You can imagine a world where the Corporate or State AI handles education, tailors it to individual student levels and talents, and assigns work based on its own direct experience of a lifetime of interaction.
You can also imagine that in that world where most humans would be redundant - unless the AI was optimising for human-to-human jobs and for evidence of unusual insight and creativity, not managing bullshit work for corporate profit.
I'm curious about the objective competence of recent graduates compared to previous cohorts, not just in tech but in basic literacy and numeracy.
A lot of Gen Z are ferociously anti-AI, but for tribal and emotional reasons, not because of a nuanced understanding - which is ironic, because the nuanced reasons for being wary of AI are much stronger than the usual talking points about "stealing art".
Being tribal and emotional is going to make Gen Z easier to replace, because nuanced strategic insight is less common and more useful.
Taxes do not fund spending. This is a foundational myth of neoliberalism, closely related to the "A national economy is run like a household" myth.
The alternative is Modern Monetary Theory, which states that the government and banking sector money creation fund spending, and governments cannot run out of currency.
Taxes control the money supply and mop up excess funds, which controls inflation.
Bonds set interest rates.
Spending is a strategic and political choice, not something limited by "the deficit" - which is literally just the difference between spending choices and taxation choices.
One very obvious tell is how Republicans make a lot of noise about the deficit and the debt, but always raise both when they're in office.
Always. Why? Because they spend government money lavishly on themselves and their patrons, and cut taxes for themselves and their patrons.
This doesn't "create jobs", it clogs up the system with sclerotic piles of cash that drive an extractive economy that sits on top of the productive economy most people live in.
This is very different economically to stability spending - welfare, healthcare, and such - and investment spending, such as direct funding of education and R&D.
In the MMT, the most significant drivers of inflation are corporate profiteering and supply shocks.
This is also how I see it, and honestly it is hard to understand it any other way. In the current year, it seems very clear that governments can get away with incredible debt spending, as long as it's mostly in the right direction.
A solar backpack is a backpack with a relatively tiny solar panel. It's not designed to power an apartment. It's barely designed to power a laptop. You wouldn't be plugging one of these into the mains.
Solar systems are well understood, as is the business of connecting them to existing power. Magic boxes exist to handle exactly this problem. Connecting them up isn't hard, but installations usually require professional certification to stop people frying themselves and/or their wiring.
DIY solar makes no sense if you're paying your building for unmetered power.
Generally apartment solar can be a nice optional accessory, but very few apartments have the space for a system capable of powering the entire apartment for a significant part of the year.
It used to open them to most of the population - at least that was the ideal for a couple of decades - but now it seems to be opening them to oligarchs more than workers.
It's essentially a political energy source. It heats everything up.
Eventually it either explodes, goes through a phase change to a new (meta)stable state, or collapses back to a previous state.
For questions like this you can ask an AI directly instead of getting herded through the clickbait.
Education and targeted summary searches are one of the best uses. I literally found the location of the criminal who embezzled thousands of euros from my condominium with an AI search. It took me around fifteen minutes. Other people had been looking for years. (True story...)
The thing with LLMs is that it is very, very easy to adjust the weights across the entire model to sway responses one way or another. Previously, in the hypothetical case one wanted to rewrite history, it would be a much more involved endeavour of curation; fabrication of original sources would be difficult to do at scale. But now it's trivial for a provider to inject a preamble to the prompt to not only hide results that do not fit the narrative of those legislating in the model providers' favour, but to distort the results.
Obviously none of that is happening in the current moment, and I grant that cake recipes would be low stakes, but I would rather take the tradeoff of trawling through a little bit of slop to get that same information than acclimate myself to a workflow that could be abused by providers in more high-stakes situations down the line.
But that's just me, and I realise this is not a particularly popular take, but it should nonetheless be illustrative for why "just ask the LLM" might not be the best of ideas long term.
It's €1.6tn up to 2040. And it's not being built to fix problems "caused by intermittent sources" so much as a complete overhaul of a grid for 27 countries, some of which are relatively backward, with standardised digital control, plus significant new interconnectors.
The finished grid will be far more robust, better able to handle local outages and issues, and generally more adaptive and open to development in various directions.
As for "cheap energy" raising prices - prices rose a little after Covid, but there's been no constant march upwards. The main driver of higher prices is gas, and eliminating gas dependence, for both for financial and strategic reasons, is a key goal.
The current situation in Iran is likely to increase that motivation.
A key point about renewables is that power doesn't rely on imports from war zones.
Dropping a nuke on a city where nuclear plants aren't … And it's not even close. That'd be exactly like the difference between the sole victim of the Fukushima nuclear accident vs the 19 000 dead from the tsunami that caused the accident.
If nukes get involved, all bets are off no matter what, millions of people would die and the consequences of a subsequent reactor meltdown would be negligible compared to the mess you've got already.
And even compared to a conventional war, nuclear accidents are benign next to armed conflicts. (Not only during the war, but also decades after: most people are familiar with the Chernobyl red zone, but there's red zone in France due to the eternal pollution caused by WWI ammunitions).
> the sole victim of the Fukushima nuclear accident
This is a misrepresentation. There is a single person who the courts have established was (to their satisfaction) killed by nuclear exposure from Fukushima, although even that is quite debatable.
But that doesn't mean there weren't any victims, just that they could not (or could not yet) be identified. The estimated ~200 cancer deaths from Fukushima will mostly be lost in a sea of cancers from other causes. This doesn't mean they can be, or should be, ignored. Regulation is not like criminal law; one does not have to prove a technology is guilty beyond reasonable doubt to regulate it.
> The estimated ~200 cancer deaths from Fukushima will mostly be lost in a sea of cancers from other causes. This doesn't mean they can be, or should be, ignored
In comparison to the 19000 persons who died directly from the Tsunami? Yes it can be neglected. That's two orders of magnitude smaller!
> Regulation is not like criminal law; one does not have to prove a technology is guilty beyond reasonable doubt to regulate it.
No industry on earth is even remotely as regulated as nuclear industry. Over the span of the period your “200 excess death” have been calculated, more people in that particular region of Japan will have died from industrial causes, from any other industry (you should check how many people die each year from professional deceases in places as mundane as hairdressing saloons … Should we ban hair coloring?)
What nonsense. Of course we cannot ignore the 200 estimated deaths from radiation, just because people die from other reasons. You might make a cogent case that the value of 200 lives isn't all that great compared to the benefits of nuclear, but whether 19,000 people died in a tsunami is irrelevant to that argument.
Of course it is relevant: the “nuclear accident” was caused by the tsunami in the first place!
It has never been a nuclear accident to begin with, it was just a negligible (<1% in the pessimistic estimates) aggravation of the consequences of natural disaster.
Also nobody died from radiations. The additional cancer is caused by contamination, which is an entirely different health hazard for all intent and purpose.
I think the amount of energy needed during wintertime would be difficult to cover with pumped storage or traditional batteries. You have to have suitable geography for pumped storage and also enough (fresh) water available for that. However, instead of water compressed air could be also used, but that has also problems.
You can imagine a world where the Corporate or State AI handles education, tailors it to individual student levels and talents, and assigns work based on its own direct experience of a lifetime of interaction.
You can also imagine that in that world where most humans would be redundant - unless the AI was optimising for human-to-human jobs and for evidence of unusual insight and creativity, not managing bullshit work for corporate profit.
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