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An understanding of human impact on climate change Discovery of extra-solar planets (and even potentially an extra-galactic one) Self-driving taxis (waymo, in

• dredmorbius 5y ago
  Of those: - Realisation of climate change puts additional constraints on human activity, it doesn't lift them. It's what I call a "hygiene factor", along with other realisations of unintended consequences of activities. Note that the constraints existed all along, we're just made aware of them at some point. - Extrasolar planetary systems have virtually no practical impact for life on Earth. They represent an extension of understanding but not of means. - Self-driving taxis ... are solving a wrong problem for most people. They don't solve transportation problems (congestion, cost, pollution, land-use), they are far more capital-intensive than increased land-density, walkable (or bikeable) cities, or mass-transit. They seem to exacerbate, not solve, inequality issues amongst both drivers and riders. There may be a slight safety improvement, but that remains theoretical rather than demonstrated. On every other touted benefit, ride-hailing / self-driving vehicles have failed to deliver. - Movie CGI is an example of a technology with very minimal upside benefits and huge downside risks. The positives are ... making it easier to tell lies in entertainment. The negatives are ... making it easier to tell lies for any other cause at all: deepfakes, porn, fraud, spearphishing, propaganda, etc., etc., etc. There may be some benefits in situation / scenario modeling and simulation, though much of that seems to have military and offensive applications as well. - Physics, astronomy, and medicine are all domains in which return to knowledge seems to fall rapidly. Basic mechanics gave us simple machines, chemistry and gas laws gave us our prime movers, steam engines, ICEs, and turbines. Electromagnetic experiments gave us generators, electric motors, and a wide range of electromechanical and electronic systems virtually all conceived of in the 19th century. Of quantum-based systems, the most widely used are probably LEDs, lasers (in information transmission and preservation), and photovoltaics. Returns to basic medical interventions (public health, nutrition, food quality, antisceptics) are vastly greater than those to acute interventions. And we can't even persuade a huge fraction of the population to practice basic hygiene and get a proved vaccine. - Modern cars are dependent upon computational power. It is not necessary to use computational power in those cars, and vehicles lacking any electronics do in fact function. There are marginal at best improvements in performance and safety. Pollution controls (through improved real-time combustion tuning) is probably the largest impact. Note that the primary alternative to ICE-based automobiles are electric cars, themselves a development track abandoned over a century ago in favour of (at the time, and by badly flawed economic pricing functions) cheaper fossil-fueled internal combustion engines. Meantime, pervasive problems exist in pollution (global warming from CO2 emissions, ozone from CFC releases, lead largely from use in motor fuels though also paint and other applications, other heavy metals, endocrine disruptors, plastics), environmental and ecosystem devastation (multiple causes), economic inequity, political imbalance, massive injustice, discrimination and genocide, epistemic warfare, and fundamentally, a failure to accept and act on the reality of limits to human expansion and progress.