I'm convinced the people who do not see what Mathematicians see simply have not considered that their jobs are just as vulnerable. The day when OpenAI replaces their own AI researchers with GPT will be upon us, and the response from the Mathematicians will be "First time?"
Per capita is worse by definition, unless your arguing that people with higher per capita emissions are somehow more valuable to society than those with lower.
The other aspect is that China provides a large industrial base for the West, which is arguably the West just externalizing/offshoring their emissions anyway.
> Per capita is worse by definition, unless your arguing that people with higher per capita emissions are somehow more valuable to society than those with lower.
By what definition? If Norway has a 100x higher per-capital admissions rate and 5 people live there it’s inconsequential.
> The other aspect is that China provides a large industrial base for the West, which is arguably the West just externalizing/offshoring their emissions anyway.
I think that is a bad argument because China prefers to have that capacity and specifically courted it as part of their national strategy. Emissions they create are theirs to blame too. Ask China - would you rather have these factories or have lower emissions? The answer is 100% have the factories (and jobs).
When you write things like China is arguably the recipient of western emissions offshoring, despite western countries taking actions to decarbonize or add environmental efficiencies, you deprive China and Chinese people of agency and responsible for their decisions.
> When you write things like China is arguably the recipient of western emissions offshoring, despite western countries taking actions to decarbonize or add environmental efficiencies, you deprive China and Chinese people of agency and responsible for their decisions.
Not only that, it's a misdirect to try to blame countries that have more stringent emissions rules for the results in a country that doesn't.
Suppose that every country banned coal. Obviously then the location of the factories or customers wouldn't affect the amount of coal being burned because the number would be zero either way.
Suppose no country regulated emissions at all. Again the amount of coal being burned doesn't depend on the location of the factories because companies would be able to burn as much as they like regardless of where they are.
But suppose that some countries have emissions rules and others don't. As a result, the companies that want to burn coal move to the countries where they're allowed to do it. Now the amount of emissions does depend on where the factories are. But if the country where they are had the same emissions rules then they would be less competitive -- and so they choose to attract a disproportionate share of the manufacturing to a place that uses dirty power. That's definitely a choice -- compare it to the outcome where every country stops burning coal.
By the definition of per capita. If only a small group of people have significant more emissions than the rest of the world, then they're only increasing the average by a small amount, but that's still worse, not better.
Practically speaking, GHG emissions tend to follow income more than country, and that's where a minority (10+%?) of people are responsible for about half of emissions.
And I agree that China policy is partially responsible for their industrialization, and that's on the Chinese government, but not on the Chinese people.
Along the same lines, comparatively wealthy Americans (and wealth Chinese, etc...) blaming others for GHG emissions is the primary problem, and like you said, ignoring that deprives them of responsibility for their actions.
I’ve thought a lot about publishing research and wanting to do more of it, but right as I finally had the time and energy to start writing articles LLMs start to take off. Now all of a sudden, I’m acutely aware that everything I publish will be used for AI training.
For math, a field that is built on incremental research it feels like AI labs will do nothing but discourage publishing research at all for fear that they will be able to spend the money for compute that publicly funded academia simply cannot afford.
It feels like publishing anything at this point just means that your work will be fed to a machine that will make sure your work will never been seen by anyone else because it will always be the ones making the “true advancements”.
Perhaps I’d feel better about this if AI labs really existed for humanity’s benefit, but for some reason I don’t think that comes up in their investor slide decks.
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