This, my friend, is an overly cynical take. You can apply it to your life in any way that serves you. You can imagine it as a good reminder to live life to the fullest, to not let your ego run away from reality, or to give perspective on all the little things we worry about when we consider how many weeks we have left on this planet.

Memento mori.

Just curious, which pen are you planning to get?

I admit I’m on the verge of losing sight of the overall point of this thread. But thinking about it more, I will add that looking at the actual tech curve itself may not be that important, depending on where you draw the line between technology and capability. For example, it may not matter that increase in transistor density is slowing down when global total compute keeps increasing exponentially. Further, how would quantum computing factor into this (the movement in the cryptography space suggests that a post-quantum world is imminent). On the topic of LLMs, would it matter if those stagnate while the ability of companies and states to manipulate us and drown us in misinformation keeps growing exponentially? And how would the advent of AGI factor into this - in some ways that would be the last invention we have to make ourselves. I guess the point is that some advancements, even ones that are just incremental, seem to have an outsized effect on our ability to impact the world around us.

Anyway, I read the article you linked and enjoyed it. It reminded me a bit of Meditations On Moloch, also a good read if you haven’t seen it yet, attempting to explain the behaviors of civilizations.

Fair enough all good points, but the reason we’re all here beyond the natural carrying capacity and eating the planet is because of the exponential tech curve (Haber-Bosch and others) that we’ve been in since discovering fossil fuels. If the energy is there, we will use it to grow at the detriment to everything else, it’s in our nature. If we somehow manage to complete the green energy transition that’s probably even worse for our long term survival, because instead of running out of accessible fossil fuels and being forced to degrow, we’ll keep the growth machine running and accelerate this mass extinction and knock down the rest of the planetary boundaries. All new technologies will allow us to increase the scale of our impacts to the planet.

Thanks for the link, I haven’t read it yet but it looks interesting.

What do you think he’s getting wrong about our predicament? AI wasn’t really a focus in this talk, just showing how we knowingly develop dangerous tools and act against our collective interests because of our system of incentives and multipolar traps.

It will also have a very low attention span and not know anything of substance.

Great video, thanks for posting it.

I find ‘metacrisis’ more descriptive and satisfying for the reasons Daniel talked about in the video - that it’s not just the many crises we face, but the underlying systems that are creating the crises (ie, Moloch). Also, it doesn’t matter if AI is not effective at staving off disaster, as long as it creates value for the market it will be deployed with mind-boggling scale and resource use even as the world burns.

I’m trying to wrap my head around this - I’ve been stuck in the mickey mouse line of business world where a company may have like a few TB of transactional data in a decade - and I kind of want out into the real world. A few questions if you don’t mind, what kind of customer needs this amount of storage, what kind of data is it, and are you mostly building on top of S3?

This sounds interesting. I’m wondering if you could go into any more detail about what you were trying to do with your opening, and what needs you are seeing out there around storage specifically. I have a small software company and I’ve been under the impression that storage is pretty much taken care of at all levels by the existing commodity services, but maybe I’m just talking to the wrong people or missing something important. Thanks.

Society is entering a time of hyperreality, and hypernormalization. We can almost see it happening in real-time.

I’m sure we’ll see new house policies to prevent this exact thing from happening again, but the stupidity of politicians is a force without bounds. I’m curious how you expect CSIS to have prevented this. Do you mean they should get involved with all of the actions of our political bodies, or to somehow stem the deluge of AI-generated divisive content?

Just an aside, but has anyone had the misfortune to have a quick look at the comments over on r/canada or cbc.ca around these articles? The amount of dumb (i.e. simplistic, low information), seething hatred for basically everything, is overwhelming. I can’t tell if this is all bots, or if something weird is coming out of the woodwork, but it seems like we’ve passed some tipping point and I’m starting to feel alarmed at where we are headed. I get this is super embarrassing, but no serious person could think there was malicious intent in this Parliament incident. Fuck-ups and carelessness happen, the guy resigned, time to move on and focus on real issues.

In my experience it’s okay, but not amazing and slowly getting worse year after year for various reasons. Generally speaking if you have a life-threatening issue (heart failure, cancer, etc), you are taken care of as well as anyone could reasonably expect. But for anything else it can take forever to see a specialist and it’s easy to get lost in the system that always seems to be running in capacity crisis mode. There are other countries that do a better job with the single-payer model, mostly those without provincial fiefdoms that insist on doing everything themselves and reinventing all the wheels for political reasons.

We will all need to come to terms with the scope and scale of our predicament - climate change is not ‘the’ problem, it is one facet of the overall collapse of the biosphere that we are causing (see: planetary boundaries). Guaranteeing some livable future for our children will require revolutionary change in our economic systems and our relationship with the environment. Real mitigation will involve: reserving our remaining carbon budget for critical activities (heating our houses, food transport, etc), significant build-out of resilient systems (local sustainable/regenerative agriculture), and preparing for a less complex economy with much lower energy use. We can do this in a controlled way over the next few decades, or in a chaotic way when we are left with no other options. It doesn’t seem like the public is ready or willing to have these conversations yet.

Very detailed and helpful, thanks.

Fall of Civilizations

I haven’t seen this mentioned yet, but it’s incomparably good (if stories about past civilizations is your thing).

Their greenwashed climate change videos really exposed them as a corporate propaganda outlet. I can’t watch them anymore.

You could also try Universal Blue and change images until you find something you like.