Hacker News with Generative AI: Human Impact

Microsoft Study Finds AI Makes Human Cognition "Atrophied and Unprepared" (404media.co)
A new paper from researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University finds that as humans increasingly rely on generative AI in their work, they use less critical thinking, which can “result in the deterioration of cognitive faculties that ought to be preserved.”
Gradual Disempowerment by AI (gradual-disempowerment.ai)
AI risk scenarios usually portray a relatively sudden loss of human control to AIs, outmaneuvering individual humans and human institutions, due to a sudden increase in AI capabilities, or a coordinated betrayal. However, we argue that even an incremental increase in AI capabilities, without any coordinated power-seeking, poses a substantial risk of eventual human disempowerment.
the Earth has tilted 31.5 inches because of human activity (msn.com)
Earth Could Be Alien to Humans by 2500 (2021) (scientificamerican.com)
Unless greenhouse gas emissions drop significantly, warming by 2500 will make the Amazon barren, Iowa tropical and India too hot to live in
Nature’s Ghosts: The World We Lost and How to Bring it Back (nature.com)
Even ‘untouched’ natural landscapes bear witness to millennia of human influence, a lyrical book argues — with implications for how we seek to rewild them.
Fear and hardship for the last community inside Chitwan, Nepal's tiger central (mongabay.com)