True.

But off is a lot better than on, still. Modern high-speed radios use quite a bit of juice. So at most, it would keep some microcontroller on for predefined functions, and wake up every now and then. It simply isnt practical to keep the big stuff on for more than a few days or so.

If you want to avoid even that, get a phone with removable battery. Or put it in a metal box. A tin can with a bit of aluminium foil around the seal gets you 60+ dB dampening.

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

And whatever nature managed to adapt and survive the winter would probably be killed off by the warming afterwards. Yeah.

Yes, for a few decades. And then we’d go straight into warming again.

The only solution: a new nuclear war every 50 or so years. Solar radiation management is for suckers, real men use nukes!

It will snitch on me, it already does. Somehow we accepted that constant tracking is a cool feature and not a horrifying virus. But it can’t see what happens on the other phone, right? And, I can still turn it off, keep it in a drawer, and that limits most of the tracking. Still, not impossible, but much harder.

Nah, global warming is on much larger scales than nuclear winter. Well get a few years or decades of winter and then a quick rebound to warming. Even worse than just the warming, because at least that happens gradually and gives nature and people time to adapt.

At the end of the day, nothing is really beyond any doubt. Witnesses can imagine things, cops can be bribed, judges can have a newborn kid and maybe slept 3h last night

Sorry, there must have been a couple of misunderstandings.

That was supposed to be sarcastic

Sarcasm probably isnt the correct word. More like “cynic statement with no contribution to the debate”. I know full well that the US is a shit show, and I am scared shitless that they export their “new” culture to the whole world.

Great, so in your scenario, things will still be great

No. In my opening statement, I clearly said that people will suffer. People are suffering already. More than once, people in my family tree had to suffer through their job being replaced by automation and economic forces.

with the technology they have RIGHT NOW.

Now, this is the point where I disagree: if it is possible with today’s tech, why is it not happening? Why is automation limited to repeatetive tasks and stuff like self checkout?

Either companies aren’t as greedy (unlikely), or the tech isnt quite there yet.

Replacing as many human-powered the is the express purpose of AI by nearly every corporate entity. Stop pretending that it isn’t.

I don’t. Public corporations are, by definition, legally required to be greedy, soulless machines. Salary is one of the biggest, if not the biggest single cost item for most service companies.

However, many of the people trying to convince us that “AI” is there and inevitable are those that conveniently have an interest in selling AI.

I am scared of the societal effects of so-called AI, don’t get me wrong. But not because it will replace “all jobs”. Will it eliminate some jobs? Probably. Are the current prognoses overhyped? IMHO, also likely.

Besides, many issues with today’s society (especially in the US) have nothing to do with AI, like exploited “gig workers”, lack of social security, ridiculously expensive costs of (bad) education, and not enough people being held accountable for their actions if they are rich. None of those need AI, but AI surely doesn’t help either.

I am lucky that I got a job that is, if not doing good, at least not doing something evil. And I get to play with cool hardware. Not something practicable for everyone, I know. But those jobs are out there.

Besides, I have met many people with similar feelings recently. You are not alone. I don’t know how to find those people where you live. But for instance, there are many people helping worthwhile causes with the tech side.

Personally, I might have to use two phones in the future, kind of like how I saw some do in China. One for the official, mandated bullshit, and one for personal things, with an operating system that does not snitch on every action I take.

You don’t need to be a Marxist to see how AI-generated propaganda, surveillance economy, targeted advertising, social isolation, privatized censorship and global resource waste are bad things.

It has jack shit to do with Marx or Lenin. Sure, you can view it in the framework of Marx. Or you can view it, in an equally valid way, in the framework of Christian-inspired humanism, for example. Or in some libertarian invidiual-freedom-first framework. Still looks pretty shitty.

I forgot that the US is a dystopian hellscape where many people work what would have been a college summer job a couple of decades ago just to get by, my bad.

Sarcasm aside, self driving cars are actually a good example. It is a rather controlled environment, with standardised signs and rules, and billions upon billions of r&d money thrown into it for decades now. And they barely, mostly, just kind of start to work.

Fun fact, there is a fully automated, commercial pizza vending machine in my city. Kind of neat, from a tech stand point. I still don’t see it replacing all the pizza places.

The things that do cost jobs will probably surprise us now. 20 years ago, people were demo-ing the automated supermarket, and we just recently saw large scale retailers adopting self scan / scan as you shop and that stuff. And while it does eliminate some jobs, you still need some human to stop shoplifters, clear errors, figure out what to do with the dropped, cracked milk crate, check that those minors are not getting liquor with their brother’s driving license and so on.

I believe you overestimate modern robots a bit. They are still expensive, they still require maintenance, and they still cannot reliably and efficiently deal with new situations based on incomplete instructions.

Is dick polymer biodegradable? If so, maybe we can tackle the whole microplastic issue as well!

But she’s fun at barbecues!

OP wrote:

because all human workers will be fired, not at once, of course, but gradually, In a few years, about 2-7 years to be exact(depending on the industry)

which I replied to. LLMs won’t replace all human workers, because for instance it cannot do manual labour. And to preemptively answer “but robots”: industrial robots already exist since forever.

I know. Man, tell me about it. Some days you just can’t get up, and then you keep sitting on the couch, doomscrolling or something like that, and hating yourself for it.

The thing is, it’s not going to be better unless you do something about it.

I remember that one time I felt like absolute shit. Burned out, tired, dreading human contact. I forced myself to go to some political meetup, as an experiment. I argued with some wannabe college communists, didn’t change a single thing in the grand scheme of things, and went home much happier.

Another day, I forced myself to go to some emergency response exercise. Half the people are pensioners twice my age. The other half are the kind of people I could never honestly argue politics with, because one of us would be dead. And they own way more guns. You know the type. I biked back, cursing them personally for all that is wrong with this country. But you know what? That evening, I felt better.

You get the idea. Then of course there are days that I am just tired, and, to quote, take my comfort from this hole I’m sinking in.

Bottom line: force yourself. At least sometimes. Even if the people there are morons. Even if the voice in your head says you should stay, and that you don’t need to.

Nah, there are plenty of bad GPs, surgeons etc…

I can tell you much more anecdotes about bad “physical” doctors from friends and family than about psychological ones. To be fair, people are much more likely to rant about how a surgeon fucked up the stitches on their leg than about how a therapist made their depression worse.

AI won’t replace everyone. Have you seen those police robots? At the end of the day, it will be a regular old cop arresting you for making trouble, don’t worry.

People will loose money, the poor will get poorer, the rich will get richer. Some countries will become more fascist, others might become more sane. People will die, people will commit atrocities, people will fall in love and make more people, and the wheel keeps on turning.

There are plenty of ways to control your rgb lights without a LLM made by an evil company run by privacy-hating, election-manipulating warmongerers. Just sayin’.

Yeah, that is something I regularly look up, too. Together with Euler’s formula, resistor colours and printf codes… My brain is very efficient at almost remembering things, and when I read the intro to the article, it mostly comes back

One, like most people.

But the more interesting question is: how long can you go with too little sleep? Like, with 3-4h naps? Or a few 30 min naps?

Obviously much longer, as anyone with little children or a tight thesis deadline can tell you. But I catch myself making mistakes and generally saying and doing things I shouldn’t, quite similarly to mild alcohol intoxication. I would describe 2-3 days with too little sleep as maybe 3-4 beers, you can still force yourself to focus, but you really shouldn’t drive or write that important letter any more.