I think the bigger concern is what sudden climate shifts might do to agriculture. If some farmland becomes much less viable on a wide basis, that might be much harder to adjust to on the short term.
I can't help but think of all the historical societies that collapsed due to even mild pressure on the food supply.
> I can't help but think of all the historical societies that collapsed due to even mild pressure on the food supply.
They didn't have the logistical advantages we have today (storage and transport).
Okay, when prawns fished from the coast of Mozambique are no longer viable some other spot will, necessarily, become viable.
Historical societies did not have the technology to simply farm in another place when their current place become hostile to farming. We already do this.
The only danger we have is if the global area for farming decreases. I do not think this will happen - it will merely shift around.
> Historical societies did not have the technology to simply farm in another place when their current place become hostile to farming. We already do this.
Maybe not to the same extent, but empires in the past certainly had the ability to move food around.
In the meantime food production has become more specialized relying on fewer producers.
> some other spot will, necessarily, become viable.
What is your basis for this claim?
It's entirely possible for prawns fished from the coast of Mozambique to simply...go extinct. For areas with good arable land to be plunged into inhospitably cold temperatures, only for other areas with arable land to be made too hot to reliably support their crops.
> It's entirely possible for prawns fished from the coast of Mozambique to simply...go extinct.
So? That isn't an irreplaceable staple, is it? Those prawns can be replaced by food that is grown in other places that are viable, whether newly viable or always viable is irrelevant.
> For areas with good arable land to be plunged into inhospitably cold temperatures, only for other areas with arable land to be made too hot to reliably support their crops.
I find it unlikely that all areas become non-arable at the same time. Not even the most extreme warnings about climate change go to this extreme.
What is your reasoning for considering a possibility so small that it exceeds all the most extreme models we have?
> Those prawns can be replaced by food that is grown in other places that are viable, whether newly viable or always viable is irrelevant.
But those prawns are gone. The people whose livelihood depended on them have lost that. The people for whom they were a staple have lost that, no matter how replaceable they may be.
Sure, given time, we may be able to find replacements for the things we lose to this drastic climatic shift. But that's not a guarantee, and even if we do, there's huge damage and upheaval in the meantime.
> I find it unlikely that all areas become non-arable at the same time.
It's not about "all areas". Nowhere did I say that everywhere on the planet would become non-arable land at the same time. It's about having more land lose viability than gains it within a short span of time.
What you're positing—that as various areas of the planet warm and cool, there will be perfect balance in what arable land we lose and gain—seems much, much less likely than the scenario where land we have farmed for literally thousands of years becomes wasteland, and we do not immediately gain enough new arable land in other areas to replace it. In fact, every projection I have seen has suggested that while we may gain some new arable land, it will be much, much less than what we lose in a scenario like the one described.
What it looks like to me is that you are either handwaving the decades (or more!) of turmoil, hardship, and loss of life for people in the areas that will be most affected by this, or you're engaging in seriously magical thinking to posit that every acre of farmland lost will be perfectly balanced by an acre of farmland gained somewhere else, and no one will be seriously negatively affected by the move from one to the other.
> What you're positing—that as various areas of the planet warm and cool, there will be perfect balance in what arable land we lose and gain
I am not, and never did propose that. I am arguing that there is no model that I am aware of that predicts a such dramatic NET reduction in arable area that society collapses. If you know of such models, now would be a good time to make me one of the lucky 10k :-) The only ones I am aware of are those predicting specific collapse on specific populations, most of which are tiny, percentage-wise.
> What it looks like to me is that you are either handwaving the decades (or more!) of turmoil, hardship, and loss of life for people in the areas that will be most affected by this,
No, I am not. Respectfully, you appear to be ascribing intentions to my argument that I don't have. I quoted the bit I was responding to specifically!
>>> I can't help but think of all the historical societies that collapsed due to even mild pressure on the food supply.
To which my answer is that this is very unlikely - there will be turmoil, hardship and (some - they aren't going to all die) loss of life in the affected currently-arable areas, but society does not depend on any specific area being viable.
The largest societies live nowhere near their source of food. The impact is not the same as the quoted "historical societies" that collapsed when the arable land did, because our societies don't have the dependency of "living on or near arable land".
Will there be a negative impact on those people living in and around arable land? Sure. Are they a significant percentage of our societies? Nope. Single-digit percentage of the population is nowhere close enough to cause a societal collapse.
All of this to say that, what happened to historical societies happened because those societies were built in, on and around their basic nutrition requirements.
Net land area suitable for arable production may well remain roughly constant, but only over timescales much longer than a human lifespan due to the speed at which ecological succession operates.
For instance, when permafrost melts the land left behind is extremely uneven, covered in marshy hollows and collapsing pingos. Where soil exists, it is thin and biologically inert. Primary succession to the point where it is suitable for intensive arable production will take at least a millennium, even if there are no further changes to the climate.
Now, it's likely - human ingenuity being what it is - that we'd be able to use that new land for some form of agriculture well before that, perhaps even within a century or two. But if we do, it'll be through something like genetically-engineered moss and sedges, not intensively growing wheat and corn in northern Siberia!
> some other spot will, necessarily, become viable.
and provided no basis for that claim.
Not "some other spot may become viable." Not "the amount lost will be minimal." Not "we will be able to get by with less." You made an extremely strong claim, that for every lost place to fish, we will, definitely, necessarily, be granted another.
That is what I was responding to. Indeed, I quoted it in my first message here.
>> some other spot will, necessarily, become viable.
You are correct, I did say that, but that's because the probability of that is so close to 1 that it's not worth splitting hairs about.
Can that fail to happen? Sure, but for the planet to heat up even by an exceptionally high 10c and have few places near the average is a vanishingly small possibility, and would almost certianly require a change in the earth's orbit.
The proposition wasn't "all the viable land/fishing spots will be destroyed". No one has been arguing that.
It was "when we lose this viable fishing spot, another spot that was not viable will become viable".
And there is zero basis for that.
So either you have massively failed to state your position clearly, or you are so blatantly moving the goalposts, the dragmarks can be seen from space. Which is it?
> So either you have massively failed to state your position clearly, or you are so blatantly moving the goalposts, the dragmarks can be seen from space. Which is it?
Stop with the personal attacks - you are obviously emotional about this, and it's clear I am not.
My position is, and always has been, that there is no evidence that modern societies are as dependent on living on, near or around their source of nutrition.
Even an extremely high increase, past what all models predict currently, will still leave net than enough arable land on earth to continue sustaining societies.
I am arguing that an imbalance wide enough for societal collapse is highly unlikely.
My position is absolutely clear, from the very first message in this thread.
You have, variously, 1) strawmanned that I argued cosmic balance, 2) shifted the frame of the argument from societal collapse to individual human suffering, 3) Made personal slurs against me rather than my argument, and 4) Point-blank refused to address my argument, restarted here for the third time.
These optics are not good. Just to be clear, this is what you are supposed to be arguing against (because this is my point): "Climate change on its own will not be sufficient to cause societal collapse."
I cannot see how you have any argument against that, but you have replied so many times that I have to wonder why you are even replying, arguing against an argument that is not being made.
I was 100% clear what I was arguing against from the very start.
> some other spot will, necessarily, become viable.
You doubled down, changed the subject, and moved the goalposts.
If you had said what you claim to be your point 12 hours ago, rather than strawmanning my posts as claiming that all arable land would disappear at once, then perhaps we could have had a different conversation. (I'd still disagree, but at least it would've been different.)
....also, what the hell is so wrong with being emotional about the collapse of modern human civilization, caused by very preventable factors that we've known about and been screaming about for literally longer than my entire life?
Is acting like a Vulcan supposed to make you morally superior or something...?
Current society can quickly collapse if the internet or AI data centers are shut down. All supply chains and finance are based on it. The shutdown can easily happen if the climate cools down, given that more electricity would be needed to heat houses, and we're already on the verge of efficiency of electric systems.
> Back in 2021, a study in Nature Geosciences showed that the AMOC was the weakest it’s been in more than 1,000 years.
Out of curiosity, what happened 1000 years ago to make it so weak? 1000 years ago is still human time scales - there were people living in europe and north america at the time. We have written records from the europeans at least. Its not like this was 100,000 years ago.
1000 years ago there was the medieval warm period which at least for Northern Europe provided warmer temperatures than today (eg grapes in the Netherlands)
the further back you go, the less evidence we have. we don't know it was this week 1000 years ago, it's just that the error bars got big enough that we can't yet rule it out.
I don't think its lack of land that is preventing 10% of our energy coming from solar. Do you really believe that without golf courses there, the land would be used for solar instead?
Paper not about benchmarking or ML research is bad from the perspective of benchmarking. Not exactly a shocker.
The authors themselves literally state: "Unlike other proposed math research benchmarks (see Section 3), our question list should not be considered a benchmark in its current form"
On the website https://1stproof.org/#about they claim: "This project represents our preliminary efforts to develop an objective and realistic methodology for assessing the capabilities of AI systems to autonomously solve research-level math questions."
Sounds to me to be a benchmark in all but a name. And they failed pretty terribly at achieving what they set out to do.
It's not angst. It's intense frustration that they 1) are not doing the science correctly, and 2) that others (e.g. FrontierMath) already did everything they claim to be doing, so we won't learn anything new here, but somehow 1stproof get all the credit.
Are they really trying to do science, or are they just trying to determine pragmatically whether or not current AI is useful for a research mathematician in their day to day job?
What do you mean ? These are top-notch mathematicians who are genuinely trying to see how these tools can help solve cutting edge research problems. Not toy problems like those in AIME/AMC/IMO etc. or other similar benchmarks which are gamed easily.
> that others (e.g. FrontierMath) already did everything they claim to be doing
You are kidding right ? FrontierMath benchmark [1] is produced by a startup whose incentives are dubious to say the least.
Unlike the AI hypesters, these are real mathematicians trying to inject some realism and really test the boundaries of these tools. I see this as a welcome and positive development which is a win-win for the ecosystem.
Of course it is. Things getting cheaper is really bad for the economy.
That's why computers never became an industry, they just kept getting cheaper every year so nobody bought them. If only computing power had kept getting more expensive every year, we might have some kind of tech industry!
> But I have read some of his emails, and all of the ones I have seen are full of spelling, punctuation, grammar and capitalization errors. I would not gotten out of sixth grade if I wrote like that.
I'd more focus on the ideas being expressed being incoherent. Spelling is surface level, but that word salad made no sense.
Even if AI were erased today, most SaaS companies wouldn’t exist in 5-10 years. Doing business with a small tech company that could run out of borrowed money or sell to someone who will destroy the product or just arbitrarily change the terms of service tomorrow is a liability. That’s assuming the hypothetical tech spend isn’t just eroding margin anyway.
On prudent choices: one thing I'm surprised about is that LLMs are showing me libraries and tools that I'd not found via search.
A boring one from today was about select, datalist or some custome element (which LLM can prototype) or some JS libs. Good breakdown; links to playgrounds, rough mocks so team could kick tires. It raises points the team had and had counterpoint to help drive decisions.
it depends a lot on the application, I think, though certainly you can point to cloud services like Cloudflare or whatever Burger King was using to track how many times a clerk said "You Rule" (while capturing all customer audio data, which was then stolen by low-effort attackers) as high-risk; just because you don't feel the safety risks of outsourcing data to a black box on the cloud doesn't mean they don't exist, it just means you get to neglect them. when I headed IT at an SMB, I was given a lot of leeway, and our department had its own budget, so cutting out SaaS was a high priority so we could do more. if I were heading today with LLMs' present competency, I would have replaced much more, up to and including Salesforce which was draining the heck out of our budget despite us not doing anything technically interesting with it.
$40/head/year (including employees no longer with company) for a call metrics suite is low-stakes and relatively easy to replace what we want out of it, and this is an example of something we did replace with a $0 solution with my own abysmal-at-the-time coding skills. ~nobody's about to replace Microsoft suite, though (a couple replacements before me, they earnestly tried; there were still some laptops with OpenOffice on it; I admire them, but I'm not dealing with our sales team trying to figure out what an ODF is).
I love this "petty kingdom" budget model, by the way, as someone whose work personality could be described as "cheap analyst." I'm paying $40/month per head for Software X in your department, and I have an inferior replacement for $0/month/head which meets specs and which you can't quantify productivity loss for (essentially, it just looks ugly and feels bad). I can therefor cut that out of my budget entirely while meeting my obligations, and if *you* really want the decadent solution, *your* department can bear that cost. Either way, I get plenty more money to basically not have to be a dick (like charging careless employees for broken/stolen equipment, or getting an above-expectations solution for ADA employees); and sometimes, maybe some antennas show up on the roof which would be difficult to justify cost for if asked, but I'm way under-budget so nobody would.
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