the fossil fuels we burned.
We're talking about using more energy than the one we got from the fossil fuels we burned, right? So that means that on top of replacing fossil fuels with renewables, we would need to more than double it in order to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
This, in itself, is impossible. Already we won't be able to replace fossil fuels entirely, we will just end up with less energy in total. We most certainly won't end up with twice as much.
And that's assuming that we could extract the CO2 from the atmosphere with close to the amount of energy we got by burning it in the first place. Which is wrong. CO2 in the atmosphere is actually very costly to extract in terms of energy.
It's not that it's not easy. It's practically impossible.
The total annual CO2 budget of the earth is tremendous; less than 5% of CO2 emissions each year into the atmosphere are from humans. Volcanism, photosynthesis, and other natural sources outweigh humans by far. In numbers, ballpark 730gigatons from natural sources and about 30gt from humans.
If you look at the amount the CO2 levels increase each year in the atmosphere, you'll find that they net increase by 16gt per year or so.
Implying that if we ceased all human CO2 emissions, the atmospheric levels would start recovering at around half the rate they're currently increasing.
This is an absurd statement. Lets use bank accounts instead of CO2 to point out the absurdity.
Imagine every year a company makes $730,000 in revenue but spends $730,000 on various expenses. Its bank balance doesnt change because the income and expenses cancel out.
Now suppose the company starts receiving an additional $30,000 every year while its expenses stay the same. At the end of each year, its bank balance increases by $30,000.
By your logic, someone could argue: "That extra $30,000 can't be responsible for the growing bank balance because it's less than 5% of the company's total annual cash flow of $760,000."
That's obviously nonsense. The bank balance grows *entirely because of the net imbalance*, not because the extra income is a large fraction of the gross cash flowing through the account.
The carbon cycle works the same way. Natural emissions and natural uptake are both enormous and are approximately in balance. That 730 gigatons of CO2 released by natural sources has a corresponding 730 gigatons of CO2 capture from natural sinks. Its human emissions of CO2 that are the extra deposit that creates an ongoing imbalance, and that's why atmospheric CO2 continues to rise.
Also photosynthesis is not a source of CO2, on the contrary it's one of, if not the biggest carbon sink, reclaiming a significant portion of that 730 gigatons of CO2 released by volcanos and other sources.
> The bank balance grows entirely because of the net imbalance
Yes, this is my whole point. You wrote a long condescending comment accusing me of being a climate denier that fully agrees with me.
My point is that the actual amount of atmospheric increase per year is less than the amount humans put into the atmosphere per year, so 1) obviously humans are responsible for CC, and 2) could stop it at any time by dropping emissions below the amount the atmospheric increase amount.
It's unclear which message you're trying to convey, but your math checks out.
The net CO2 impact of natural processes is -19Gt/yr. Humans add +37G/yr for a net +18Gt. If we stopped everything, you'd expect -19Gt/yr; however, natural sinks like the ocean will start off-gassing, cutting the improvement to about half.
Because of how long this switch will take, most IPCC options need 100 to 1000 Gt of net CO2 removal by the end of the century to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees.
Well I agree on that. And even if we cut them to zero, the temperatures will not go down. So the very best we can hope is to keep the temperatures at the current level, and that's assuming that we cut all our emissions.
And the fact remains that we would need unreasonable amounts of energy to extract CO2 from the atmosphere (it was suggested with solar panels and stuff).
I didn't know that if we completely cut emissions, then CO2 would go down (and temperature would not during our lifetime, but they would at least stop rising). But "humans extracting CO2 from the atmosphere to compensate for their emissions" is impossible for the reasons I mentioned.
Very napkin math shows that annual energy consumption from fossil fuels is 500 exajoules. Every day the earth receives 15,000 exajoules in solar energy.
So to cover double the energy consumption of fossil fuels with solar we need to cover 0.2% of the surface in solar. Compare to around 10% covered in farmland.
Again, very back of the envelope math, but in my opinion this does not seem impossible.
It depends - if you are looking to raise potentially billions of dollars, showing that you are contributing at SOTA level in GenAI through papers could be a good strategy.
At the same time, there's some commonality for what words mean in different contexts. For example, even though we all have our own experiences with the concept of "dog", there's a common core where we have enough of an understanding what other people refer to as "dog" to allow discussing the concept. Likewise, for most people, dog is more similar to cat than to house.
Imagine if we could build a machine that reads a bunch of texts and tries to extract this meaning by looking at which words commonly co-occyr with other words in different contexts. Perhaps something interesting would happen...
Yes, but the qualia could be completely different and we'd never know.
For all I know you don't just have a completely different experience of red, but a complete different experience of geometry and spacetime.
Your subjective experience of vision could be a mirror of my own. But we'd both still associate "right" with the same half of the body.
You might not "feel" curves and lines the same way.
As long as everyone's mappings and weights are identical, the qualia themselves could be anything.
We assume the qualia would at least be recognisable, and they can't be too different because there has to be a common core of experience categories, with recognisably consistent relationships.
But beyond that - anything works.
This isn't a hypothetical because once you get into politics and ethics, the consistent relationships disappear. There are huge differences between individuals, and this causes a lot of problems.
But mining costs are (cost of equipment+cost of electricity)/total coins mined, so can miners not end up in a situation where they need to keep mining to pay off equipment despite the individual coins being unprofitable?
reply