Plants want to be eaten only by big animals that take them on long and random walks and then die far away from where they are picked up to fertilize the seed.
Which also explains the talking Ameglian Major Cow on the menu at Milliways, in Douglas Adams' The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: when you confuse evolutionary outcomes with intent, you end up with livestock enthusiastically volunteering for dinner.
If we say that half of innovations came from Alphabet/Google, then most of them (transformers, LLMs, tensorflow) came from Google Research and not Deep Mind.
No, because Airbnb is sharing market information with you, and is quite happy for you to undercut the market to drum up demand, or raise prices if you think you’ve got a winner, which keeps market efficiencies intact.
What’s described in the article is a bunch of estate agents agreeing to use a price recommended by 3rd party software and minimize cheating on that price, which is price fixing.
Continued reliance on outdated nuclear technology might not have the same crucial global technology spillovers as investments in other clean energy (including advanced nuclear). Since the best path towards global decarbonization is through global technology spillover into emerging economies, the actors that have the best emissions score may, surprisingly, not be the most effective actors at reducing the global rate of emissions in the future. This has some counterintuitive implications. Consider that Germany has higher carbon emissions than France even though it has invested more heavily in solar than its neighbor, which uses much more nuclear. Should advanced economies like Germany leave their nuclear plants running? Perhaps, but it will not make a very large dent in global emissions because 75% of all future emissions will come from emerging economies, which will not adopt the kind of (non-advanced) nuclear power currently in use in Germany. Consider that German citizens environmental footprints are currently less than 4% of the global total, a share that is on the decline.
Germany would have had to burn coal that night anyway. The output of the remaining 3 reactors would have been only a fraction of the electricity requirements anyway. Meanwhile the buildup of renewables continues and part of the "lost" production capacity will be filled in soon.
I don't think it's fair to compare the "little" 3GW with the total energy production. This is still power that must be replaced by coal and thus CO2 emissions. Yes, its 6% compared to the total energy production, but it's still extra unneeded CO2 in the atmosphere
> Germany would have had to burn coal that night anyway
But much, much less coal.
> The output of the remaining 3 reactors would have been only a fraction of the electricity requirements anyway.
That is s great way to say: we killed our stable source of electricity because of populism, and now we're burying our head in the sand justifying our decision.
> production capacity will be filled in soon.
Soon when? And the question of quiet nights remains
Somewhat less coal. We are talking about 3 GW less nuclear in a Grid which draws like 50. And yes, that were only the last nuclear reactors. But a lot of them would have had to be decommissioned anyway and there are still the problems of cost, especially of the nuclear waste etc.
A large part of these 3 GW will be replaced even in 2023 and that will continue through the years. The current plans aim for 80 renewables in 2030.
That's a very good insight, I haven't thought of it. Germany has indeed turned the saying "the best way to predict the future is to invent it" into reality.
There's a good video by Robert Miles about that 'Why Not Just: Think of AGI Like a Corporation?' (youtube.com/watch?v=L5pUA3LsEaw)
Corporations are kind of like AIs, if you squint. How hard do you have to squint though, and is it worth it?
In this video we ask: Are corporations artificial general superintelligences?
> Was any force ever able to get close to world domination?
Evolution? 2.5bn years ago stromatolites changed the atmosphere from a CO2-rich to O2-rich through photosynthesis, because they had no competition.
Now plants dominate the earth (≈450 Gt C, the dominant kingdom), then animals (≈2 Gt C, mainly marine, and bacteria (≈70 Gt C) and archaea (≈7 Gt C).
In 2020, global human-made mass exceeded all living biomass ( nature.com/articles/s41586-020-3010-5).
Yes. The only force we know that achieves this is undirected, and no single part of it stays at the top for long. Contrast with superintelligence, a single entity which does not evolve but optimizes in a directed way.
I think evolution is not an undirected process in that sense because it's an optimization process, that optimizes to create more copies of itself. Superintelligence will likely use some Evolutionary Computation (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_computation ).
Also see Karl Sims 'Creatures' from the 90s:
youtube.com/watch?v=JBgG_VSP7f8
or
OpenAI's Multi-Agent Hide and Seek:
youtube.com/watch?v=kopoLzvh5jY
From ""Rapid Clinical Evaluation of Anosmia - The Alcohol Sniff Test" (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaotolaryngology/article-...):"Standard 70% isopropyl alcohol preparation pad is opened such that 0.5 cm of the pad itself is visible. The alcohol pad is placed beneath the patient's nostrils while the patient inspires twice, to familiarize himself or herself with the alcohol odor, and the subject is asked if he or she detects an odor. Odor thresholds for alcohols are 2 or more orders of magnitude lower than trigeminal thresholds for the same stimuli.6 Thus, an anosmic will detect the presence of alcohol trigeminally only when it is extremely close to the nose. The alcohol pad is withdrawn and the threshold test begun. The subject is asked to close the mouth and eyes, breathe normally, and indicate when the odor is detected. Active sniffing and deep inspiration are discouraged. The basic procedure follows the method of limits. A standard metric tape measure is extended downward from the patient's nares and held in place (Figure I ). The alcohol pad is placed 30 cm below the nose and, with each expiration, is moved 1 cm closer to the nares until the subject detects the presence of odor. The distance from the anterior nares to the alcohol padis measured in centimeters at the point at which the subject first detects the odor. The procedure is repeated 4 times and the mean distance defines the threshold.Butanol ThresholdFor purposes of comparison, all of the subjects completed a standard olfactory threshold test. A series of 10 concentrations of butanol ( -butyl alcohol) was used to determine absolute olfactory threshold sensitivity. The highest butanol concentration consisted of 4% vol/vol in distilled water. Each successive dilution was one third of the preceding dilution. Two "blanks," containing only distilled water, were also prepared. All bottles, including blanks, contained 60 mL of liquid. Olfactory threshold was assessed with a modified version7 of a 2-alternative, forced-choice,ascending method of limits procedure.8 The subject was presented with 2 bottles, one containing the odorant and the other consisting of distilled water. Each nostril was tested separately. The spout of the bottle was inserted into the nos tril of interest. The subject was asked to squeeze the bottleto generate a puff of air. The subject did this with both bottles. Subjects were asked to identify which of the 2 bottles contained the stronger odor.All subjects began at the lowest concentration to avoidadaptation.9 Incorrect choices led to presentation of a higher concentration and correct choices led to continued presentation of the same concentration to a criterion of 5 successive correct responses. The presentation of the odorantand blank were randomized for each comparison trial and the nostril to be tested first was also randomly determined. There were approximately 45 seconds between trials to allow time for recovery of the olfactory system and for the odor molecules to collect in the head space of the bottle."
Tell people not to test in an obvious draft? It would only be indicative on a population scale anyway, surely. Seems worth trying; an experiment that some of the millions of school kids at home could easily do once a week over the next 6 weeks or so.
