True, but it was more restricted in its potential application (because you had to be near a reliable water source). Modern electricity generation, including renewables, doesn’t have that limitation - as the application of coal to steam power demonstrates!

But the economics are clear: if renewables stay cheaper than fossil fuels (and there’s no reason to think they won’t), governments will make the switch anyway.

We’re actually doing pretty well, globally, at shifting to renewables. We’re making more, more quickly and more cheaply than ever before.

I often wonder about this with regard to right wing Americans believing such ridiculous things. It’s seem that what Trump supporters ultimately have in common is not one set of beliefs but a shared belief in things that make no sense: that all Democrats are paedophiles, that JFK wasn’t really assassinated, that vaccines don’t work, that climate change isn’t real, that Donald Trump is anything but a foolish, evil corrupt man. What do these views have in common? They’re fundamentally foolish things to believe.

The fact is that once you believe one patently absurd thing - for example, that an interventionist god exists - your thinking gets warped. When you then make this absurdity the centre of your worldview and your identity, your views on everything become warped. After a certain point, they seem to start believing things because they make no sense.

If a person believes God actually answers prayers, something there is no reason whatsoever to believe, they’re primed to believe all kinds of other nonsense. This is exactly why many religious people have stopped believing in that kind of thing, and now take refuge in the idea of prayer as comfort or as asking for ‘strength’ rather than asking for anything specific (note that even this compromise requires them to ignore the plain meaning of the words of, e.g., the Lord’s Prayer). Most people find it uncomfortable to believe in nonsense. For others, it becomes the point.

Right, but we mitigate that harm (good) by depriving people of their freedom (bad). It is necessary to do it, for the exact reasons you suggest - to reduce evil overall.

I’ve been meaning to read some stuff about how to approach criminal justice if we don’t have free will, but I keep reading other stuff instead. So many books, so little time!

I still think prisoners should be treated well, no matter the crime.

Yes, absolutely. Even for the worst of the worst, their should be rehab attempts, whether it’s anger management, getting them away from gangs - whatever it is they need. I think there are only small numbers of people, if there are any at all, who are really irremediably violent and dangerous, but even for them I’m not exactly happy about putting them away indefinitely.

Prison seems the obvious one. It’s obviously (to me, that is) not desirable to deprive anyone of their freedom, but for persistently violent people I don’t think there’s a better solution, unfortunately.

• Sport and art
• low cost and free places to do sport and art
• linked together by public transit and clean, safe places to walk, run or cycle (or scoot or skate or whatever)
• a shorter working week, so people have time to do the above
• a higher minimum wage, so people can afford the (ideally low, if necessary) costs involved

So, e.g., lots of parks with publicly accessible five-a-side football pitches, ping-pong tables, basketball courts, skateparks whatever - that’s your sport. The parks also have bandstands or outdoor theatres, where there’s space for that.

Public libraries with rooms people can hire (or use for free) for book clubs, sewing circles, art classes - that’s your art.

Good thing about the above is that all these ideas already exist in lots of forms, you just pick whatever works best for your current situation.

People are already painting his face on walls.

Assuming we’re going back far enough, antibiotics. Cure one person of the bubonic plague or tuberculosis and people will start taking you seriously.

The only people who can quit their “pointless” jobs in the name of “moral ambition” are those who are lucky enough to not need them in the first place.

The article does say exactly that.

Good question.

Again, you’ve written quite a long comment, almost none of which is pertinent.

Music is not math. Some aspects of it can be expressed mathematically, yes, but that’s not the same thing.

Imagining the idea ‘I’d like to see an image of a lemming’, which is what you’ve done, does require some imagination. However, the output is not art because the process used to go from your ‘prompt’ to the image was not a creative one. (Also, this isn’t entirely pertinent, but the image output is really bad. If it had been made by a person and otherwise looked like this, I would still say that it was just ugly, bad art.)

You may well be a creative and imaginative person; I don’t know you and I wouldn’t want to judge! However, your image of a lemming was not the result of a creative process and so is not art.

Current AI is lacking both.

Only word wrong here is ‘current’. AI will never have creativity or craftmanship. It’s impossible.

You’re lazy and talentless, and you like how it allows you to steal the hard work and talent of others.

That some, most or all art is partly or wholly derivative of other art is not relevant because the process used by ‘AI’ does not resemble the artistic process. When Shakespeare wrote Hamlet (a work derived from an older play, itself derived from an older myth which itself had been through countless retellings, variations and translations), he did not do what an LLM does, which is approximately to say: ‘It’s statistically likely that the phrase “to be” will be followed by the phrase “or not to be”’. Putting together statistical likelihoods is not creativity. This alone shows that AI ‘art’ is not creative and therefore not art at all.

Additionally, instructing a machine to make things from prompts does not require creativity. Creativity is not ‘having ideas’; it’s an ongoing process. When you tell an image generator to make an image, you’re not asking it to create something, because it cannot do it. You’re saying ‘Show me the statistically likely output for this input’. Again, this statistical generator is not the same as, nor is it comparable to, the human imaginative process.

Yes. It can only exist through stealing the creative work of others.

Also, it looks terrible.

Doesn’t matter as long as they’re exactly as knowledgable as I am or, failing that, slightly less so /s

Some sort of libertarian socialism, basically. Markets with co-ops and a strong welfare system provided principally by highly democratic local governments.

Nuclear fusion, right? That’s got to be the big one.