News for the week of 2023-06-12

The Prepared Support - June 12, 2023

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Game Night is this Wednesday, June 14, at 6pm Pacific / 9pm Eastern. Seth has created a survival scenario for us to play in the form of a tabletop role playing game. No previous experience needed to join us. Follow the link to join Discord so that you’ll be ready later when the game starts.

https://discord.gg/DArV5QZN?event=1112497434581540956

 

Game Night is tonight! Join us in Discord at 6pm Pacific / 9pm Eastern.

https://discord.gg/DArV5QZN?event=1112497434581540956

 

Game Night Recap

Army grunt Michael Randolph (Seth), his daughter Leah (ExlyAmuzed), and a family friend Adelaide Harper (Eric) are trying to escape a city in chaos after a financial collapse. Michael is driving when they see three men robbing another man. Everyone is torn about whether to get involved or just take care of ourselves. We decide to take the risk and help someone in trouble.

Michael drives onto the sidewalk, surprising the three thugs. One of the thugs is hit by the car, injured and unconscious. The other two jump out of the way, but Leah and Adelaide shoot at both of them while they’re still off balance from dodging the car, hitting one in the arm and missing the other. The two thugs still standing are so terrified by this ambush that they run away.

The three preppers made it through their first encounter, but there’s still danger around every turn as they try to escape the city. To be continued, on the next Game Night!

 

Ten years ago: AI will excel at technical tasks, but human workers will still be needed for communication and empathy.

Today: Physicians find that ChatGPT improves their ability to communicate empathetically with patients.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/12/health/doctors-chatgpt-artificial-intelligence.html

We need to prepare for substantial disruption of the job market due to AI.

 

So, after playing around w. Chat GPT, I have to say I find it fascinating and horrifying at the same time.  It takes me about two hours to write one page.  Chat does it BETTER in seconds.  Not just this, but other tech is and will squash the HUMAN job market.  What kinds if work will y’all do for $ as well as for your personal needs?  There will (initially) be some jobs in being the “prompt writer” person who tells the AI what to create.  Also, there will be some rich people  that will use human workers as a status symbol – “my HUMAN maid/pilates instructor/gardener and so on.   Otherwise, Govco will dole out UBI (Universal Base Income)   IMO, the Covid Cash that most of us willingly took was laying the framework and a seemingly successful test run. 

 

“So, after playing around w. Chat GPT, I have to say I find it fascinating and horrifying at the same time.”

I think this is exactly the mix of feelings for anyone who is paying attention. 🙂

AI is a large and difficult topic that deserves its own post at some point. Here are just a few thoughts on how to prepare.

1) Get your finances in order. The biggest risk is job loss, so try to have enough money that you can afford to lose your job for a while.

2) Develop the skills to be able to do more than one type of job. This gives you options when/if one of those jobs is no longer needed.

3) As one job is destroyed others are created. This includes the prompt writing that you already mentioned. It also includes supervisor of AI workers, quality control of their work output, assisting when they get stuck, noticing patterns in their mistakes to recommend software improvements, writing those software improvements…

4) Longer term, society as a whole needs to adapt to this enormous increase in productivity. The UBI that you mentioned is one of the more hopeful possibilities I can think of. Another good outcome is technological improvement of humans so that we can keep up with the machines and play a meaningful role. A bad outcome would be most humans just being left behind. Humans as pets is somewhere in the middle – I’d call that mostly a bad outcome. We need to think about which of these to push for and also be ready to adapt to whatever solution society actually follows.

 

Great points Eric!  Additionally, I would add that we need to keep up our basic prepping that keeps ups connected to and competent with our own survival and happiness. Because if EMPs, solar flares or sabotage take out all our tech, most of the people I know will not make it very long.

 

Hospital closed permanently due to cyberattack.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/illinois-hospital-links-closure-ransomware-attack-rcna85983

Patients of this hospital will now need to travel an extra 30 minutes for emergency services.

Cyberattacks are becoming both more common and more sophisticated. What can we do about it? The Digital Security 101 guide would be a good start.

https://theprepared.com/prepping-basics/guides/digital-security-101/

 

Stop sitting on your tail!

A six-minute lesson on healthy sitting and avoiding back pain.

 

Prepper Chat Night is this Friday evening, June 16, on Discord at 6PM Pacific / 9PM Eastern. Join our Discord now at this link so you’ll be ready when the event starts:

https://discord.gg/DArV5QZN?event=1111032743887896636

Prepper Chat Nights are on the 1st and 3rd Fridays of every month.

 

Fungal infections much more deadly (49% mortality!) in patients that also have COVID.

https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/105027

The mortality rate of certain severe fungal infections rose from 12.3% to 49% when the patients also had COVID.

 

ThePrepared staff are investigating an issue with the “follow” button that no longer appears on forum topics.

As a workaround until we can get this fixed, you can still find the “follow” button by looking for that topic in the profile page of the person who posted that topic.

 

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2378026-north-atlantic-ocean-has-reached-record-high-surface-temperatures/

Record temperatures in the north atlantic. I’ve seen speculation that this will contribute to more severe heat waves and rain events in europe, also to fish die off (warm water dissolves less oxygen).

 

“A century ago, a well-ventilated building was considered good medicine. But by the time Covid-19 arrived, our buildings could barely breathe. How did that happen? And how do we let the fresh air back in?”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/17/health/covid-ventilation-air-quality.html