World is projected to have 10B people by 2050 (I think). There are plenty of people. He should be more worried about the famines in Afghanistan and Madagascar if he cares so much about people.
This can all be done with GitHub repositories and signed commits. The workflow would be every "transaction" becomes a pull request that requires approval from several owners of the repository and the CI pipeline only passes and merges the PR to the main branch if the commits are signed by some minimum number of approved contributors.
There are also things like joint bank accounts that require approving transactions so this is all already possible with existing technology, all without having to put up with gas fees or any other blockchain nonsense.
This isn't regular ignorance. At this point there is enough data on vaccines and death rates for any sane person to see that the vaccine is a net positive. What's going on with some people is more than just ignorance. They're killing themselves just to "own the libs". The virus doesn't care if you're republican or a democrat, it's just a biological replication machine, it has no political agenda or allegiance.
Innovation hasn't slowed down. Individuals are just having fewer effective ideas. This is expected. The contemporary world is a complicated place so any kind of real innovation requires coordination among large groups of specialists. The development of the vaccine is a very good example of real innovation because it demonstrates what specialists can accomplish when they effectively cooperate across commercial and governmental institutional boundaries.
So if something is slowing down innovation it is probably the incorrect emphasis on the lone genius focusing on hard problems. This is no longer a sensible model for innovation and it probably never was in the first place.
Follow the science means gather data and see what works, it's not about philosophical differences about whether lockdowns are good or not from a philosophical perspective but whether they actually have their intended outcomes, i.e. reduction of infections and deaths.
It would be idiotic to think lockdowns don't make a difference for a highly contagious airborne virus. The fewer people there are out and about the less chances the virus has of jumping from one host to the next. That's not even following science, that's just basic logic. But people don't have logical skills anymore because they keep consuming nonsense from their internet connected pocket supercomputers.
It sounds like you want variations of a patch instead of what GANs do with the synthesizer and the discriminator. You might be better served with some kind of evolutionary algorithm instead since there is no discrimination involved in what you described.
I'm not convinced it's a useful abstraction. It is obvious that text vs. pictures vs. sound and so on have different semantic capabilities, e.g. try describing a new color to someone who has never had functional eyes.
However, it is not something I would read or write books exclusively about.
I'm interested in how culture changes and where it can go/is going. Knowing about what ideas or forms of thinking different media favor -- this seems useful to me. It's part of the 'selective landscape' of culture.
Omicron will not end the pandemic. All the previous variants are still in circulation and evolving. It's only going to get worse because the more variants are in circulation the more chances the virus has of evolving. Eventually there will be several overlapping waves of infections each with a different variant so that people might even get sick from a combination of different variants at once.
The only way out of this was all the way in the beginning when we had a chance of stopping it through lockdowns and vaccination but that's no longer an option. The virus is spreading faster than our vaccine manufacturing and uptake capabilities. This virus is here to stay, it has become endemic.
It's also not surprising. This is exactly what ecological theory would predict for a monoculture. See what's happening to bananas with tropical race 4 infections.
More vaccines won't make much difference because of original biological sin. Omicron is outcompeting delta and milder, that is the beginning of the end, although it may take 1-2 further high transmissibility and low virulence variance to see the actual end.
>>Eventually there will be several overlapping waves of infections each with a different variant so that people might even get sick from a combination of different variants at once.<<
it is possible for delta and omicron [and or others] to recombine genetic features, how probable is the million dollar question at the time
Ya, I'm willing to bet money this is going to happen. It's pretty much guaranteed at this point since there is evidence now that Omicron picked up DNA from the common cold. [1]
> It's also not surprising. This is exactly what ecological theory would predict for a monoculture. See what's happening to bananas with tropical race 4 infections.
What comparison are you trying to make...? Are we similar to bananas?
It's not a perfect analogy but yes, we are like bananas. We should expect all future viral outbreaks to have similar effects. The moment Omicron was detected in the UK I knew it had already reached the US. There is no way to contain outbreaks in a global technocracy. Detection will always be too late.
