Ok, that makes more sense. I'm saying that with what we know now, it's clear we could have made different choices that would have worked out better for us earl

Ok, that makes more sense. I'm saying that with what we know now, it's clear we could have made different choices that would have worked out better for us earlier in industry. You're saying that the information at the time made it impossible to correctly make the optimal choice. (By that I mean, making the optimal choice would have appeared to be the wrong choice, based on information available.) I don't agree with your point; I think we knew that burning carbon was going to change the atmosphere for the worse and we could have been more careful by simply burning less carbon. However, I concede that it's unknowable what science and technology would look like if we had done that. In analogy to AI, that is very much a point of conversation in alignment/safety discussions. Should we wait until we have better tools to figure out alignment, since it's so insanely difficult to figure out now? Frankly, nobody knows for sure the answer to that question either. My contention is that you (and others) are assuming the answer to that question is yes, but that's not necessarily correct, even based on all the information and analogies we have now.