There is an interesting catch to this argument, which is that in a human body we can eliminate pain by using general anesthesia or nerve blockers. Locally the body still reacts to damage but the actual person doesn’t experience any pain because it isn’t communicated to their consciousness. If we accept that being unconscious precludes experiencing pain then it follows that consciousness is a pre-requisite for pain.

On the other hand if it’s still unethical to inflict damage on a living thing without consciousness then is it unethical to operate on a sedated person even though they don’t consciously experience pain?

I mean same, but inevitably it will also hurt everyone who buys oil which is pretty much everyone in America. Still it has to happen

I genuinely feel like the climate is just a no win situation from a political perspective. Any real solution has pretty serious tradeoffs so either you take small low impact steps which are panned as being too little too late, or you take bold steps that hurt some significant group economically.

Not even close. Despite the hype being pushed by tech companies the latest wave of AI has extremely niche use cases and it’s already beginning to plateau.

What kind?

I mean that’s not really a problem specific to EVs. But yeah I also drive an aging car because I don’t want one with 10x more failure points.

I do love how much torque my electric stove can put out while stopped

Are you asking him why he can’t fix the world?

Yes the obscure and little known fundamental theorem of algebra

My first thought was that a couple cops are going to get hurt in traffic accidents and then their union is going to point to the increased injury rate as a reason for further militarization

Honestly that would still be an improvement

The problem isn’t that the energy is too cheap, it’s that there’s too much of it, which is why it’s so cheap. An electrical grid can only support so much power and there is no cost effective way to store enough energy to run the grid for any appreciable amount of time, so it all must be used or else the system becomes unstable.

Because they would have brownouts overnight and when the weather was bad.

Don’t give them any ideas

Idk, there was an expansion released like a month back so it’s probably experiencing a spike in popularity.

Also if you don’t know I’m alluding to the fake season names it uses which are portmanteaus of real month names. Decebuary, Aprimay etc

Rimworld months

I always thought the Chinese Room argument was kinda silly. It’s predicated on the idea that humans have some unique capacity to understand the world that can’t be replicated by a syntactic system, but there is no attempt made to actually define this capacity.

The whole argument depends on our intuition that we think and know things in a way inanimate objects don’t. In other words, it’s a tautology to draw the conclusion that computers can’t think from the premise that computers can’t think.

I increasingly feel like the best (though imperfect) solution that has a realistic chance of happening is just to make student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy. This would provide people with huge loans and no job prospects a way out while avoiding giving free money to well paid professionals who don’t really need it. It would also incentivize schools to invest tuition dollars in ways to actually help graduates find employment rather than flashy facilities to bring in freshmen.

Poor students would have a harder time finding loans to go to expensive schools but it seems increasingly like elite colleges aren’t much better than public colleges anyway.

Dude what? Bears don’t give a shit about you. Unless you charge the bear it’s going to be fine.

My biggest takeaway from this discourse is that none of you live in bear country