TheGoodFuture Blog (Futurist Gerd Leonhard)

“If AI causes mass unemployment among the general populace, it will be the first time in history that any technology has ever done that. Industrial machinery, computer-controlled machine tools, software applications, and industrial robots all caused panics about human obsolescence, and nothing of the kind ever came to pass; pretty much everyone who wants a job still has a job. As Noah has written, a wave of recent evidence shows that adoption of industrial robots and automation technology in general is associated with an increase in employment at the company and industry level.”

Generative AI: autocomplete for everything
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/generative-ai-autocomplete-for-everything
via Instapaper

“Animal populations worldwide have declined by 69% since 1970 (by 94% if just looking at Latin America and the Caribbean). 1 million plant and animal species face extinction.

Last month, governments converged in Montreal, Canada for two weeks to try and reverse the largest loss of life on this planet since the dinosaurs. The UN summit on biodiversity, known as COP15, resulted in a new set of biodiversity targets to meet over the coming decade, known as the Global Biodiversity Framework.”

XR Global Newsletter 72: We Are The 96%
https://rebellion.global/blog/2023/01/13/global-newsletter-72/
via Instapaper

“Climate displacement is adding to a massive migration already underway to the world’s cities, and it is becoming a critical issue globally. In 2022, the number of forcibly displaced people exceeded 100 million for the first time, with climate change displacing more people than conflicts. Models show that for every degree of temperature rise, a billion people will be displaced. Over the coming decade, hundreds of millions of people will have to move—you will either be among them or receiving them.

We are facing a huge upheaval, a crisis for our species. Yet, to date, there has been little acknowledgment of this unavoidable climate migration and certainly no plan to manage it. It has taken decades for governments to act in any meaningful way on mitigating climate change by decarbonizing their economies. That has now started, although too late to avoid global temperature rise”

Mass Climate Migration Is Coming
https://www.wired.com/story/migration-climate-environment-refugees/
via Instapaper



“Synthetic media promises a very near future in which advertisements are custom generated for each customer, super realistic AI customer service agents answer the phone even at small and medium-sized companies, and all marketing, advertising and business imagery is generated by AI, rather than human photographers and graphics people. The technology promises AI that writes software, handles SEO, and posts on social media without human intervention”

The one real problem with synthetic media | Computerworld
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3684408/the-one-real-problem-with-synthetic-media.html
via Instapaper

“Last year 94 per cent of US employers polled by Just Capital, a non-profit US research organisation, said their organisation had committed to greater workplace diversity, equity and inclusion. While this was happening, the average CEO in the top 350 US public companies by revenue earned 399 times more than a median employee, according to the Economic Policy Institute, whose calculations include estimates of the worth of granted shares when cashed in.”

How to pay executives in the age of stakeholder capitalism
https://www.ft.com/content/d4aedc19-93c4-4fee-ae51-acac48ed13b7
via Instapaper

“Nevertheless, beyond such incremental improvement also lies a fundamental problem that faces any form of artificial intelligence. A computer manipulates symbols. Its program specifies a set of rules with which to transform one string of symbols into another, or to recognise statistical patterns. But it does not specify what those symbols or patterns mean. To a computer, meaning is irrelevant. ChatGPT “knows” (much of the time at least) what appears meaningful to humans, but not what is meaningful to itself. It is, in the words of the cognitive scientist Gary Marcus, a “mimic that knows not whereof it speaks”.”

ChatGPT can tell jokes, even write articles. But only humans can detect its fluent bullshit | Chatbots | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/11/chatgpt-is-a-marvel-but-its-ability-to-lie-convincingly-is-its-greatest-danger-to-humankind
via Instapaper

Dehumanization!!