Basically, if you currently own a home this good. If you don't, maybe rent will go down at the expense of being able to purchase a home. And deregulation may lower the cost of housing (at the expense of quality of life).
Enjoy a lifetime of never owning is what this article proposes.
Let's be honest, if their is a global conspiracy to spread disease I think it's to kill off the masses due to AI replacing jobs and lowering the amount of green houses gasses people produce.
Granted, they're no strangers to pushing unwanted nonsense on people (remember the ribbon?) but even by their standards this does seem unusually extreme.
There is more than enough lithium on the planet for it.
Additionally, there's growing recycling technology and significant advances in battery technology and engineering the vehicle itself to be more efficient with the battery it's tied to. Structural and management systems for example.
There's also growing research and use cases for second-life applications for batteries no longer useful for an automotive application such as additional grid storage. Some key applications for this include grid balancing and lesson length of outages.
I worked this out a while back, based on the percentage of the earth’s crust that is lithium and the percentage of a car that is lithium.
I worked out that you could cover > 10% of the planet with EVs if Lithium was the only bottleneck resource.
The bigger problem is the environmental impact of extracting the lithium. My guess is that desalination plants would be a big part of my plan to cover the planet with EVs.
(We’ll probably need desalination anyway because we keep electing politicians that are intentionally causing increasingly severe droughts).
If anything, the superhuman AI should be used to write simpler laws that are unambiguous and free from exploitation and/or loopholes. Well, at least better than we humans do today.
Laws become complex primarily to account for loopholes, or in some cases to add loopholes. It's still a bad idea to use an AI to write the laws and it always will be.
> simpler laws that are unambiguous and free from exploitation and/or loopholes
Is such a thing possible?
I mean, "simple" often has a lot of exploits and loopholes, while "unambiguous" pretty much means Lojban and similar instead of normal languages like English, Welsh, or Swahili.
This is a fantastic point and gets at the crux of the issue.
I do see a future where laws are encoded in an unambiguous, conceptual/symbolic form, to be as simple as possible, but virtually unintelligible to read by a human directly, a machine code of sorts.
The point of a 'laywer' AI would be to act as an oracle to interpret the law in the target language at the level of specificity requested by the user. For those writing the law, the AI would interpret the motives and question the user about any ambiguity, potential ethical issues or clashes with other law, to assert conceptual integrity.
That is unacceptable. You’re describing a black box that cannot be examined, understood or held accountable; you’re assuming it’s programming is absolutely objective, which it wouldn’t be even if all responsible parties had the best intentions. That throws us back into times of worshipping an infallible god at the temple.
Law, democracy ultimately, must be made by the people for the people, or it becomes a tool in the hands of the rich and powerful agains the majority. This is the same reason elections must be held using paper, so every single citizen can understand and participate in the election process. The second you bring voting machines into the equation, you’ve created a technocracy, leaving the unknowing out and depend on those in control of the machines.
That just replaces a "difficult but humanly possible" task (practicing law) with a "we think this must be possible in principle but all of us working together have only scratched the surface" task (interpretability).
When the average person cannot understand either the law or matrix multiplication, they're definitely not going to be able to understand laws created by matrix multiplication.
(And to the extent that our brains are also representable by a sufficiently large set of matricies, we also don't understand how we ourselves think; I believe we trust each other because we evolved to, but even then we argue that someone is "biased" or "fell for propaganda" or otherwise out-group them, and have to trust to our various and diverse systems of government and education to overcome that).
That doesn’t address anything. It only leads to the generation of a single line of arguments stacked against each other, but does nothing on accountability, observability, and is just as enigmatic and intransparent to laypeople. You’re describing a dystopia of complex technology that only a very small elite will be able to control.
I don't necessarily agree with the premise that simple language is more open to loopholes. However, even if it were true, common law systems [0], such as those of most of the UK and the US, are arguably intended to deal with ambiguities and the risk of potential exploits and loopholes, by offering judges significant leeway in their interpretation of a given law and establishing precedent. It is the civil law system [1] which is much more sensitive to precise wording.
Clearly the language spoken today is not entirely the same language spoken a few hundred years ago.
The meaning and intent behind a word written a century or two earlier has the ability to morph and change.
So, that is to say if it's indeed possible to truly make a communication system that is entirely unambiguous and only as complex as is necessary for it to achieve its goal, I do not know.
Even if it is not provably possible however, that should not remove the intent to aim towards that. Especially with regards to legislation or law writing.
I can't recall the source but I think with programming there is an aphorism along the lines that just about every program can be shorter and it is not without bugs. It seems to be something similar is applicable for laws.
Aside, I'll have to look into lojban as I am unfamiliar with it. It looks interesting though.
I have a modern diesel truck and a 1988 Land Cruiser. I’ve been a mechanic since I was 14 (farm tractors) and was a helicopter mechanic and crew chief in the marines, then a transmission mechanic on cars during college. I’ve got a mechanical engineering degree.
The Land Cruiser requires a lot more of my time working on it, but it’s a dream. I can fix something in a couple hours. The diesel, it’s a nightmare. Everything sucks working in it. Access is horrible, I end up having to jack into the CAN bus all the time, I spent a while with an oscilloscope plugged into it a month ago, and I’ve had to write my own software to interact with it.
Modern cars are more computer than car, and they are pushing more and more towards being fixed like them. I’d rather work on an electric car… what wears out? The cooling system? A bearing? Simple.
The same overcomplex, proprietary computer surveillance systems infect all electric cars because they're all modern. They're all (for some reason?) connected to the internet, subject to OTA updates, and completely locked down to the end user. If a manufacturer would make an EV with open software and systems--no useless internet crap--for less than $100k I'd buy it tomorrow.
My education is via YouTube and downloaded service manual, and I’m able to maintain my modern ICE car just fine. My hybrid scares me though. High voltage controlled by computers is nothing to play with.
There is a disconnect. And information on how to properly insulate and isolate away from the voltages that you may be dealing is also easily found.
It requires maybe a bit of research but it's not impossible.
Are you also able to rebuild your engine and transmission? Service every sensor on board your car? Have access to a diagnostic computer and dicern those codes?
Basically, if you currently own a home this good. If you don't, maybe rent will go down at the expense of being able to purchase a home. And deregulation may lower the cost of housing (at the expense of quality of life).
Enjoy a lifetime of never owning is what this article proposes.