skunk_ink

skunk_ink t1_jczunfw wrote

This is the thing that people seem to be blind to. Even if carbon capture was meeting its targets, fossil fuel use must also be reduced in order to stop the planet from further degradation. Yet some how most people seem to be completely oblivious to this and think carbon capture means we can keep using fossil fuels. It's absolutely fucking insane.

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skunk_ink t1_j9x62ij wrote

>But the thing is we just don't know when AGI is coming, maybe a long way off.

This is what I feel a lot of people don't get. We have literally no idea what the threshold for consciousness is. We don't even know how to identify it in other humans let alone another species. Without knowing what that threshold is, there is absolutely no way for us to determine how close or far away from it we are. All we do know is that if and when AI reaches that level, it will intellectually outpace humans at a significant rate.

When the first atomic bomb was created, scientists knew precisely under what conditions a nuclear reaction would go critical. Now imagine if those scientists had absolutely no way of know when or if the reaction would go critical and blow up in their face. That is exactly what we are doing with AI. Racing towards a criticality point which we cannot identify.

Long story short, it could happen in 10 years or 100 years. We literally have no means knowing when.

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skunk_ink t1_j9x4zep wrote

>My work is facilitating a particular type of technical safety audit (HAZOP) in the process engineering industry.

You had me here. I was about to jump in pointing out that things like auditing is probably one of the easier tasks for AI. Glad I read the rest before commenting though because I think you're spot on with what you said. Lots of things could be replaced by AI, but until AI becomes more advanced and lower cost to train, many of those applications just won't be feasible from a financial point of view.

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skunk_ink t1_j2bteku wrote

I remember reading a study on this and they found most people imagine the characters to be remarkably similar. It really isn't that surprising to me either. Books can be quite descriptive of a characters physical features. So as long as the writing is detailed enough, readers should have some what similar image in their head of what characters look like. I'm currently unable to find the study again, but will update if I do.

Now as for the scenery you are probably correct. It's a lot harder to describe every detail of a scene.

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skunk_ink t1_it5cfqy wrote

>No it isn't! Either there are protocols for handling it safely and humans are capable of that, or they aren't!

They absolutely are different.

First of all the military industrial complex has very little to no oversight. They are accountable to no one but themselves and it usually takes decades before information is declassified and the world finds out about their crimes. The nuclear power industry on the other hand is heavily regulated and has lots of public oversight. If something goes wrong it is not long before the public knows about it.

In addition to no oversight, the production of fuel for nuclear weapons results in a lot more long lasting radioactive waste like Plutonium-239. Nuclear energy reactors do not. The majority of waste from nuclear reactors has very short half-life with Strontium-90 and Cesium-137 being the longest lasting of the waste which have a half-life of ~30 years. Plutonium-239 on the other hand has a half-life of 24,000 years and the greatest quantities of it comes from the production of nuclear weapons.

In addition to all of this, most of the high-level waste (other than spent fuel) generated over the last 35 years has come from reprocessing fuel from government-owned plutonium production reactors and from naval, research and test reactors. A small amount of liquid high-level waste was generated from reprocessing commercial power reactor fuel in the 1960s and early 1970s. There is no commercial reprocessing of nuclear power fuel in the United States at present; almost all existing commercial high-level waste is unreprocessed spent fuel.

>There is waste everywhere and the remnants from the accidents are poisoning all of humanity.

No, radiation is not poisoning all of humanity. Unlike other things such as the burning of fossil fuels, nuclear waste can be contained to one area and properly disposed of underground.

>I might be more willing to separate the two if not for Fukushima.

You know the majority of the land around Fukushima is already safe to inhabit, right? It is only the plant itself and the area directly surrounding the plant which is still dangerous. In addition to this, not a single death was caused by radiation. Hell even the majority of Chernobyl has less radiation that the majority of popular beaches around the world.

Please do more research into this before continuing to chime in. Your opinions on the subject are grossly mislead.

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skunk_ink t1_it0i5cy wrote

This article is useless. All they really say is that there was 22 times the expected amount of lead 210. So what was the expected amount? Were they expecting normal background amounts? If so 22 times higher than background is nearly the same as having a high seafood diet. Were they expecting higher than background? If so how much?

What a useless report.

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