I think people’s reactions are a spectrum (like what else in life is not?). There are the AI cultists who believe the marketing lies of AI companies that AI is sentinent and allmighty, able to solve every problem on earth as long as the companies get more money to burn. And there are the AI enemies who deny AI has any use besides disrupting the job market, wasting ressources and enslave the masses. I guess both extremes are wrong and the sane ground lies between the two.

The problem is that most average citizens are so illiterare with technology that they believe the marketing until proven otherwise… the narrative is shaped by media and media influence can be bought (with investor money). The fact that many reporters don’t know what current “AI” is also isn’t particulary helpful.

I think it’s like the .com-Bubble: The Bubble will burst, many enthusiasts will lose a lot of money… but we’ll keep using and developing specialized tools in areas where they actually create a ROI worth having.

I also don’t know if your sword-gun-comparisson works out as there are first results that imply that using AI for every task doesn’t necessarily makes the user more efficent but also dumper as he/she isn’t challenged cognitively anymore. I wouldn’t say this is an advantage for the individual per default.

I’ve been here for 10 months, and from what I can tell (who knows if my perception is correct), the Fediverse and Lemmy are gaining popularity (or maybe I’m just slowly learning how to use them properly… that’s also possible xD). Here’s how I came to that conclusion: When I first joined, popular posts on world would get a few hundred upvotes. Now, they often get more than a thousand. It’s not a massive surge, but if we assume these are the posts that get the most views, then either interest is growing or the user base is expanding.

Thanks for the interesting video!

It really is a clash of the titans when you consider just how big a full-grown brown bear is… I also find the setting interesting: For one thing, it seems to be winter, and strangely enough, the bear isn’t hibernating (I actually thought they’d have been sleeping for a long time with that much snow on the ground). On the other hand, the deep snow might also be preventing the wild boar from simply fleeing from the bear (I seem to recall, for example, that moose are primarily killed by wolves in winter because they’re slower in deep snow than in summer). Finally, this is a damn big (and confident) boar. Since he’s out on his own, I’d guess he’s a male boar, and even a whole pack of wolves probably wouldn’t dare take him on (at that size)… maybe that’s why he’s so confident in the face of the bear. ^^

As a hunter myself, here are a few thoughts that come to mind on the subject:

1. As is almost always the case, “hunters” are not a homogeneous group. There are many reasonable hunters who hunt, among other reasons, because it’s an honest, nature-oriented, and animal-welfare-conscious way to obtain meat for their own consumption. But there are also idiots who are just eager to kill and/or want to bag big trophies (perhaps because they need to compensate for personal shortcomings). In my experience, however, that’s only a tiny minority of the hunters I’ve met so far. Especially because of the pandemic, many people have been thinking about this topic, and I hope that young people will bring a breath of fresh air and sensible ideas to the community in this area as well. In my experience, the stereotype of the psychopathic gun nut is simply not true in the vast majority of cases.

2. We live in a cultural landscape. We must live in a cultural landscape because our survival (yes, even after we’re gone if we’re vegan) depends on our ability to grow enough crops to feed ourselves. In a cultural landscape heavily shaped by human activity, natural regulatory mechanisms (more on this below) do not function, or function only to a very limited extent, because, for example, wild boars find much more food than they would in a natural (forest) ecosystem, which results in correspondingly high reproduction rates (up to 200% for wild boars). So I don’t think we can manage in the long term without some form of regulation. (It should be noted here that I am a big fan of predators like wolves and bears, and that we should reintroduce them wherever possible if we can manage to coexist with them… Wolves and lynx, for example, are much better at regulating roe deer populations (or preventing overgrazing of young trees) than human hunters.) Furthermore, wildlife populations are only partially regulated by predators. For many species, disease and weather conditions play a more decisive role. These are, in and of themselves, natural processes that ensure populations do not get out of control and/or cannot permanently overuse local resources. In both cases, however, “natural regulation” is accompanied by an agonizing death for the individual, and it is this death itself that seems to be the main point of contention for some opponents of hunting, more on this below.

3. Ethical Considerations. Assuming I do my job as a hunter correctly, the animal (let’s say a deer) dies on the spot within seconds without suffering for long. If I don’t shoot the animal (and, as is currently the case in many countries, there are no large predators because they have been exterminated), it dies after about 15 years “of old age,” as the saying goes. What does that mean for the individual in practice? Eventually, its teeth become so worn down that it can no longer feed itself properly; it grows weaker, will likely fall ill at some point because its immune system weakens, and will either be strangled by a red fox, starve to death, freeze to death, or succumb to disease. In any case, the agony is significantly longer than if it were killed by a clean shot. So no matter how you look at it: There is no chance that the roe deer will not die, and (at least from my perspective) death by a well-placed bullet is the quickest, least stressful, and most painless death a roe deer can expect in the wild.

/edit: removed some dashed because I’m not a native english speaker and use an AI translator for more elaborate answers.

We don’t need to hunt to subsist when we can exist on a plant-based diet.

Yes and no. The point I was trying to make isn’t that we need meat to survive, but that the cultural landscape (where we also grow our plant-based food) has been reshaped by us to such an extent that natural regulatory processes no longer function or are no longer sufficient to maintain balance. `

Personally, I’m not OK with getting eaten by a tiger or a boa constrictor, so I totally undersand why people would want to eliminate human predators. `

You’ve raised a point here that I think I can use to illustrate my point quite well: I live in Central Europe, and one of the wild species found here that is heavily hunted is the wild boar. Wild boars are normally (if we focus solely on predators and set aside bad weather and epidemics) regulated mainly by wolves and perhaps, to a certain extent, by brown bears. The problem is that our modern cultural landscape offers the adaptable wild boars much more food than they would naturally find: In the spring (during the nursing season), there are many available meadows where they can root for mice, earthworms, and other small creatures; then in the summer, first the milk-ripe grain, then the fully ripe grain, followed by corn well into the fall; and then, due to climate change, one bumper crop year after another (which, of course, occurs less frequently). The result is population growth rates of up to 200%. So we would also need a much higher density of wolves and brown bears to regulate the populations in the same way as in a natural system. I dare to doubt whether this is possible, or, given the potential for encounters between wolves and humans, even desirable, in metropolitan areas and lowlands without sufficient forest cover.

I therefore believe that we cannot do without some form of human regulation (whether through hunting or some other method), since we rely on exploiting these systems in a non-natural way.

Cruelty isn’t a relevant concept in nature. I always remeber that picture of a baby mknkey clinging to his mother dangling from the fangs of a leopard…

A point that came to my mind when reading you comment: Yes, nature would (more or less cruely) regulate prey populations through predators, ressource depletion ( read starvation) or pathogens. However we humans need to use the landscape in one way or another to generate our means of living. That being said what we today mostly aren’t observing natural landscapes where natural regulation works but man made ones where we can’t leave the regulation up to nature entirely due to our selfinterest.

We should aim for natural systems and regulation wherever that is feasible but at the same time will have to accept the fact that we’ll always need to intervene, or kill, to a certain degree as we’re dependent on using the system for our subsistence.

Three Thoughts:

1. In the long run, things have steadily improved for the majority of the world’s population. That doesn’t mean there can’t be setbacks along the way in the form of dictatorship and mass murder… but viewed over the long term, we’ve all become wealthier, healthier, and lived longer. Of course, this isn’t a sure thing, but it gives us hope that things will eventually be even better than they are now.
2. Billionaires aren’t superhumans, even if they think they are. The fact is, capital doesn’t create anything. WE create value through the work of our hands and minds. Without us, these people are nothing, and even with the stochastic parrot currently being hailed as “AI,” they’re just fooling themselves. It follows that even the biggest narcissists don’t stand a chance when we work together… and if there’s one thing humans are good at, it’s that.
3. People are much better than their reputation. If someone falls in a pedestrian zone, someone helps them up. If a traffic jam forms on the road, a rescue lane opens up. If you ask a stranger for help, you’re usually not let down. Far too many people believe that humans are “just animals with a thin veneer of civilization,” yet the vast majority are clearly more social and altruistic than is generally assumed. The narrative that “all people are bad” is, in my opinion, merely a self-serving narrative propagated by the ruling egoists to justify their own authority, and it’s passed on based on the assumption that we’re all just as selfish as our leaders.

Are these points open to criticism? Sure. Still, there’s at least a spark of truth in them, and that gives me hope.

I think it’s more about a ,see the machines were unsecure, so we’re ignoring the election outcome" plan.

Also to discredit and/or try to nullify a not-so-favorable election outcome afterwards.

China continues to withhold data from the WHO regarding the outbreak in Wuhan. That in itself is not proof, but now, seven years into the pandemic, I personally find it suspicious. The other indicators supporting the lab-origin theory are well known. Aside from the incompetence of the Trump I administration, it seems that some intelligence agencies still subscribe to this theory.