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This is exactly the question I was asking myself this morning! I find the parallels to robotics interesting too: whenever another creepy beast lurches out of B

This is exactly the question I was asking myself this morning! I find the parallels to robotics interesting too: whenever another creepy beast lurches out of Boston Dynamics I wonder how such machines will function 50 or 100 year in the future when the world is operating under a different energy cost equation, when the fruits of millions of years of fossil fuel deposit have been spanked. Edit: I see lots of "no fair!" comments here. I think people are failing to grasp how supremely efficient biological systems are at dealing with exactly the sort of messy/noisy/lossy reasoning required for real-world problem solving, the sort of reasoning I see linked (incorrectly IMHO) by various media to the advancement demonstrated by this hyper-specialized Go playing machine. Edit2: (I removed that "little to show for it" bit before I saw your comment because it was leading to a digression I realised I would need to defend which seemed unwarranted in this context. Sorry about that!)

pavel_lishin 11y ago
> with little to show for it. Those fossil fuels allowed us to rapidly bootstrap ourselves through the industrial revolution, and to get to the point where renewable and carbon-neutral energy isn't just feasible, but already being used in many places. I'd say we've got quite a bit to show for it.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  And now we're telling the rest of the world they should focus on sustainability and the environment. The hypocrisy is quite incredible at times.
  - pavel_lishin 11y ago
    It would be less hypocritical if we were helping them set up a renewable/carbon-neutral infrastructure.
  - Vraxx 11y ago
    It is hypocritical, but that doesn't mean it's not a good idea. That's also not to say it isn't necessarily unfair. I tend to see it like progression in a game's tech tree, in some sense the prior steps (oil) were needed to get to a point where we can actually create energy in a clean and renewable way. In the future, there will likely be a tipping point where the energy created from clean and renewable sources can be used to help create new sources, but it likely wouldn't have been possible without the oil stepping stone. In an ideal and non-hypocritical scenario, the advancements in energy production would be shared to avoid the dirty oil intermediary step, but while there is still scarcity and separate national entities, there will still be hoarding and greed. A great implementation of this is type of thinking is Morocco's solar plant in the Sahara [0]. Though I don't think this would have happened if it wasn't also thought to be a good investment, and urging a bad investment that you're not willing to participate in would definitely be hypocritical. [0]:http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/02/04/465568055/morocco-unveils-a-massive-solar-power-plant-in-the-sahara http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/02/04/465568055/...

pavel_lishin 11y ago

> with little to show for it. Those fossil fuels allowed us to rapidly bootstrap ourselves through the industrial revolution, and to get to the point where renewable and carbon-neutral energy isn't just feasible, but already being used in many places. I'd say we've got quite a bit to show for it.

jacquesm 11y ago
And now we're telling the rest of the world they should focus on sustainability and the environment. The hypocrisy is quite incredible at times.
- pavel_lishin 11y ago
  It would be less hypocritical if we were helping them set up a renewable/carbon-neutral infrastructure.
- Vraxx 11y ago
  It is hypocritical, but that doesn't mean it's not a good idea. That's also not to say it isn't necessarily unfair. I tend to see it like progression in a game's tech tree, in some sense the prior steps (oil) were needed to get to a point where we can actually create energy in a clean and renewable way. In the future, there will likely be a tipping point where the energy created from clean and renewable sources can be used to help create new sources, but it likely wouldn't have been possible without the oil stepping stone. In an ideal and non-hypocritical scenario, the advancements in energy production would be shared to avoid the dirty oil intermediary step, but while there is still scarcity and separate national entities, there will still be hoarding and greed. A great implementation of this is type of thinking is Morocco's solar plant in the Sahara [0]. Though I don't think this would have happened if it wasn't also thought to be a good investment, and urging a bad investment that you're not willing to participate in would definitely be hypocritical. [0]:http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/02/04/465568055/morocco-unveils-a-massive-solar-power-plant-in-the-sahara http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/02/04/465568055/...