Ask Lemmy

The dangers of artificial general intelligence (humans becoming even worse thinkers, dystopia, takeover) could be avoided by turning towards human collaborative intelligence augmentation.

https://www.quora.com/Why-is-it-better-to-work-on-intelligence-augmentation-rather-than-artificial-intelligence/answer/Harri-K-Hiltunen

A slow burn. Humanity is slowly wiping itself out. If this is a Q humanity test then we have failed. We need a Picard/Riker/Data/LaForge combo

I do honestly think empathy would be more common if access to psychedelic mushrooms was legal

Which is why it will never happen

I came for the vegan comment however as it was already there, the biggest change I could see from mass adoption of the vegan ideals are that the population would have an across the world increase in empathy to not only animals but because they aren't murdered as part of societal norms the empathy towards and the treatment of humans is likely to increase as well. This could theoretically lead to an increase in environmental action helping climate change but also help addressed a number of socialogical issues at the same time. We are a long way from this however in the uk veganism has increased 1567% in 10 years so with this rate of change it is possible.

There's a lot of "billionaires shouldn't exist" and "eat the rich" sentiment out there. I often suggest jokingly that it should be legal to murder someone once they reach a certain level of wealth. It might motivate them to limit their greed at some point, perhaps be less exploitative of those who are working to generate their wealth or share more of it. And even if they pass the threshold, they may give more concern to how they treat people and how they are perceived.

Truth in advertising laws. Make it illegal to lie, mislead, or deceive in advertising. And I mean criminal, like jail time for the CEO, or they can specify an executive that must sign off on all ads if they like. That person takes the fall. And who decides if an ad breaks the law. A jury, or something more streamlined but still made up of regular Americans who decide.

The two-party system. Regardless of where you live, if it's under a two-party system, you probably agree that it sucks.

Assuming we're starting from "choose one" single-winner elections, you need to first switch your elections to Approval Voting. This would make it always safe to vote for your favorite candidate, and the full support for every losing candidate would be reflected in the vote totals. This will weaken the two party system, but no single-winner system can dismantle it.

After that, switch as many single-winner elections to multi-winner as you can (like city council or a legislative district) and use Sequential Proportional Approval Voting to award seats. This will enable minor party candidates to get into office after the major ones, and the seat totals will look a lot closer to the vote totals.

A few places already use approval (Fargo and St. Louis) and a few places are just begging for SPAV (Cincinnati City council).

The answer to the majority of problems the world is facing is community - we need to rebuild real physical communities, participate in them, and nourish them. We can do this by simply getting more involved in existing ones, staring from things as simple as local gardening groups, litter picking/beach tidy groups, community celebrations, local markets, etc. We need to hold on to, strengthen and rebuild arts groups and help local arts and music scenes to grow.

We can all participate on some level in some aspect of physical community building, and it will enrich us in a way social media never can. (Put on a gig, attend an arts show, donate to a community group, talk to neighbours, support the vulnerable). I believe people feel so isolated and depressed by the way greed has ruined the web, jobs, the economy, etc.that the time is right for many more people to start investing time and effort in real communities.

We need to build and grow communities in a local, regional, national and international spirit. We need to learn how to share, and how to get rid of greed and selfishness in ourselves and in our societies - participating in and building welcoming, non discriminating communities is the path towards this. We need to remove competition in education, arts and science (and ultimately economy), and focus on cooperation and improving things out of the joy of helping yourself and others. Communities can bring this about, and digital communities (as opposed to competitive social media) can support this, too.

Ideally, we want to grow communities in a way where people start thinking first "how does this help my community?" - especially when looking at political and business decisions. We need to feel something positive to stand up for (not old fashioned ideas of 'country' or political groups) - we simply need mutually supportive groups (communities) that fight power, greed and selfishness to defend people, animals and nature.

Mental health crisis -> housing

Anybody working in inpatient mental health right now can tell you that at any one time around 3/4 of our units are occupied by homeless people. Many of them will even fake or exaggerate symptoms of mental illness (usually psychosis or suicidal ideation) to avoid living on the street. Personally I don't even blame them, I'd probably do the same thing. And it really highlights that housing is the primary driver of the modern mental health crisis.

I probably whine the most about the lack of transit options in my city.

Proposed solution: Take intra-city transportation out of the control of the county, so it is run by the city instead. The county can run the buses from the suburbs, or not. We can extend the streetcar, increase bus frequency, all the stuff the city wants, that keeps getting slapped down by the county commissioners, because the suburbs don't want buses.

We should take all the people who oppose universal national sovereignty, and push them somewhere else!