Brainwaves

But Pokopia fully does not do that. The world is lonely without humans and lesser for humanity's absence. So much of the game is about how Pokemon miss humans and are struggling to make sense of a world without us, how the ecosystem is just as hurt by our absence as any other species, and how the things we left behind, even in ruins and burned shells, are often beautiful and strange and helpful to the Pokemon who find them.

Pokemon have always been this allegory for the natural world- back to the original idea of the games inspired by children who caught bugs and kept ant farms- and thus the relationship between Pokemon and humans becomes this allegory for the relationship between nature and humans. And Pokopia looks you dead in the eye and says "the world would be poorer without humans, and if we all vanished tomorrow the echoes of who we are and the things we did would still ring out for eons uncountable. We would be missed and mourned and searched for and the wound of our absence would be deeply felt on this earth for the rest of its turning. The actions of a few greedy short sighted humans will never change that."

From the article:

“If you look only at the trend of species declines, it would be easy to think that we’re failing to protect biodiversity, but you would not be looking at the full picture,” said Penny Langhammer, lead author of the study and Executive Vice President of Re:wild. “What we show with this paper is that conservation is, in fact, working to halt and reverse biodiversity loss. It is clear that conservation must be prioritized and receive significant additional resources and political support globally, while we simultaneously address the systemic drivers of biodiversity loss, such as unsustainable consumption and production.”

This massive meta analysis (for those not familiar, a study analyzing the results of many studies on similar topics) found that the vast majority of conservation efforts show much much better results than doing nothing. In many cases, biodiversity loss was not only stopped but reversed.

GOOD.

Look at him! Look at his chubby little body and droopy snout!

The first image is of a statue from the Naqada Period (3500-3400 BC). There are holes in its head and rear where ears and a tail were probably inserted, but they're gone now.

by age 8 I had started to retort with "I'm listening, I just decided not to do it", which my dad (anti-establishment academic) loved and my mum (a cop in all ways except literal) hated.

fast-forward a few decades, and I now realise that when my ex-spouse started using "you're not listening to me" to mean "why aren't you doing what I told you", I should have ended things right then and there. looking back on it there was no coming back from that.

The common feature cutting across chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and whatever Meta is calling its AI product this week are that they are all primarily “large language models.” Fundamentally, they are based on gathering an extraordinary amount of linguistic data (much of it codified on the internet), finding correlations between words (more accurately, sub-words called “tokens”), and then predicting what output should follow given a particular prompt as input. For all the alleged complexity of generative AI, at their core they really are models of language. The problem is that according to current neuroscience, human thinking is largely independent of human language — and we have little reason to believe ever more sophisticated modeling of language will create a form of intelligence that meets or surpasses our own. Humans use language to communicate the results of our capacity to reason, form abstractions, and make generalizations, or what we might call our intelligence. We use language to think, but that does not make language the same as thought. Understanding this distinction is the key to separating scientific fact from the speculative science fiction of AI-exuberant CEOs. The AI hype machine relentlessly promotes the idea that we’re on the verge of creating something as intelligent as humans, or even “superintelligence” that will dwarf our own cognitive capacities. If we gather tons of data about the world, and combine this with ever more powerful computing power (read: Nvidia chips) to improve our statistical correlations, then presto, we’ll have AGI. Scaling is all we need. But this theory is seriously scientifically flawed. LLMs are simply tools that emulate the communicative function of language, not the separate and distinct cognitive process of thinking and reasoning, no matter how many data centers we build.

An adult human being should be able to decide what to have for dinner. Yes, some days it's rough and you don't wanna, but the point is, you can do it. And if you can't, you can learn. Hell, make post-it notes with dinner options, stick them on a dart board, and on days when you really can't decide, throw a dart.

You'd really rather put these decisions in the hands of an AI? As in, a company? And you don't see the issues with that? You don't see how easy that makes it for companies to manipulate you, influence your choices and your spending and your entire life?

And if your mental health relies on talking to a robot about your issues "because it listens and cares" - no, it doesn't. It can't listen. It can't care. It's lying to you. It's parroting phrases said by other people in similar contexts. It's an elaborate predictive text machine.

And again, you're just giving all of this information about yourself to a company. A company that wants to make money and likely has no compunctions about selling your data. You're trusting a software run by a company. And you don't think that'll be used to manipulate you? I've got a bridge to sell you.

What you need is actual human connection with other humans. And if you don't know how to connect with other humans then it's time to learn. Start by caring about other people. Take a genuine interest in them. Listen to them. That's how you connect. Not by treating others as entities to dump all your issues on or monologue at about your boring life. Sure, character.ai will put up with that and humour you, but there's literally nothing genuine about it and you will never ever learn to make actual friends.

Relying on genAI for any of this means you'll never learn, in fact you'll get worse, and if genAI ever goes away or you find yourself without access to a computer/phone/internet or the people running chatGPT or character.ai take down the website or put it behind a paywall, you'll be completely adrift. You are handing control of your life over to a piece of software run by a business. Instead of developing skills and independence you're just handing control over to someone else, someone who by the way does not care about you, someone who's only here to make money.

"But some people need--" to stop infantilising themselves, to start taking responsibility and control of their own life, to realise that they have agency and power, to learn that agency and control are not the same as blame and guilt and that someone trying to help them reclaim control is not trying to blame them for their situation.

At the same time, in high-income countries, less-necessary production should be scaled down to enable faster decarbonization and to help bring resource use back within planetary boundaries. With this approach, good lives can be achieved for all without requiring large increases in total global throughput and output.

Provisioning decent living standards (DLS) for 8.5 billion people would require only 30% of current global resource and energy use, leaving a substantial surplus for additional consumption, public luxury, scientific advancement, and other social investments. Such a future requires planning to provision public services, to deploy efficient technology, and to build sovereign industrial capacity in the global South.