Science links for Wednesday

Yes, we can fix the problems of bad storm and disaster-response.”We have a model of how to do this: the aviation industry. There are about 45,000 flights every day in the United States. More than 10 million passenger flights in a year. Despite that frequency, the 2024 fatality risk in aviation was 0.06 per million flights. We didn’t just happen upon a safe aviation environment. The United States developed a system of innovation and policy to keep people safe, in part by making it a priority to learn from air disasters so mistakes aren’t made over and over.” Mistakes like, say, unplugging critical satellites?

The same people who insist man can’t control the climate are proposing legislation against weather control — because apparently man can control the climate.

AI is a power hog that may raise electricity prices for everyone. The Felon, of course, has his own nonsense theory: renewable energy makes power more expensive.

As Paul Krugman notes at that last link, that’s nonsense but the Felon’s obsessed with the idea. Part of that, as Krugman says, is the non-renewable energy industry paying to get his ear (and spreading lies to everyone else). Part of it is, I suspect, that a lot of religious conservatives think environmentalism is pagan nature-worship, and they have his ear too. And part of it, the Felon just hates renewable energy.

He’s targeting wind turbines with extra tariffs and openly stating the days of renewables are over.

Speaking of AI, the industry’s power demands may be one of the factors pushing it into a slump.

One of the industry’s problems is how easily people buy into the idea large language models really are intelligent, capable of knowing they did wrong. Capable of loving their users (another example). Thinking AI can accomplish wonders because It’s A Computer. Problems like Grok going Nazi? No big. Whereas the Felon has banned the US government doing business with woke AI. But techbro buffoon Marc Andreesen wants people to know when AI replaces everyone else, genius investors like him will be irreplaceable.

I wonder if he’s one of the techbros who think replacing us with AI would be wonderful (“They are ethical statements about what ought to be the case: that AI should dethrone humanity and take over the world; that this state of affairs would be better.”)

Would it? A teenager contemplated suicide. It appears his AI discouraged him from telling his parents.

YouTube uses AI to edit uploaded videos without the owner’s consent or knowledbe.

Google’s AI scrapes websites to sum up their contents. The result: fewer people click on the source site.

To end on a cool science note, here’s a look at how humans’ impact of the world is forcing animals to evolve.

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