What is low hanging fruit that we know how to actually do with germline engineering for humans regarding longevity and not as some highly speculative thing that requires overcoming a lot of issues? And how much lifespan would it add?
We are talking in the context of the future. I could have elaborated I guess. I personally don't foresee a future where human doctors will in general outperform AI and robotics.
Yep, it did. And (brown)coal kills much more people and the dependence on Russian gas made the geopolitics much worse than any nuclear reactor ever would.
The chances of a Soviet leadership-induced meltdown like at a German nuclear reactor that is properly designed and maintained is laughable.
It is, however, extremely hard to film the slow killing of people by browncoal. It's easy to film a nuclear reactor incident.
I think we can agree that people are not in general making purely statistical decisions when it comes to what risks are acceptable and which ones are not.
German TV had local experts who could tell the audience in real time that the authorities in Fukishsima were lying about the unfolding disaster.
A slightly racist belief in the Japanese as superior at following the rules meant a big shock when the Germans realised that even the Japanese could not be trusted with nuclear power.
You do realize that those "experts" were widely criticized by scientists and engineers for their lack of knowledge of the plant, many, many scientific inaccuracies and for basic fear mongering right? Most of the things they said weren't accurate. What was accurate is that the Tsunami took out the power lines around the plant and its cooling pond had a hydrogen explosion. Their backup power was down (which was the design flaw in the plant) because it was flooded. This required the pumping of seawater into the reactor to keep it cool. It never melted down in any way and the death toll was either 0 or 1 depending on how you count. Just in case you actually wanted to deal in facts on this one.
A nuclear strike on a larger fission reactor could create an awful result unlike any other power plant. There were some studies during the cold war (something about the effects in West Germanyin the early 1980s, IIRC).
As opposed to a nuclear strike directly on a populated civilian area with no nuclear power plant nearby which also creates an awful result?
The main difference in nuking a fission plant over any other area would be creating longer-term fallout.
If the attacker is at all rational, unlikely to be desired because it makes the area hard to inaccessible for troops on either side.
If the attacker is horrificaly irrational and just wants to cause pure, long term, irreparable harm, unfortunately salted nukes would be a feasible option, independent of having a fission plant anywhere near the drop zone...
Nuclear disarmament, international cooperation and reliable defence alliances can (hopefully) be used to protect against this, along with resilient fission designs within reason. Not having a fission plant by itself unfortunately and targically wouldn't prevent an utterly irrational attacker willing to cause as much long term damage as possible.
Very aware of that harsh fact, living in a country that has a section in our constitution making nuclear power illegal (yes, very stupid) and is not part of any defensive alliance (while expecting the countries around us to defend us anyways), if someone wanted to "salt the earth" around Salzburg, Vienna or Graz, they could do it, even if we have no plants.
Scale of fallout would be huge. People were kind of shocked by the analysis (trying to remember what came out then... Fetter, early 1980s, Scientific American?).
It's a bit more complex, I think. When gas imports started from the USSR, nuclear power plants were still being built in Germany, for example. There were gas imports for a long time.
if the germans want to shoot themselves in the foot they are allowed to do this, yes. what is the point of your comment? it's not even remotely relevant.
I was trying to point out that societies make and are free to make decisions that others don't like or that aren't great for them by some metric - and that there is nothing wrong with that. Why is that not relevant when it comes to energy?
so your point is that it's fine that germany ceeded energy independence and gave power to russia, because they're a country and countries have the 'right' to make bad decisions?
we have the right to criticise countries too right?
If Germans don't want energy independence - you can criticize that but that's how nation states work or is there some UN Charter violation in there, for example?
im still so confused what your point is. it's like talking about the consequences of someone's alcoholism, and someone chiming in "well they have a right to die of the booze if they want" like...ok???
So any nation state needs to be energy independent? Is that your point? Or have cheap energy and energy independence? If people want low growth, expensive energy etc., why is that like alcoholism? What is intrinsically bad there? Not like life expectancy in Germany is low, for example.
> So any nation state needs to be energy independent?
It is obviously a good thing if a democratic nation state is independent from a totalitarian dictatorship.
> Not like life expectancy in Germany is low, for example.
It's not about life expectancy. They now have to make a choice between supporting an aggressive totalitarian state vs. suffering damage to their economy due to higher energy prices. That is obviously a bad position to be in.
As usual with these debates intelligence is confused with agency, abstract self-awareness, and subjective human-like consciousness.
Systems can have goal-seeking agency with zero self-awareness. Very simple systems can do this surprisingly well. There's an entire branch of engineering called control theory which has mathematical tools for modelling and building these systems.
Systems can have abstract self-awareness through introspection loops, but no subjective human-like consciousness.
We don't know if a mechanical system can have a subjective human-like consciousness. We likely never will, because there is no objective measurement device for human-like consciousness.
We tend to assume humans have subjective awareness by default, because life would get very complicated it we didn't. But really all we see are behaviours.
Intelligence - which pretty much reduces to pattern recognition and abstraction, and effective modelling of future outcomes from past inputs - is orthogonal to all of these.
> If basically everything is , does that word mean much then/is it a useful term?
Yes and no, because nothing is as well defined as you imply.
Let's let X = "chair", to make my point a little more fun.
Obviously we know what a chair is, use the Potter definition[0]. Everyone has several of them in their houses, offices, and all around. But can you state a well defined definition? Is a table a chair? I can sit on it (I often do), it has four legs, and practically all things we'd consider a chair. Okay, it has no back (usually), but then we got to throw out the stool. It has no back. It doesn't even have to have 4 legs! So what about that stump on the ground? Is that a chair? I think most people would argue through a definition of convenience. Or maybe closer to a cat's definition of "if I fits, I sit."
You can replace X with just about anything and you'll find this ambiguity runs rampant. A cup, a table, cereal, sandwich, a tomato; you name it and I'm sure someone here will point out an instance that makes that definition look a lot fuzzier than you initially thought.
So that really shows us the crux of it all: how well defined is something. That only tells us our ability to distinguish something, though it doesn't tell us how well that thing fits into the category. So the stump is a little chair-like, the table is pretty chair, a stool is usually considered a chair, and that thing I'm sitting on is unambiguously a chair[1]. s/chair/intelligence/g and you have your answer. But the if you needed that last sentence, well, there's two types of people: those that can infer.
Simple chemistry couldn't be considered intelligent- it's basically just falling down a potential energy gradient. It gets more interesting when you implement chemical logic (like transistors) and graphs of molecules that convert between each other, like autocatalytic networks.
This is pedantic and nonsensical, IMHO. White is well defined as "the lightest color" [0]. There is nothing "whiter than white" in the objective sense. It's also a very common topic in introductions to philosophy in order to define how one makes an apology.
Sorry, but if everything is intelligent then why is a word for it even needed like it is used today - stating that intelligence is an intrinsic property of matter, moves the discussion quite a bit, I think, as it changes what we denote there.
Unlike "artery" which certainly isn't every blood vessel or "yellow" that isn't every color.
I'll highlight the gp's point here because it is subtle but important
>> words that label parts of continua are useful
and I'll add one more point: there's a difference in how people speak colloquially and how words are used by experts. In fact, different groups of experts may use the same word to mean different things (e.g. a mathematician and mechanic both call things "manifolds", yet you shouldn't confuse them). Natural language is highly overloaded (which is a big reason we invented formal languages).
A problem with the word "intelligent" is that very few people look to see how it is actually used in different fields like neuroscience, psychology, or machine learning, which all use the word a bit differently, and none of them use it in the way that we use in natural speech.
> "yellow" that isn't every color.
But I can ask you how "yellow" is the color green. It is certainly some yellow. Definitely more yellow than red is. Even more so, we might argue over if black is more yellow than white or not. Which in some settings black is more yellow than white and in other settings white is more yellow than black. Hell, the fact that you can read this and understand it is clear evidence of both utility and ambiguity. We haven't even mentioned that people may use the same definition but use a word to mark a certain threshold and disagree on that threshold (the root of so many painful to watch arguments).
There are words that distinguish between types/degrees of intelligence. Basal/proto intelligence applies to cells and bacteria. Somatic intelligence is a level higher at tissue. Superintelligence you've no doubt heard of.
It's true that "intelligence" is general/umbrella and doesn't have much meaning, but more specific terms do exist.
I personally don't think it's an intrinsic property of all matter, but an emergent one with interaction specifically. Systems have intelligence, not particles, and to be a system, you must have constituent parts (which may not be intelligent themselves). That's why they say it 'emerges'.
A cell is a system, as is a virus, a tucan, a human and an LLM. They exhibit different levels and brands of intelligence, hence continuum.
That's the popular view among scientists/philosophers/my podcasters, at least, and it makes sense to me!
No, intelligence is a description of behavior, not stuff.
As a crisp example: a newly dead person is almost exactly the same stuff as an alive person, but has no intelligence at all. Not a little less, as the difference in stuff would
suggest.
Not parent, but since we discussed in the other thread -- yeah, I think that's a good example of your observation that "intelligence" is broad and means different things depending on the context.
Cognitive intelligence in parent's example dies with you. It's gone. But a molecular biologist might say the cells of your corpse exhibit intelligence for some time after. They die gradually, and they do so according to a script of sorts.
Most human societies claim dominance over “everything else” aka “nature” and in order to do that you need a reason “humans” are different from “nature”
There are other bolder things I've seen recently that are somewhat interesting.
Michael Levin and a few other biologists are wondering if certain combinations of matter are tapping into platonic maths that they use for 'intelligence compute'.
- what Europeans tend to be opposed to is allowing conquest to stand, no?
Maybe. I am sceptical as I don't see that in their political actions. What realistic and practical solution do they actually offer towards that end, except for saying war will not end until they accept our demand (a stand quite similar to Russia)? (That strategy would be appropriate if, with their support, Ukraine could actually reclaim its lost territories - i.e. a military solution was viable. But it is clear that without NATO troops in the battlefield, this is highly unlikely.).
As for the claim of "mini wartime" economy, everyone was worried about the state of EU's economy when the war started and as it progressed, demands for declaring a wartime economy became very public. Some examples:
One is not exclusive of the other. Do you really expect any European politician to tell the public that they are benefiting from the Russia-Ukraine war because of the increased defense spending? The fear-mongering in Europe, due to the war, is the only thing allowing many of them to increase military budgets without much opposition. (Look at the violent protests happening in France because the citizens fear that the government has, and will, cut back on social spending, and divert the money elsewhere).
It's too much effort to write an answer here. (The new protests in Germany, like in France, is another symptom of the economic woes of EU members). But I've given you enough of a gist on the topic to do some research on your own if you are interested in learning more. There are plenty of resources on this topic online.
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