In my opinion, the large corporations behind fossil fuels have too much of an economic clout. The governments around the world are dependent on them for a considerable amount of their respective national economy. So yes you are right about government not doing much about this.
Ultimately, unless there is a relatively quick mass extinction event, no government is going to be bothered into action. Climate change and the devastation it's going to cause, is going to play out slowly over the years. The most affected would be the poorest of the world. They are going to die first. The rich will have enough resources to be able to not only survive, but also thrive on these events as new business opportunities are going to be created.
Ultimately, Earth maybe a very different place 100 years from now, but the rich of today are surely going to have their descendants living quite comfortably.
The only thing an individual can do is to strive to get as rich as possible, because that is the only security that's going to save you and your family in the bleak future that lies ahead of us.
Large corporations have too much economic clout because our economic and political thinking is pre-rational and not fit for purpose.
You can't do rational planning on a planetary scale when your political frameworks are explicitly tailored to maximise short-term resource accumulation without limit for a micro-minority.
We're not going to win this one without a revolution - not just the usual violent class swap that lops off one aristocracy to make room for another, but a moral and cultural revolution in how we plan for the future as a species.
I'm not optimistic, because IMO it's too big a challenge, and we literally don't have the brains or the culture for it.
In democracies we can't all just throw up our hands and blame it on the political class and big business. If the ordinary people of the developed world really wanted something done about it, as a higher priority than anything else, there is no gun held to their heads preventing them from voting for that. We are all benefiting hugely from the cheap energy reaped from fossil fuels, whether we like it or not, and in the main the fact is we like it.
Imagining that 'large corporations' are reaping all the benefits and could bear all the cost of weaning the global economy off fossil fuels is jaw droppingly naive. The massive costs of weaning ourselves off fossil fuels would bear down heavily on all of us, and especially the poor and the third world. Can we imagine China elevating hundreds of millions of people out of poverty over the last 30 years without fossil fuels?
I'm no climate change denier, far from it. You're quite right that the costs will be severe, even catastrophic, but there is no easy answer to this.
Indeed, there's no gun to our heads preventing us voting for taking serious action on climate change. There doesn't need to be.
Imagine I'm a voter in, say, the US or the UK. There is no major party I can vote for that will, if elected, take serious action on climate change. In both nations there is a Green Party which probably would, but it has a firmly established track record of getting approximately zero votes; the only way in which voting Green has ever had any visible impact on US or UK policy is that a bunch of people voting for Ralph Nader in the 2000 US presidential election is part of why we had President Bush instead of President Gore, which is probably not an encouraging precedent to most potential Green voters.
And, of course, voting Green also means voting for all their other policies. Which doesn't matter if you regard climate change as the only important issue, but since you probably don't, you might find them unacceptable on other grounds; and since lots of other voters definitely don't, lots of them are going to be voting not-Green even if they care a lot about climate change ... which means that, once again, the Greens are not actually going to win, and the only real effect of voting for them is to give you less influence on which actually-electable candidate wins instead.
So no, in practice we don't have the option of voting for taking serious action on climate change. We have the option of voting for a big package of things, one of which happens to be serious action on climate change, in the knowledge that (even if a sizeable majority of voters wants serious action on climate change) voting for that package won't actually result in a government that will try to implement it.
It may be that those of us who care about climate change should be voting Green even though it predictably won't help in the near future, in order to "send a message" that might change the political landscape in future elections. Or that we should be putting pressure on the actually-electable parties to change their policies, or starting new parties, or something. But none of that means that we have a realistic way of getting action on climate change just by voting for it.
An excellent example is Brexit. The Brexit referendum existed solely because of UKIP and UKIP have only ever won 2 parliamentary seats. And those were both for sitting MPs that had defected.
However, UKIP did get 4-odd million votes, plenty of local councillors, MEPs etc. In other words, they clearly had a lot of support for their flagship policies and that caused the main parties, that had UKIP voters in their constituencies, to take notice. Unfortunately.
This has also, to a lesser extent, been the case with green issues. The Greens increased their vote from the 80's onwards and the main parties started to adopt green policies accordingly.
So, in the UK at least, there are well worn paths to get policies, like climate change action, to the top of the heap.
I'd argue that there are a few reasons why they're not top of the heap today:
1) Other things are deemed more important. Clearly Brexit is one. Whether you agree that it should be more important, or not, it's fairly undeniable that it's true.
2) The folk that have expressed most interest in green issues have tended to not be very engaged in formal politics. <30s predominantly. That changed somewhat in the 2017 election primarily because of Corbyn (though Greens did particularly badly). So it may be that green issues become more important as a byproduct of other changes.
3) There's a strong argument that UKIP's popularity was, in large part, due to Nigel Farage. He may well be a cock but he's a cock that was on TV a lot reinforcing his message. I mean, I like Sian Berry (no idea who the other bloke is) but she's no Nigel Farage.
Depressingly pragmatic. While building resilience is certainly worthwhile, we can still fix this and should try.
I think individual actions can add up, particularly when we use the magnifying power of tech. I wrote a lot on this recently and I can't fit it all in a comment so I'll just link to it.
When you say 'fix' do you mean 'prevent a two-degree shift' or 'transition to an zero-net-emissions economy'? Or do you mean we can avoid some survivable threshold higher than two degrees?
I agree that useful action is possible and important, but I'm starting to feel that our last chance to avoid catastrophic climate change was sometime last decade or the one before.
I mean both, first 'prevent a two-degree shift' then 'transition to an zero-net-emissions economy' and finally even negative emissions. This was almost solved in the 1980s and wasn't but that's a sunk-cost fallacy. The chips are down and we are where we are, so let's roll forward and get this solved.
Well, as comfortable as you will be able get with global wars, refugees, food shortages, etc. going on.
Governments and countries are not very stable under these conditions. Probably shouldn't expect your wealth to crisis proof your life in this scenario. Won't hurt but we'll all be much better off organizing to avoid this future.
>> Well, as comfortable as you will be able get with global wars, refugees, food shortages, etc. going on.
I think the crisis will be contained to the poorest parts of the world. Especially the tropics. This area is going to be the first to bear the brunt of climate change related problems.
I dont foresee Global wars happening. The politicians are too smart for that. They will try to contain the damage to the extant that the richer countries ( US, Europe, Australia ) are not affected much. Ofcourse there will be shortages as global supply routes are going to be disrupted.
The most thought provoking scenario here is going to be what will happen with China. Maybe not being a democracy will prove to be a blessing in disguise for it. Having a pragmatic group of men leading the country is the best option in the face of upcoming doom. China may shed a lot of weight ( population), but it may just survive, because of its largely monoculture and more or less obedient population.
I see much of Africa, SouthEast Asia to completely gone by the next 100 years. They will be left alone by the rest of the world to fight the battle of survival, and the odds wont be great.
MiddleEast is already ravaged, but they may continue to survive because they have oil.
Most rich countries ( the leaders I mean ), may not be very displeased with the fate of the poorer nations. Because as far as they are concerned mass deaths in poorer nations is only going to reduce the carbon emission load on our planet.
Somehow I doubt that people in these countries will sit on their hands while dying off.
Mass migration will definitely happen, and might even be supported by their governments and armies. India, Pakistan and China have nuclear weapons to wave around.
US will likely be better off than Europe thanks to the oceans and a big army / navy. But it will not be a good time for anyone if it comes to this.
Seems like you're counting on poorer countries to die off so you in the the richer nations can survive when it's the richer folks causing the problem. Like the resource loss from these continents wasting away won't affect them.
A part of the climate change calculation is that the poorer countries are actively improving their standards of living, and that means rapidly increasing their energy demands.
People in regions bearing the brunt of the change aren't just going to stay there. There will be mass migrations of possibly hundreds of millions, and no wall is going to stop them.
Or migrate northwards, or upwards in elevation (latter might not work as well due to decreased precipitation). UK's latitude and natural moat are looking like pretty useful attributes, at the expense of losing considerable amounts of low lying coastline.
Sorry for painting a negative picture, but when poor countries are destabilised they create conflict for otherwise stable western countries too. Simply because it creates an opportunity for bad actors to gain strategic power.
For example, without becoming too political, it seems a plausible strategy for Russia to try and control migration from the east to gain influence over the EU.
Depending on the hyperbole, similar conflicts could become war scenarios where your wealth would not be enough to protect you.
Considering this, getting rich is certainly a good advice, but might not be enough. We need to work on de escalating the situation even without any altruistic reasons, if you want to maximise your personal survival chances.
> In my opinion, the large corporations behind fossil fuels have too much of an economic clout.
It's easy to blame the big corporations. It's also about the governments facilitating alternatives and about eventually, literally every person buying into that.
So we had this idea of a new feature for our product. The only way to quickly do it was to somehow implement a machine learning algo and that would give us the result that we wanted. Viola!! It seemed simple.
Now our company doesn't have any machine learning expert or a data science genius. Going for hiring one would take time. Taking someone up on contract would be very expensive (our CEO wasn't ready to shell out that kinda money). So the task fell on me. They asked me to go through the multitudes of Machine leaning MOOCs out there and get a working prototype ready in 2 weeks.
I had already done Andrew Ng's course back when it came out for the first time. But my memory had faded for the lack of practice.
I re-ran the course again. I went over a couple of online ML books too.
Then I started thinking of the problem at hand. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a chicken and egg problem. For the feature to work perfectly we needed a large amount of training data to train our models.
But without the feature actually deployed, we didn't have any way to collect any training data.
So we ultimately fell back to simple algo, that took it's decisions based on a few hard coded rules. Things have been working fine till now.
They gave you two weeks to become a data scientist and implement a working solution? That's nuts. I'm still pretty early career, but I have done data science work for about four years now and I wouldve quoted at least two months to figure out data, clean it, feature engineer, run models, compare results, and then deliver the best performing solution.
No data is better than 10 years of useless data. I’d much rather be in the position of designing the data collection (experimental design ftw) than trying to fix the problems with an overly complicated modeling project. Buuut, I am a statistician.
In my experience, having someone that knows what they’re doing on the front end of a study design wise can save weeks or months of work on the back end of a study or project.
> They gave you two weeks to become a data scientist and implement a working solution? That's nuts.
Oh c'mon. Any large company today and the expectation or deadline for practically anything is "asap" or measured in a few weeks at most. Short-term thinking is a major player in publicly traded companies. Because of that, this is what opens the door for startups to play the long-game.
> Unfortunately, it turned out to be a chicken and egg problem. For the feature to work perfectly we needed a large amount of training data to train our models. But without the feature actually deployed, we didn't have any way to collect any training data.
Everyone outside of data science seems really surprised by this and I can't count the number of times someone has asked me to build an algorithm for X but has none of the data to support doing so. It doesn't mean the feature/product can't be built but they often want a supervised learning solution without the cost (and time) of acquiring the ground truth data.
> The only way to quickly do it was to somehow implement a machine learning algo and that would give us the result that we wanted.
Since no one of you had any experience with ML, how did you know that a ML algo (which one?), implemented "somehow" would give you the results you wanted? (Not a cynical comment; I am really interested in hearing about this).
Co-author here. This is a surprisingly common situation. In fact starting with the simplest algo is usually the best way to prove the validity of your approach, and gather initial data to build a more complex model later.
In addition, trying for the feature to “work perfectly” from the get go, even with lots of data usually is quite hard.
Maybe it's an instance of "when all you have is a hammer...", because I'm learning about it right now, but you could look into transfer learning - you train a ML model in a similar, easier task, and then you tweak it with your data.
That said, there's a good chance that your current algorithm is all you will ever need - many times a ML project is too much, and you already have good results.
Transfer learning only works if the original model is in the same domain (e.g. ImageNet for images, GloVe for text). A bespoke problem likely won't have a widely-available original model.
That seems fine to me. It's a good practice to start with hard-coded business rules instead of any kind of model, just to test the waters, collect some data, and see if a new feature even makes sense, before diving into building even the simplest model.
I've been talking to academic neural net / ML experts in computer vision and OCR / NLP and the thing they try to stress is that for almost all cases an algorithmic approach works better.
I don't think most ML experts would agree with that, a big reason DL became popular are the huge improvements they brought to CV and NLP fields.
In many ways, traditional approaches were harder because you need huge amount of domain expertise in CV & NLP, whereas a ML expert can solve simple CV problems with almost no domain knowledge.
Now, a lot of the business data, especially time series data, I agree that an algorithm/heuristic approach is easier and more robust. E.g. recommendation systems.
yes, but before the ML step the old approaches relied on expert-crafted features. The breakthroughs in those fields via deep-learning is because people found architectures (CNN/RNNs) that could learn those features much, much, much more efficiently than they could be hand-crafted.
Not much information in the article. Interpol has issued a Red Corner notice, but ultimately it's the French and Chinese governments that have to find what happened.
Now let me get this straight. He was traveling from France to China, somewhere in the middle he disappeared.
What do the flight manifests say?
How about the security cameras at Airports, especially in China, where we have often heard what they allegedly doing with real time facial recognition and stuff.
For someone this high profile, there must have been security, staff etc. What do they have to say?
It's been two weeks since he disappeared. No alarm bells till now, at least the media.
I find this article to be very slim on details. There are some very simple questions not covered in the article. I guess they were in a hurry to publish this.
He didn't disappear in the middle. It was confirmed by the French that he arrived safely in China -
"The French official said Meng did arrive in China. There was no further word on Meng’s schedule in China or what prompted his wife to wait until now to report his absence."
The article says they can issue one for a certain purpose, and it's not clear to me that this situation fits that purpose; it doesn't say that they have issued one.
Interpol can issue a red notice - an international alert - for a wanted person.
But it does not have the power to send officers into countries to arrest individuals, nor issue arrest warrants.
What I am looking forward to is when someone tries to start cloning process on a human being.
When I was a kid, in 1990s, there was a lot of fuss around cloning. Most people rejected it as unethical. I wonder how far the state of the art has come since then in cloning technology.
I am guessing that cloning maybe a real chance for humans to become immortal or atleast live longer lives.
> [In the 90s] most people rejected it as unethical.
I don't understand this. If a clone is given the same rights as a non-clone, I can't see how cloning is unethical. It's not like non-clones get a choice in whether or not they want to exist. Why would we treat clones differently, anyway?
> I am guessing that cloning maybe a real chance for humans to become immortal
Sounds like you are confusing classes with instances. If every human is a different class, the class gets to potentially live forever, but each instance of the class still goes through the lifecycle. It's not like the consciousness of a previous instance is copied to a later instance. Each instance presumably gets its own state.
> If a clone is given the same rights as a non-clone, I can't see how cloning is unethical.
I've seen three popular takes on this, leaving aside religious objections and confused "cloning is a matter replicator" opinions. Two were practical, and so are probably settled, and one is, um, stupid.
- A major concern in the 90s was that clones would have serious health problems which wouldn't be obvious until later in life. That was based on health problems in Dolly and some other large mammal clones, plus concerns about telomere shortening when replicating from adult cells. I don't know if the telomere issue was ever settled, but with more evidence large-mammal clones seem to have normal health outcomes and lifespans, so I think the debate is largely dead.
- The next was that living clones would be placed in untenable positions, being judged by their genetic predecessor or being brought into existence "for a purpose" like donating bone marrow to a sibling or even 'recreating' a deceased child. All of which seems true, but no more applicable to clones than twins or younger siblings.
- The last was that creating life in unnatural ways is inherently immoral. Which I find laughable from anyone who isn't appealing to a religious prohibition (or similarly concrete ethic, Kant would have opposed it), but which was absolutely a major point of debate. By 2001, Leon Kass was heading up the President's Council on Bioethics and advocating this position. He variously argued against the inherently unnatural nature of cloning, its possible effects on overpopulation, its ability to create true "single parent children", and its dissociation of sex from procreation. He also opposed in vitro fertilization and intentional life extension, so he was an internally-consistent idiot, but I'm still convinced it's just the naturalistic fallacy redefined as a moral code.
(A final fear I've seen more recently is that extremely widespread cloning opens the door to monoculture disease risks and Muller's ratchet from mutation load. Which is again probably true, but not at all an inherent issue.)
> That was based on health problems in Dolly and some other large mammal clones.
This is the only potentially viable argument IMHO.
> brought into existence "for a purpose" like donating bone marrow to a sibling
This is untenable! Are people really stupid enough to consider slavery 2.0? At best, this sounds like some science fiction movie where people have 1800s education. "Growing a human to steal its organs" is laughable.
> If a clone is given the same rights as a non-clone, I can't see how cloning is unethical.
A child of rape has the same rights as someone who isn't a child of rape, but rape is still unethical. The equality of the rights granted to a person who is a product of an act indicate nothing about the ethics of the act.
> A child of rape has the same rights as someone who isn't a child of rape, but rape is still unethical
Cute, but irrelevant. Please tell me how something not too different from in-vitro fertilization is comparable to someone forcing themselves onto another person and giving them PTSD.
> The equality of the rights granted to a person who is a product of an act indicate nothing about the ethics of the act.
I'll clarify: Combining inanimate objects in a way that leads to the birth of a child, who has the same rights, is not unethical. Sexual reproduction utilizes biological pathways to achieve the exact same result. Why is an "artificial" (whatever that means) pathway unethical, exactly?
In people's minds, cloning = a person walks into a machine and two exact copies walk out. If you instead framed it as birthing a child who was exactly like you, I'm sure the perception would be a lot different.
> In people's minds, cloning = a person walks into a machine and two exact copies walk out.
I highly doubt this is even close to true. Most people are smart enough to know that cloning has something to do with "modifying the egg and sperm and growing the baby". That's literally all they have to know to not think the absurd thing you mentioned. What you've described is "teleportation gone wrong" which is complete and utter science-fiction, and most people know that. I would even go further and say that most people are familiar with Dolly and already know cloning to be possible.
Plus, they are already familiar with twins (about two pairs per high-school) which is natural cloning. You'd have to be living under a rock to think twins share the same mind.
At the very most, I think people expect clones to look like identical twins (correcting for age difference), and perhaps share that same level of average personality similarity. That's still an overestimate, since identical twins get very similar epigenetic and usually environmental pressures. But it's a pretty reasonable thought, and very different from "cloning is what they showed in Star Wars".
Yes. The word "clone" has been so abused by popular media that people have wild misconceptions and objections. We should call them "elective identical twins."
I'm by no means an expert, but I really don't think it would take much. Cloning is being used in polo[1], which suggests that it isn't terribly difficult. Once you have the egg cell you just use in vitro fertilization, which has been possible for decades.
It's also worth noting that in the U.S. neither therapeutic nor reproductive cloning are banned at the Federal level, although reproductive cloning is banned in ~15 states. So any scientist participating would not be breaking any laws.
Frankly it wouldn't surprise me if some wealthy people have cloned themselves in secret. I imagine that there are a decent number of scientists who wouldn't find it unethical.
Part of ethics also has to do with the resources. With our current state of the art cloning frankly sucks. Cloning Steven Hawkings just gets you a baby who will certainly get very sick. Even cloning livestock becomes unethical because of the sheer pointless indulgence. You are basically better off with sexual reproduction unless you want to attempt resurrection of dead species incubated by their nearest kin which adds further complications to get one let alone sustainable numbers.
A vaccine with a 10% chance to kill someone but protect from a widespread disease killing 99.99999% of the infected and exposes it to 20 other people under even strictest quarantine measures it becomes ethical to dose everyone against their will at the risk of literal decimation because the alternative is so much worse. A vaccine against the common cold with a 1% chance of death becomes a no for everyone and a maybe for immunocompromised if the chance of a lethal cold is higher and if it works for them in the first place.
I think as far as current tech goes, even if somebody gets 100% cloned, their mind (data in the brain) would still be different. That of course is when The 6th Day[0] (Brain data copy + clone) will never become a reality.
Cloning people for harvesting organs doesn't really make that much sense: it'll take many years to grow the organs to the size needed to be useful as replacements.
We're already working on growing (or even 3D-printing) replacement organs without the human; that avoids ethical problems, but it also doesn't require the huge investment in time and resources needed to grow clones of yourself and raise them to adulthood. They'll probably have this technology ready for prime-time before they could have human cloning working plus have those clones grow to late adolescence.
That's my point. We don't need "the island"; when we've worked out the genetic issues with cloning, we'll already know how to just grow organs on-demand. The whole clone thing doesn't make that much sense when you look at it that way; it would cost a fortune to raise a human to adulthood just for organ harvesting, plus garner all kinds of ethical problems and controversy and protesters etc. No one's going to protest organ-growing or 3D-organ-printing except maybe a few religious nuts.
And with the clone, what happens when you harvest its heart (killing it), and now you need a lung? Or you harvest one thing, and then get injured and need that same part, but you didn't have multiple clones lined up? With organ-printing, you just make the organ you need when you need it.
We still don't have truly 100% working clones; we tried with a sheep a while ago and it wasn't 100% and died early. However, we're already experimenting with 3D-printing organs.
It would take extreme idiocy to think that this is morally sound. There is no defensible argument for treating a human clone as anything less than human.
That's not how cloning works. Clones aren't empty husks full of free organs ripe for the taking, any more than non-clones are. Even if you could create a clone without a brain, it's still hard to condone. If an anencephalic fetus miraculously grew to 24 years of age, would people post a "free organs" sign on him and lay him down on their lawn? Gonna have to say... probably not.
How about Internet splitting up based on large companies?
Facebook already tried it with free basics. Google with its hold on Android devices is going to go down the same path sooner or later.
Apple has already it's own closed garden. Netflix is doing that to entertainment.
It won't be a surprise if a few years later you have to buy a package web services from your ISPs and you only see what you pay for. Not like the free internet we imagined for sure.
The internet will likely be split in multiple dimensions. Nations will split off. Companies obviously have an incentive to split off. We can see it being split up, for example, racially and along gender lines. Etc etc etc.
And in the final analysis, maybe that's just the flawed component in the architecture of the internet. Humans.
It likely wouldn't matter how easy a technology makes it for us to talk and communicate with each other, most of us will just use said technology to beat each other over the head.
AMP Is open source, Microsoft/Bing are on board, and Google recently stepped back from AMP governance to encourage more parties involved. No one group will hold more than 1/3 control.
Google AMP is not "open source". You might be able to offer suggestions about it, but it's not like a piece of software that you can fork and develop independently. Google controls the main reading device (Google Chrome). The "open source" line is marketing BS.
When I read "no group will hold more than 1/3 control" it sounds like 3 big players will wink at each other while they pillage the WWW and divide the spoils.
I read an interesting thought.. if we saw Google, Facebook, etc not as companies but new forms of countries and governments.
Our use of services make us citizens of these digital countries, where a TOS takes on a whole new meaning of how we are governed, beyond physical borders.
What kind of governance do we want over us in the digital world?
I used to struggle with sleep as well. Infact, I thought that it wasn't natural to be awake while lying on bed in the dark. Then I noticed a pattern. It was that I would always fall asleep within 10-15 minutes of lying in bed, only if I didn't worry about when the sleep would come.
From then on, I have just let go. I let my mind wander wherever it wants to go. And without fail, sleep always catches up within 10-15 minutes.
Of course, it helps if you are tired from the days work and haven't had a very heavy dinner.
We had Charles Dickens's Great Expectations in school. I was mesmerised by the incredible storyline and the shocking twist at the end.
It introduced me to western classic literature for the first time and I was really impressed.
Then in college, there was an ongoing bet that who could finish the entire unabridged version of War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. It tool me three months to read the whole of it. It changed me as a person and made me aware of the fact that the problems faced by humans haven't really changed over the centuries, but only their manifestation has changed as per the present times.
And what about The Count of Monte Cristo and other books by Alexander Dumas.
I had the exact opposite experience reading Great Expectations in high school. To such a degree that even I recognize that my hatred of it is uncharacteristic of me.
Poor managment doesn't always stem from ignorance or lack of understanding of how SW works. Sometimes it emanates from pressure to deliver within very tight timelines for the sake of survival of business or standing up to the competition in the market.
I have seen the best managers giving into ridiculous deadlines at the time of project onset just because they know that there is no other option.
Ultimately, unless there is a relatively quick mass extinction event, no government is going to be bothered into action. Climate change and the devastation it's going to cause, is going to play out slowly over the years. The most affected would be the poorest of the world. They are going to die first. The rich will have enough resources to be able to not only survive, but also thrive on these events as new business opportunities are going to be created.
Ultimately, Earth maybe a very different place 100 years from now, but the rich of today are surely going to have their descendants living quite comfortably.
The only thing an individual can do is to strive to get as rich as possible, because that is the only security that's going to save you and your family in the bleak future that lies ahead of us.