Silicon vs Carbon and the Battle for Human Cognition

Rising CO2 causes more than a climate crisis--it may directly harm our ability to think

Apr 2020, phys.org

As a person who uses carbon dioxide levels to estimate indoor air quality, this projection is hard to believe -- Carbon dioxide levels are predicted to rise to almost 1,000 parts per million (ppm) by the year 2100, with indoor accumulation at 1,400 ppm.

It's hard to believe because today it's 400ppm outside. In 1900ish, it was 300ppm. But because we exhale carbon dioxide, it accumulates in spaces with poor ventilation. Today, if CO2 reaches 1,000ppm, we say there's something wrong with your ventilation system. In 2100, the entire planet will have a "ventilation problem," at least from the perspective of an oxygen-breathing meatbag.

To be exposed to that much CO2 all the time will lower your IQ. It's not just 8 hours a day, it would be all day all night of exposure:

Put simply, when we breathe air with high CO2 levels, the CO2 levels in our blood rise, reducing the amount of oxygen that reaches our brains. Studies show that this can increase sleepiness and anxiety, and impair cognitive function.

In fact, at 1,400 ppm, CO2 concentrations may cut our basic decision-making ability by 25 percent, and complex strategic thinking by around 50 percent, the authors found.

via the University of Colorado at Boulder:

Kristopher B. Karnauskas et al, Fossil fuel combustion is driving indoor CO2 toward levels harmful to human cognition, GeoHealth (2020). DOI: 10.1029/2019GH000237

http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2019GH000237

Luckily, we're already doing something about this.

No, not like that. We aren't going to reduce the amount of CO2 in the air. We're making artificial brains to take over where our environmentally-sensitive brains leave off. Every year, as the CO2 rises, we will offload more and more of our oxygen-intensive decision making to silicon brains. They don't need oxygen. Eventually, neither will we. 

Post Script:

On Carbon Footprints and Cognitive Decline

Jul 2019, Limbic Signal

 

Artificial Impressionism

Fake news via OpenAI - Eloquently incoherent?
Nov 2019, phys.org

Robots slowly taking over. Give them a sentence and they can now keep it going for a few more sentences, but after that it gets stupid.

So you can give it a fake headline, and it will generate the first line of the story, but after that things will start to fall apart.

Good thing the targets for engineered memetic propagation are not trying to read past the first sentence!

Post Script
Researchers develop a method to identify computer-generated text
July 2019, phys.org

In the above 3 images, the first is a chunk of text written by a robot (most of the words are green, with a few yellows sprinkled in), the second is a real New York Times article (only half is green, the rest is yellow, with some red, and a sprinkle of purple) and the third picture is a clip from "the most unpredictable human text ever written", James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake (the colors green, yellow, red, purple are all evenly distributed about the page).

Green words are very predictably the next word. Yellow words are less likely to show up after the word they show up after. And red and purple are for when the next word is something you absolutely did not expect.

Because text-writing algorithms today use a statistical correlation program based on a compendium of written language (so they know what words typically occur together) the output of such algos will tend to look like the topmost image with all green words. The algos can't think for themselves, they can't 'come up with' new stuff, and they can't be unpredictable. The whole point of writing an algorithm to do this is to prescribe what it's going to do in advance, i.e., it's predictable.

Anyway, soon we won't be writing our robots to write like that. They'll use less predictable programs to generate their text, with unpredictability and random association thrown in there on purpose.