What this really reflects is a (not at all unjustifiably) pessimistic assessment of our political system's ability to actually do these things. People evacuating and restarting elsewhere can...
You know, instead of simply still-costly but significantly-less-costly coastal defence infrastructure.
What this really reflects is a (not at all unjustifiably) pessimistic assessment of our political system's ability to actually do these things. People evacuating and restarting elsewhere can happen on its own over the long run through individual action. People building massive earthworks and levees and other coastal defenses, however, take coordination and massive amounts of infrastructure spending that our dysfunctional government has, time and time again, demonstrated that it simply will not do with any level of effectiveness.
As long as 70% of the Senate is elected by 30% of the country who (mostly) live in landlocked interior states, I don't know any other way around it. They refuse to even admit there is a problem and they will refuse to allocate the money to do anything about it. Look what happened to New Orleans after Katrina.
It's not unprecedented for major cities to simply depopulate in the face political breakdown and climate/disease pressure. This is basically what happened to most of the MesoAmerican civilizations just before the Spanish arrived. The opportunities of the city go away and the city-dwellers go with them, resigning themselves to a markedly lower standard of living than what they had before.
Another thought to consider... in a post-covid19 world, with remote-work now forcing companies to try it, will people still want to live in NYC over the next few decades? I for one would choose to...
Another thought to consider... in a post-covid19 world, with remote-work now forcing companies to try it, will people still want to live in NYC over the next few decades? I for one would choose to live far away from expensive cities with in-office jobs if permanent remote was an option.
Not to mention access to healthcare, legal services, etc. There are parts of some of the less populated states where you literally have to drive 100 miles to get to the nearest hospital. Nebraska...
Not to mention access to healthcare, legal services, etc. There are parts of some of the less populated states where you literally have to drive 100 miles to get to the nearest hospital. Nebraska recently had an issue where there were something like 12 counties that didn't have a single lawyer in the county. Not to mention all the issues with local law enforcement in smaller municipalities. And with companies like Verizon promising to build out to rural areas and then reneging on those promises after getting grants for the buildout, you might not even have decent internet to do that remote job.
I think it depends. For NYC, probably not. For many of the small costal towns and cities, it quite possible makes more sense to move or abandon them. And as @NaraVara mentioned, at a certain point...
Do people seriously believe moving New York is more efficient than spending the billions required for the various hard and soft defences we can muster?
I think it depends. For NYC, probably not. For many of the small costal towns and cities, it quite possible makes more sense to move or abandon them. And as @NaraVara mentioned, at a certain point enough individual people may just choose to move themselves.
There will probably be something of everything. It makes sense for rich cities pay a lot to protect expensive infrastructure, but there are also going to be beachfront homes where it doesn't make...
There will probably be something of everything. It makes sense for rich cities pay a lot to protect expensive infrastructure, but there are also going to be beachfront homes where it doesn't make sense economically to protect them. In some places, it might make sense to raise homes up a bit; I saw an article about people doing that in some places in Cape Cod. There was also that time when old Sacramento was raised to protect against river flooding.
Calling it "unimaginably labor-intensive tasks" seems a bit much. A lot of this will look like normal construction that happens gradually.
I am skeptical of the idea of guaranteed government jobs. This sounds like forced make-work to me. I would rather see universal basic income combined with increased funding for those infrastructure projects where it makes sense, and the actual construction being done by construction firms. We also need to figure out what's going on with cost disease, or it will amount to a lot of spending with not much to show for it.
I mean it's important to consider that Doctorow is looking at a long timescale (200+ years) and sea level rise can be pretty significant on that timescale. At something like 3 degrees Celsius of...
I mean it's important to consider that Doctorow is looking at a long timescale (200+ years) and sea level rise can be pretty significant on that timescale. At something like 3 degrees Celsius of warming (on the low end of "business as usual"), we could see eventual sea level rises of 50-80 meters1, which is far too much to consider defending existing coastal infrastructure. Sure it may take a couple hundred years, but if we're planning that far ahead then it would be prudent to consider that whole cities will need to move.
I agree with you that unemployment predictions of 30% are a bit overblown, he does say "unemployed or working for governments." Considering that in the US, the low end is for a state to have 10% of its workforce working for some level of government2, his numbers are still a little higher than I think we can expect, but not the absolutely unreasonable ones they may appear to be at first glance.
1: See The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells for more on this. He cites The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth's Climate by David Archer for 50 meters, and "What the World Would Look Like If All the Ice Melted" by Jason Treat et al. in the September 2013 issue of National Geographic for 80 meters.
Just wait a few decades for the sea level to rise, surely it's possible then.
Why is literally relocating entire cities, abandoning all the material and centuries of infrastructure that went into them, on top of moving their millions of citizens, considered a realistic prospect?
Just wait a few decades for the sea level to rise, surely it's possible then.
Or just let tens of millions of asylees desperately romp through into rural areas without accommodating them so the people there stay/become (more?) racist/xenophobic instead of trying to help...
Or just let tens of millions of asylees desperately romp through into rural areas without accommodating them so the people there stay/become (more?) racist/xenophobic instead of trying to help them, that'll do too.
Cory Doctorow's brief argument against AI is a sort of proof by lack of imagination that everyone in an entire exciting, well-funded field will be unimaginative. While a lot of bad work will...
Cory Doctorow's brief argument against AI is a sort of proof by lack of imagination that everyone in an entire exciting, well-funded field will be unimaginative. While a lot of bad work will likely get funded, it seems likely that a lot of creative work into alternative approaches will get funded too? Like, how do you know that some of the bicycle mechanics aren't experimenting with gliders?
We can't know in advance what new research developments will happen or what the timing will be. All we can really say, taking an outside view, is that the field doesn't seem to be stagnant; there seem to be interesting new papers coming out all the time. Maybe the research will hit a wall, some fundamental barrier, but speculating that maybe a wall exists doesn't show that there is actually a wall. (Actually proving something like this would be an interesting research result, because then people would look for workarounds and alternatives.)
I think, more than anything, it's a warning that relying on some technological breakthrough that may or may not happen in the needed time frame is a losing proposition. Even then, the article...
I think, more than anything, it's a warning that relying on some technological breakthrough that may or may not happen in the needed time frame is a losing proposition. Even then, the article isn't fundementally about AI...it's about solving climate change (and societal problems as a whole).
We can't rely on future technology to solve problems that need work started on them yesterday.
This is a very hypothetical consciousness you are trying to empathize with! I take it you are also concerned for the animals whose dominion coincides ours, and for the people who bear the burden...
This is a very hypothetical consciousness you are trying to empathize with! I take it you are also concerned for the animals whose dominion coincides ours, and for the people who bear the burden of technologies that already exist! "General ai" my word! Computers are as dumb as they always were, I tell you
What this really reflects is a (not at all unjustifiably) pessimistic assessment of our political system's ability to actually do these things. People evacuating and restarting elsewhere can happen on its own over the long run through individual action. People building massive earthworks and levees and other coastal defenses, however, take coordination and massive amounts of infrastructure spending that our dysfunctional government has, time and time again, demonstrated that it simply will not do with any level of effectiveness.
As long as 70% of the Senate is elected by 30% of the country who (mostly) live in landlocked interior states, I don't know any other way around it. They refuse to even admit there is a problem and they will refuse to allocate the money to do anything about it. Look what happened to New Orleans after Katrina.
It's not unprecedented for major cities to simply depopulate in the face political breakdown and climate/disease pressure. This is basically what happened to most of the MesoAmerican civilizations just before the Spanish arrived. The opportunities of the city go away and the city-dwellers go with them, resigning themselves to a markedly lower standard of living than what they had before.
Another thought to consider... in a post-covid19 world, with remote-work now forcing companies to try it, will people still want to live in NYC over the next few decades? I for one would choose to live far away from expensive cities with in-office jobs if permanent remote was an option.
Not to mention access to healthcare, legal services, etc. There are parts of some of the less populated states where you literally have to drive 100 miles to get to the nearest hospital. Nebraska recently had an issue where there were something like 12 counties that didn't have a single lawyer in the county. Not to mention all the issues with local law enforcement in smaller municipalities. And with companies like Verizon promising to build out to rural areas and then reneging on those promises after getting grants for the buildout, you might not even have decent internet to do that remote job.
I think it depends. For NYC, probably not. For many of the small costal towns and cities, it quite possible makes more sense to move or abandon them. And as @NaraVara mentioned, at a certain point enough individual people may just choose to move themselves.
There will probably be something of everything. It makes sense for rich cities pay a lot to protect expensive infrastructure, but there are also going to be beachfront homes where it doesn't make sense economically to protect them. In some places, it might make sense to raise homes up a bit; I saw an article about people doing that in some places in Cape Cod. There was also that time when old Sacramento was raised to protect against river flooding.
Calling it "unimaginably labor-intensive tasks" seems a bit much. A lot of this will look like normal construction that happens gradually.
I am skeptical of the idea of guaranteed government jobs. This sounds like forced make-work to me. I would rather see universal basic income combined with increased funding for those infrastructure projects where it makes sense, and the actual construction being done by construction firms. We also need to figure out what's going on with cost disease, or it will amount to a lot of spending with not much to show for it.
I mean it's important to consider that Doctorow is looking at a long timescale (200+ years) and sea level rise can be pretty significant on that timescale. At something like 3 degrees Celsius of warming (on the low end of "business as usual"), we could see eventual sea level rises of 50-80 meters1, which is far too much to consider defending existing coastal infrastructure. Sure it may take a couple hundred years, but if we're planning that far ahead then it would be prudent to consider that whole cities will need to move.
I agree with you that unemployment predictions of 30% are a bit overblown, he does say "unemployed or working for governments." Considering that in the US, the low end is for a state to have 10% of its workforce working for some level of government2, his numbers are still a little higher than I think we can expect, but not the absolutely unreasonable ones they may appear to be at first glance.
1: See The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells for more on this. He cites The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth's Climate by David Archer for 50 meters, and "What the World Would Look Like If All the Ice Melted" by Jason Treat et al. in the September 2013 issue of National Geographic for 80 meters.
2: See Business Insider, "Here's how much of each US state's workforce is employed by the government"
Just wait a few decades for the sea level to rise, surely it's possible then.
Or just let tens of millions of asylees desperately romp through into rural areas without accommodating them so the people there stay/become (more?) racist/xenophobic instead of trying to help them, that'll do too.
Cory Doctorow's brief argument against AI is a sort of proof by lack of imagination that everyone in an entire exciting, well-funded field will be unimaginative. While a lot of bad work will likely get funded, it seems likely that a lot of creative work into alternative approaches will get funded too? Like, how do you know that some of the bicycle mechanics aren't experimenting with gliders?
We can't know in advance what new research developments will happen or what the timing will be. All we can really say, taking an outside view, is that the field doesn't seem to be stagnant; there seem to be interesting new papers coming out all the time. Maybe the research will hit a wall, some fundamental barrier, but speculating that maybe a wall exists doesn't show that there is actually a wall. (Actually proving something like this would be an interesting research result, because then people would look for workarounds and alternatives.)
I think, more than anything, it's a warning that relying on some technological breakthrough that may or may not happen in the needed time frame is a losing proposition. Even then, the article isn't fundementally about AI...it's about solving climate change (and societal problems as a whole).
We can't rely on future technology to solve problems that need work started on them yesterday.
This is a very hypothetical consciousness you are trying to empathize with! I take it you are also concerned for the animals whose dominion coincides ours, and for the people who bear the burden of technologies that already exist! "General ai" my word! Computers are as dumb as they always were, I tell you