Tobacco//Nicotine do have beneficial effects, and uses. Indigenous Americans wouldn’t have used it medicinally if it did not. Obviously a highly processed cigarette full of additives is going to have higher risks of negative sides. But there have been studies showing that nicotine can help with weight management, act as an anti oestrogen, and help prevent Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s disease. I say healthier than marijuana as a hyperbole. Both tobacco and marijuana smoke contain tar and carcinogens.
They might have just liked getting high. Most people do in some form or another.
And nicotine definitely gets you high. Not many other substances will give you the kind of bang a few mg. of nicotine does.
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That’s also true. First time I packed a lip felt amazing
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Further to the nicotine discussion, I used it in lozenge form for several years, some of the science might be out of date in that article (CT mentions it as pre-workout but I think that the way it impacts makes it stimulate the brain but relax the muscles, meaning it’s good for thinking stuff not so much lifting stuff)
I’ve heard that nicotine can reduce insulin sensitivity so I stopped using it, plus my tolerance was too big, no issues stopping however. (Still occasionally partake of a good cigar).
Tobacco is still carcinogenic in whatever form consumed regardless of processing.
Medicinally is the key word there. Very different from recreationally, which is what I took from your first post. And despite what history books call the stuff they put in their pipes, most tribes didn’t actually have what we now call tobacco - it doesn’t grow just anywhere.
Plus, people from tribes from Canada to Peru have told me they never actually inhaled whatever they smoked, because they knew it was bad for their lungs. It was more of a gesture. Take that for what you will.
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I wish Oasis were not getting back together for a world tour
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I’ve always had the radical position that Oasis are the biggest twats ever to succeed in Rock and Roll.
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I always knew I liked you.
If I were given the gift of Ragdoll for even just 30 seconds, I would use it on them.
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I thought that was the typical position outside of Manchester.
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I though that too, but I am now down in Australia and the hype over the tour is real.
The Gallagher brothers are Manchester City supporters.
I read somewhere that during a concert in Germany (I think) they spotted a guy in the audience wearing a Manchester United shirt, so they had him strip it off and told the audience to pass it along until the stage; they then proceeded to stomp on it and tore it apart.
Yeah, they’re twats.
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A networked sentience is the biggest risk that humanity faces, and there is an imminent threat that we will have an AI awakening / shift coming within this century which will fundamentally break global society and risks ending humanity (basically I think something between the plots of terminator & the matrix is going to happen).
The robot assistants that Elon Musk just demo’ed (insane that they’re not getting a ton more press IMO) is a first marker for this. Although I believe Elon is altruistic in his ambitions and endeavors, and cares about humanity, I don’t think it matters. There is a huge existential risk that technology begins to slip out of our control and becomes self-aware/environmentally reactive. For every responsible Elon Musk, there are a hundred who are less sophisticated or controlled in their approaches, and seeing the rapid global impact of tech viruses and exploits (ex: cloudflare outage that broke windows commercially for a day and grounded nearly all flights few months ago) shows the vulnerability of the integrity of our technology.
The scary part of that is the networked aspect of technology. When a change happens such as a level of sentience/self preservation mechanism that AI develops, it would be effectively instant, globally, in its manifestation. That is the single biggest gap and weakness in ‘humanity vs anything existential’
Humans project ourselves into other objects and items, and our biggest weakness ‘against’ technology is that we think and act individually. We may lose the ability to ‘turn it off’ if things go truly sideways.
Yeah, if there was a coordinated attack by a macro-organism that behaves like a micro-organism, with individual cells behaving as one body, it could sweep across the planet like a very smart plague blindingly fast.
I remember a conversation with my neighbor when everything was shutting down and the schools announced a closure. She said that she’s kind of scared and things were getting really crazy, with all of the stuff on the news. I responded that by the time its news, we sprinted past crazy 2 weeks ago.
Even then, I was slow on the uptake.
I don’t think AI is anywhere close to what we would consider sentient and I am pretty sure most scholars would agree (though I didn’t run it through scholar.google.com to check yet).
The biggest risk in my mind is that the algorithms these AI/ML (Because most right now called AI are just predictive machine learning algorithms that appear to “think”) are not actually understood by the people creating them. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are the most common type of predictive machine learning algorithms used today. Computer scientists really don’t know what goes on in the middle step of these to produce the answers they provide. It’s been getting better in more recent years (Theoretical Understanding of Convolutional Neural Network: Concepts, Architectures, Applications, Future Directions) but this really doesn’t explain how the algorithms work, just the steps to produce an outcome. Again, what is currently being called AI is really just a Deep Learning algorithm that makes decisions/predictions based on large inputs of known training data.
I don’t think a Terminator style judgement day is coming soon, but i do worry about certain countries using these algorithms in kill-chain decisions of military assets. Most NATO countries have signed affidavits (which hold no legal standing - so could be flaunted) agreeing to include a human in any “kill” decision being made by a military asset. However, places like China and Russia have not said they will do this.
There were people controlling the “robot assistants”. They weren’t autonomous.
Maybe all those who are talking about the potential dangers of AI are all plants who are trying to sell us on the idea that it is going to be some major breakthrough that will change the world in order to get people to invest. In reality, it will turn out to be another porn niche.
Japan has cornered this market already:
They probably have Taylor Swift asses.
Lower the maximum amount of money any one individual has to pay in taxes, but, also greatly increase the penalties for tax evasion.
It should be legal to send companies who pretty much only have automated customer service exploding shit bombs through the post.