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Computer models predict the collapse of society by 2040


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On 1/28/2022 at 11:27 AM, spud the mackem said:

So, computers know more than we do , where did they get their intelligence from , the people who put into these p.c's should be sectioned and put into the nearest mental facility . Computers cannot predict the future and neither can humans .

Past is prologue.

All any of these predictions are is a projection of what is already happening.  And all of them are subject to the qualifier:  "if nothing changes."  But with catastrophe already on top of them, people usually change.  Sometimes soon enough and sometimes not.

Then we have the question of exactly what is meant by "societal collapse." 

Doug

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10 hours ago, Tom1200 said:

And how about those recent computer models - the C-19 ones with outcomes varying by several thousand percent?  According to the most doomsday forecasts we should al be dead a dozen times over by now.  Which is silly - nobody I know has died more than twice so far.

But we shouldn't scoff - all they've done is attempt to calculate the point where consumption overwhelms production, something everyone since Malthus has wondered about.  And don't forget that the source of the story is Lad Bible, where we all turn for deep, insightful, scientific analysis and research.  The only thing missing is an in-depth, authoritative TickTock video explaining everything in 30 seconds using a screeching backing track and lots of emojis.

Still?  I don't follow the US news as closely as I should, but I thought Antifa were fairly quiet at the moment?  Or do you mean the woke mob shouting down anyone and everything they disagree with?  That sounds dangerously fascist to me but unlikely to end the world any time soon.

What d'you reckon that last bastion of freedom will actually be?  For me a vaccine mandate is a horrific invasion of person freedom (given that the FDA has half a million pages of information on the Pfizer vaccine but can't/won't produce the data that shows it's safe), but as long as we've got Netflix and beer I'll suffer a monthly injection of booster chemicals (so long as someone else is paying for it).

Exactly - just some of the issues beyond the remit or scope of a computer model designed in the 1970s.  Which pre-dates the fall of the Soviet Union, the rise of China, home computing, mobile phones, Internet, DNA-sequencing, GMO crops, 9-11, Greta No-fun-berg, PapaG's ingenious imagination... basically everything that shapes today's world and society.

In the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov he describes an interstellar empire so huge and so interlinked that mathematicians can model trends up to and including the collapse of the society into effectively tribal warfare, and then humanity's gradual regrowth back to civilisation.  Those books were written in the 1950s as imaginative science fiction; this computer model 20 years later seems little more than an ill-considered attempt to quantify Asimov's psychohistory.  I don't imagine the authors took its predictions too seriously.

I'm anti jab for jabs sake.

The modellers in the UK have back tracked massively because they called out on their numbers.

They were massively pessimistic  and they got found out.

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11 hours ago, Essan said:

No, as predicted by (subsequent AGW sceptic) science writer Nigel Calder.   And, despite receiving widespread publicity at the time (mainly due to a BBC documentary) not supported by science.   Indeed, even in his 1974 book (The Weather Machine) he admitted that most scientists instead thought increasing CO2 levels would lead to global warming.

[quote]Acid rain to kill all lake life by 2000.[/quote]

Only if nothing was done to reduce acid rain.  Guess what we did?

[quote]Venice to be submerged numerous predictions.[/quote]

It is, more and more frequently

[quote]No more snow to be seen in UK after 2007[/quote]

Don't recall this one.  But the prediction that it would be an increasingly rare event in (lowland) England has proven very true, with increasing frequency of entirely snow-free winters (such as this one, thus far) - which were previously entirely unknown - and widespread, heavy snow, very unusual these days. 

[quote]Y2K bug to start meltdowns at Nuclear power plants with a plane or two dropping from the skies.[/quote]

See acid rain


Everyone of those predictions hit the mark or failed only because of preventative measures. 

That's the point.

Humans make great choices along the way.

This prediction is BS for that reason.

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3 hours ago, OpenMindedSceptic said:

Acid rain to kill all lake life by 2000.

We beat the acid rain problem by putting in some tough anti-pollution laws.  This was not a case of failed predictions, but of people paying attention to those predictions.

Doug

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A somewhat wandering missive...

First off there is no money in good news or happy predictions so don't be surprised when predictions are nearly always going to be doom and gloom. Now, that does not mean that all warning are just bunk to be ignored. Our world has some serious problems that if we put off addressing for too long could result in catastrophic world wide disaster.

We have a growing population all over the planet. One of the problems with our modern society in the first world nations is a simple matter of evolution. When you have a population of people and you encourage the smartest people to have fewer and fewer children while allowing in in some places like the US actually encourage those least suited to be productive contributors to have as many kids as possible you are creating a problem that can build and cause horrific issues in a short period of time relatively speaking. 

In my Great Grandfathers and Grandfathers time a person could get by with just a little reedin, ritin and rithmatic. The farms and fields didn't require people with very much education or even intelligence to be successful. Mostly it was just hard and determined work. Those days are long gone. What place is there in our current civilized and computerized world for people like that now?

Emigration is what made America great in its beginning. People came here from all over the world to come and work. These were people that were motivated and willing to take a chance. There was no place for people that were lazy, stupid, or weak minded losers. Now we don't filter our emigration to only allow people that will be good for the country. We in recent years seem to search and import people that have little to nothing to offer and never will. Too many of our new citizens didn't come here to work. they came to get on the public assistance and free rides. What future does a person that is mostly illiterate in their language, does not speak English, little to no education, and has no family here to help them have in any of the first world nation?

Slowly but at an ever increasing rate the most highly technological nations are being inundated with people that have no place in that world. In the end our technology will kill our economies as more and more people begin to slide down into this currently unneeded category. It is getting harder and harder for a person to get a good job without a college education. Machines have taken the jobs that used to be the major employers of a lot of people. Jobs that are mostly just repetitive actions are being done by "smart" machines and the people that in the past would have held those jobs now have fewer and fewer options. 

There has always been starvation and other natural disasters that along with mankind's love for killing each-other kept the population of our world under control. These challenges also ensured that there was an advantage to being strong and smart and this kept our species advancing. In the evolutionary sense now in the most advance nations this evolutionary direction has been reversed.  

The computers are not smarter than people but the only deal with facts in the form of numbers and are not influenced by what they want the answer to be. Humanity is heading for hard times because we have the mistaken idea that natural selection no longer applies to us. Those of us with good educations, good jobs and plenty of money will not necessarily be the winners in a world that has returned to the cruelty of natural selection. Interesting times ahead unless we change a lot of attitudes and ways of looking at things in the future...

Edited by DanL
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Guest Br Cornelius
10 hours ago, OpenMindedSceptic said:

I'm anti jab for jabs sake.

The modellers in the UK have back tracked massively because they called out on their numbers.

They were massively pessimistic  and they got found out.

The UK has the highest death rate in Europe which sort of confirms their pessimism.
Your a fool if you refuse the vaccine for no other reason that even if you get Covid it makes a huge difference to the outcomes - almost all ICU admissions are from the unvaccinated.

 

Br Cornelius

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Guest Br Cornelius
2 hours ago, DanL said:

A somewhat wandering missive...

First off there is no money in good news or happy predictions so don't be surprised when predictions are nearly always going to be doom and gloom. Now, that does not mean that all warning are just bunk to be ignored. Our world has some serious problems that if we put off addressing for too long could result in catastrophic world wide disaster.

We have a growing population all over the planet. One of the problems with our modern society in the first world nations is a simple matter of evolution. When you have a population of people and you encourage the smartest people to have fewer and fewer children while allowing in in some places like the US actually encourage those least suited to be productive contributors to have as many kids as possible you are creating a problem that can build and cause horrific issues in a short period of time relatively speaking. 

In my Great Grandfathers and Grandfathers time a person could get by with just a little reedin, ritin and rithmatic. The farms and fields didn't require people with very much education or even intelligence to be successful. Mostly it was just hard and determined work. Those days are long gone. What place is there in our current civilized and computerized world for people like that now?

Emigration is what made America great in its beginning. People came here from all over the world to come and work. These were people that were motivated and willing to take a chance. There was no place for people that were lazy, stupid, or weak minded losers. Now we don't filter our emigration to only allow people that will be good for the country. We in recent years seem to search and import people that have little to nothing to offer and never will. Too many of our new citizens didn't come here to work. they came to get on the public assistance and free rides. What future does a person that is mostly illiterate in their language, does not speak English, little to no education, and has no family here to help them have in any of the first world nation?

Slowly but at an ever increasing rate the most highly technological nations are being inundated with people that have no place in that world. In the end our technology will kill our economies as more and more people begin to slide down into this currently unneeded category. It is getting harder and harder for a person to get a good job without a college education. Machines have taken the jobs that used to be the major employers of a lot of people. Jobs that are mostly just repetitive actions are being done by "smart" machines and the people that in the past would have held those jobs now have fewer and fewer options. 

There has always been starvation and other natural disasters that along with mankind's love for killing each-other kept the population of our world under control. These challenges also ensured that there was an advantage to being strong and smart and this kept our species advancing. In the evolutionary sense now in the most advance nations this evolutionary direction has been reversed.  

The computers are not smarter than people but the only deal with facts in the form of numbers and are not influenced by what they want the answer to be. Humanity is heading for hard times because we have the mistaken idea that natural selection no longer applies to us. Those of us with good educations, good jobs and plenty of money will not necessarily be the winners in a world that has returned to the cruelty of natural selection. Interesting times ahead unless we change a lot of attitudes and ways of looking at things in the future...

So much prejudice and misapprehension of the facts. Almost everything you believe is fundamentally wrong and comes from a hatred of people other than yourself.

Depressing to read really.

 

Br Cornelius

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Guest Br Cornelius

The difference between past predictions and this one are simple;

- ice age imminent was simply wrong and never had any serious scientific basis

- acid rain was addressed by the introduction of stack scrubbers, isolated problem solved with simple solution

- CFC's again single isolated problem solved with simple solution which was relatively easy to solve

- population crisis, solving itself by widespread education, vaccines and general healthcare. populations are stable or falling in many parts of the world. only in Africa is there still steady population growth

 

The difference with the described crisis is that it is all encompassing and embedded in every single aspect of human life. We are consuming resources faster than the planet can replenish them. This is a trend which is only gathering pace as more people aspire to achieve middle class lifestyles. Climate change is a small symptom of this bigger crisis and we cannot even get a sizable proportion of the planets population to accept its reality - so what chance do we have in getting them to see the bigger crisis of resource over exploitation ?

Resource over exploitation touches every single other crisis we face:

- climate change

-biodiversity loss, the biosphere is the ultimate resource which all other resources derive from. It is impacted in our thirst for more agricultural land, more fresh water, more pesticide use to exploit the increasing agricultural land.
-their are "peak" resources crunches on the horizon for just about everything that forms the basis of modern human society. The obvious one is oil/gas. Less obvious are such things as copper, water, lithium, plutonium. When these peaks arrive they send prices sky rocketing and the poorer members of society can no longer afford things that were considered essential only a few years before. There are already people who have to make the painful decision of whether they can afford to drive to work or feed themselves - just the start of what will become normal.

Push ordinary people into living in resource scarcity and lives which were once tolerable become intolerable - and civil unrest ensues. This is where the collapse of modern society becomes inevitable.

There are no quick fix technological solution for most of these resource crisis - because to implement things such as the greening of the grid (wind turbines etc) demands a whole new set of pressures on the dwindling resource base - they compete for resources and push prices even higher - something i see conservatives complaining about daily.

The simplest way to solve this complex of crisis would be to shrink the human population by about 90%, but since I can think of no humane way of achieving this I wont even contemplate it as a solution. For those who imagine capitalism will come up with nifty solutions (lean efficient markets) it wont because the ultimate solution of people been priced out of markets is to let them go without - which ultimately will mean go without food, water and energy. Increasingly governments will have to become more and more interventionist in an attempt to stablize society, and the horror which right winger have been warning us about for decades will arrive - a global command and control society.

And those who would simply dismiss this out of hand, as many here have already done, simply don't have the intelligence, knowledge or analytical skills to understand the near inevitability of the computer models predictions.

 

Br Cornelius

Edited by Br Cornelius
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What do they mean by the collapse of society? This isn't exactly a bad thing. Civilizations rise and fall throughout history. And sometimes you need to hit the reset button.

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59 minutes ago, Br Cornelius said:

The UK has the highest death rate in Europe which sort of confirms their pessimism.
Your a fool if you refuse the vaccine for no other reason that even if you get Covid it makes a huge difference to the outcomes - almost all ICU admissions are from the unvaccinated.

Point 1: the UK is 20th in Europe by death rate.  2273 per million population, behind countries with large populations such as Italy, Ukraine and Poland, and Russia is just behind at 2265.  (Source https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/)

That aside, this has no bearing on the point @OpenMindedScepticand I made - that the models forecast massively variant outcomes none of which came true, even the least pessimistic ones.  (Hence the relevance to the OP - mathematical models can be wrong and often are.)

[Point 1a): no two countries record 'Covid deaths' in exactly the same way which makes direct comparisons between figures problematic.  For example the CCP claims a 'total deaths' count of 4636 which nobody in their right mind believes.]

Point 2: Let's start with a confession - I'm fully vaccinated.  I weighed up the apparent risks of taking the experimental vaccine against staying unvaccinated.  Based on the available evidence, and my innate (naïve?) faith in government institutions to act in our best interests, I took the educated decision to accept the vaccines offered.  

BUT - it was MY decision, and one I did not take lightly.  The vaccine was rushed through development and trials with incredible haste.  We are told it's safe but where is the evidence?  The FDA has half a million pages of data about the Pfizer jab but can't produce a succinct summary that shows it's safe.  We can now see that being vaccinated has little impact on reinfection or transmission rates.  Covid has a 97+% recovery rate across all age groups, approaching 100% in specific cohorts.  So who exactly is harmed by someone refusing a vaccine?  

Point 3: almost all ICU admissions are those sick or elderly patients who for medical reasons have not been vaccinated - their doctors have deliberately withheld the vaccine fearing even one jab might prove too much for their frail bodies.  primum non nocere.

5 hours ago, DanL said:

Those of us with good educations, good jobs and plenty of money will not necessarily be the winners in a world that has returned to the cruelty of natural selection. Interesting times ahead unless we change a lot of attitudes and ways of looking at things in the future...

I wonder how your logic applies to one of the most successful young nations on the planet?  When white people stole Australia the vast majority of settlers were criminals - convicts with little to no education and certainly without the proven work ethos you describe.  Yet they quickly built the foundations of one of the most enterprising and outgoing nations on Earth.  (And some modern Australians aren't criminals at all, so peoples do change.)

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I can believe it.   The population is just growing and growing and the resources are declining.  By 2040 there is projected to be another 1.5 billion people on the planet.  That is the population of China.   

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5 hours ago, Br Cornelius said:

The UK has the highest death rate in Europe which sort of confirms their pessimism.
Your a fool if you refuse the vaccine for no other reason that even if you get Covid it makes a huge difference to the outcomes - almost all ICU admissions are from the unvaccinated.

 

Br Cornelius

The UK's death rate is approx 15 times smaller than the modellers average predictions with some up to 30 times out.

They were woeful and they got found out.

Plus minimal risk assessment in their models for the increase in death from lack if healthcare for other diseases.

And then they use the "with" covid model and the over egged pcr tests with huge Ct.

And even the with covid patients, most went in for other reasons.

Disgraceful.

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54 minutes ago, Myles said:

I can believe it.   The population is just growing and growing and the resources are declining.  By 2040 there is projected to be another 1.5 billion people on the planet.  That is the population of China.   

The long-term predictions for global population are saying that after a short period of growth, it will then drop.

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Guest Br Cornelius
10 minutes ago, OpenMindedSceptic said:

The long-term predictions for global population are saying that after a short period of growth, it will then drop.

This is true, but that short amount of remaining growth will take us over 10billion. We did over 50% of the damage to our biosphere since the 1980's when population grew from 4.5Billion to its current level of 7.8billion (ie nearly double). So if we add nearly the same again by 2040 as projected then the chances of the remaining 50% of biodiversity surviving is slim at best.

There has been no moderation of resource depletion since the original model made its prediction. Its actually a really simple model to run compared to predicting the course of global warming which is incredibly complex.

 

Br Cornelius

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On 1/29/2022 at 6:13 AM, Tom1200 said:

Greta No-fun-berg

Borrowing this one  :w00t:

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Society has already collapsed. People just haven't realized it.

Edited by tortugabob
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On 1/28/2022 at 6:57 PM, Tatetopa said:

During a steep dive, both a pilot and an auto pilot can predict that if nothing is done, an airplane  will impact the ground.  That is predicting the future.

An astronomer can calculate by hand or using a computer the position a planet will be in a year or 50 years time, assuming it doesn't get hit by a surprise asteroid.

You might be counting on human intelligence and free will to avoid predictable catastrophe. Can you count on that?

 

To me that is not predicting the future , predicting the future is what may happen to the human race or the planet in years to come ,and that is not fore see able . A computer is an aid to humans and is only as good as it's operators . 

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On 1/30/2022 at 7:47 AM, Myles said:

I can believe it.   The population is just growing and growing and the resources are declining.  By 2040 there is projected to be another 1.5 billion people on the planet.  That is the population of China.   

Eventually this is coming, but 2040 seems a bit pessimistic.  The history of climate disaster forecasts over the least 50 years is that they just don't allow enough time for their predictions to happen.

The US should reach ZPG about 2050, then begin a long, slow decline in population.  Most of the world should catch up by 2100, but whether that will be caused by population control efforts, better standards of living or environmental crisis remains to be seen.

Doug

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  • 2 weeks later...

I read the Club of Rome's book "The limits to growth" when it came out in the 70's.  Even then I was alarmed by what I read. I also read "The Population Bomb" around the same time. The science behind the MIT study upon which "The Limits to growth" has been proven to be sound. Of course no such study can completely take into consideration black swan events or anomalous scientific developments (such as practical fusion energy), but the predictions of this study seem to be playing out at the present time. I am much more alarmed at present than I was in the 70's - then 2040 was an eternity away , now it is less than 20 years.  I don't believe that 2040 is too pessimistic - I think it is possible that society will collapse much sooner than that. I believe we are living on borrowed time and are likely beyond the point where we could alter our planetary behavior to prevent a catastrophe. 

 

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On 1/30/2022 at 12:07 AM, DanL said:

US actually encourage those least suited to be productive contributors to have as many kids as possible you are creating a problem that can build and cause horrific issues in a short period of time relatively speaking. 

Ghengis Kahn has the most living descendants.  Was he "least suited to be productive?"

Doug

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On 1/30/2022 at 12:07 AM, DanL said:

There was no place for people that were lazy, stupid, or weak minded losers

Charles Steinmetz, a hunchback, was an immigrant at Ellis Island.  He could not speak English.  The customs official decided he was retarded and placed him in a group to be returned to Europe.  A friend of his spotted him in the holding cell and through a pick-pocket-in-reverse placed a roll of bills in his pocket.  He then went to the customs official and asked why he was rejecting a wealthy man who spoke five languages (Steinmetz actually did.).  He showed the roll of bills.  Steinmetz was admitted to the US based on his friend's fraud.  After arriving in the US in poverty, Steinmetz went on to found General Electric, becoming one of the wealthiest people in the world.  One can only wonder how many highly-qualified people we sent back to Europe because they didn't meet the expectations of some customs officer.

 

My grandmother immigrated through Ellis Island.  When they made it a National Monument, volunteers came around collecting money to restore it.  She offered to pay for a bulldozer to knock it down.  True story.  She hated Ellis Island.

 

The US was built by immigrants.  Both those who became bosses and those who labored with coal scoops in the fire holds.  We couldn't have built America without them.

Doug

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On 1/29/2022 at 2:36 AM, OpenMindedSceptic said:

Food rationing in the USA by the 1980's.

We don't feed all our children and haven't since at least 1980.  Many children in the US go to bed hungry and go to school without breakfast.  We et around rationing by choosing to let this happen.  Yet we have more than enough money and more than enough food.  We lack the balls to vote in the programs.

Doug

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On 1/30/2022 at 12:07 AM, DanL said:

There has always been starvation and other natural disasters that along with mankind's love for killing each-other kept the population of our world under control.

The major check on human and other populations is disease.  The black death was the last epidemic that actually caused a population reduction.  All covid did was slow things down a little.  By we are providing new diseases with lots of opportunities.  Eventually one of those could precipitate that disaster.  We have already had Marburg virus inside the Washington beltway and we just barely caught ebola in time.  The next killer disease is already evolving in southeast Asia.  Be ready.

Doug

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