>Unless we as a society return to a simpler lifestyle of living, I see this as an unsolvable problem.
There's no reason to presume that it isn't possible to retain our current standard of living while also solving the problem through technological innovation - we've arguably had the solution for decades in the form of nuclear, and we're inching closer every day with developments in non-nuclear renewables and outside of the energy space with innovation in farming (outdoor and indoor/vertical, GMO) and material design.
Despite the doom and gloom, talk along the lines of 12 years before irreversible runaway into catastrophe is really a worst case estimate. Chances are we will have plenty of time to develop technology to slow climate change and adapt to its effects in the coming decades, particularly given that it is a rising concern among citizens the world over.
Honestly, given how much of our infrastructure is dependent on fossil fuels and environmentally unfriendly materials, it simply isn't practical to make the kind of radical transition you're advocating for - our entire food chain, for example relies on modern plastics and ICEs for delivery/storage. The waste you describe from e.g. Starbucks and packaging is probably a small percentage of the waste that our modern civilization is structured upon, even if you convinced everyone to drastically lower their standard of living overnight. Balancing risk with cost, this is a transition that cannot happen overnight anyway.
> it simply isn't practical to make the kind of radical transition you're advocating for
The above line is exactly my point. We think changing ourselves is impractical. But we want the rest of the world to abide by our views of "green" and "sustainable living".
This has been true of most American "journalism" for at least a decade now. Activist journalism has become so common that editorialization is just taken as normal - I doubt that the average person even understands the degree to which news is editorialized. It's next to impossible to find an objective mainstream source these days - for both left and right leaning media.
Probably related to the modern polarization of the nation, though which is the chicken and which is the egg is hard to say.
So call it virtual experience training for first responders. That way you implicitly emphasize that this is more than just classroom training, it's much closer to, well, real experience.
You know my business card actually reads, "Virtual Training, Real Experiences." It's a tagline and not a description but I like Virtual Experience training.
>Do current patent laws and regulations regarding inventorship need to be revised to take into account inventions where an entity or entities other than a natural person contributed to the conception of an invention
Well, this seems a little dangerous. I would argue that any invention or innovation generated by an AI should be made public domain.
As we rapidly approach the possibility of genuine AI, the gap between the haves and have nots will increasingly be defined not by accumulation of capital but by accumulation and control of information. If the explosion of technical progress we've seen in ML recently continues, it's quite likely that future designs and breakthroughs will eventually come from neural nets themselves - and if we define these innovations as IP and afford the usual legal protections to the nets that generated them, as the question seems to imply ("other than natural persons"), then I imagine by proxy the ultimate owner of the patent is the owner of the net. Which forms the foundation of a dystopia defined by unprecedented "wealth" inequality where one or a handful of first movers become irreversibly entrenched as the gap between AI powered innovation and human powered innovation will widen exponentially once that door is unlocked.
I think much of the progress in the ML explosion is owed to the beauty of open source and open access publishing on arxiv, and I can't help but feel like getting neural network designs mixed up with patent law would stymie the iterative collaboration that defines ML research.
I don't know that I can find any sources to cite but I once wrote some code for an anthropologist analyzing prehistoric tooth scans, and he mentioned that modern dental carries are substantially more common now than they were in the past because acid producing bacteria thrive on refined sugars that weren't used in modern quantities until fairly recent history.
Not forcing... just having market forces encourage good behavior, instead of hiding the underlying cost pressures from them.
Look at it this way. With enough variation over the day, you create a market for storage. Let's say stored electricity costs twice as much as direct, but the price of direct varies by 3x over the course of the day. You've now created an arbitrage market for buying cheap electricity during the day, and selling it at night.
Of course, the more storage gets built, the more the load (and thus cost) increases during the high-availability times, and the lower the selling price during demand spikes. And thus the market attains equilibrium.
The law of supply and demand is a marvelous thing sometimes.
I understand your point, but GP is talking about avoiding the need for batteries by pricing people out of the market instead. If you're not using batteries, supply during dark or windless hours is inelastic, because there's nothing being generated - in other words you're not solving the problem and you can't really charge anyone anyway because there's nothing to deliver.
> GP is talking about avoiding the need for batteries by pricing people out of the market instead.
Nope, I talked about incentivizing consumers to shift their demand based on a volatile price. I pointed out that much of this can be accomplished without need of batteries.
For example, have the hot water tank heat up water higher than normal when electricity is cheaper, and lower when electricity is more expensive. Hot water tanks lose heat very slowly, this could result in never needing to heat water during the expensive times.
It's a heluva lot cheaper than having a battery do it.
"Windless" is greatly overrated, for two reasons. First, utility-scale wind is built hundreds of feet in the air, not on the ground. Wind is much steadier there. And it's built in carefully selected locations for steady behavior.
Second, it's not a single location. Wind may be lower in one location, but strong in another location 50 miles away. The idea that wind goes completely dead all at once across statewide areas is not how wind actually works.
I'm afraid you misunderstand the way embeddings work - at least for BERT based models, which are currently state of the art.
BERT embeddings, after training change with context. In other words if you feed a paragraph about bank robbers and look at the encoding for bank, it will be meaningfully different from the encoding for the same word produced from a paragraph (or sentence) about river banks.
We use BERT at the startup I work at, and one of our tests was the sentence "the bank robbers robbed the bank and then rested by the river bank". BERT was able to generate three different semantically meaningful encodings for the word bank in this sentence. The first two instances were much closer to each other in vector space (euclidean distance) than the last.
This is huge, because it is arguably the first step in building an AI which can perform basic reasoning about information encoded in text. For example, if you average up the encodings of a paragraph of words, you can create an "encoding" which assigns a summary meaning or topic. Simple vector math becomes a powerful reasoning tool.
> This is huge, because it is arguably the first step in building an AI which can perform basic reasoning about information encoded in text.
Well, except for the many many decades of previous work on NLP using symbolic methods that are quite capable. Although DNNs are en vogue and have some amazing properties, we shouldn't forget that symbolic AI/NLP using explicitly semantic representations is powerful and has a rich history, and complements DNNs quite well -- such as being easily explainable, for one.
The contextualized word embeddings you get out of BERT are still generated from fixed per-word vectors. And while you get one output vector for each input vector, that doesn't mean they correspond to each other. The model could arbitrarily reshuffle information between outputs, so long as the output as a whole reflects the input sufficiently well. So BERT embeddings are not "word embeddings" in the usual sense.
> "2017: Climate Science Special Report: Fourth National Climate Assessment, Volume I" > "Chapter 9: Extreme Storms" lists a number of relevant Key Findings with supporting evidence (citations) and degrees of confidence: https://science2017.globalchange.gov/chapter/9/
There's no reason to presume that it isn't possible to retain our current standard of living while also solving the problem through technological innovation - we've arguably had the solution for decades in the form of nuclear, and we're inching closer every day with developments in non-nuclear renewables and outside of the energy space with innovation in farming (outdoor and indoor/vertical, GMO) and material design.
Despite the doom and gloom, talk along the lines of 12 years before irreversible runaway into catastrophe is really a worst case estimate. Chances are we will have plenty of time to develop technology to slow climate change and adapt to its effects in the coming decades, particularly given that it is a rising concern among citizens the world over.
Honestly, given how much of our infrastructure is dependent on fossil fuels and environmentally unfriendly materials, it simply isn't practical to make the kind of radical transition you're advocating for - our entire food chain, for example relies on modern plastics and ICEs for delivery/storage. The waste you describe from e.g. Starbucks and packaging is probably a small percentage of the waste that our modern civilization is structured upon, even if you convinced everyone to drastically lower their standard of living overnight. Balancing risk with cost, this is a transition that cannot happen overnight anyway.