6 ms·

It's certainly a strange time to be alive. I was explaining to my child my work in AI, showing him images of himself as a character from his DnD campaign and at

• edgefield 3y ago
  Well said. I have two small kiddos and difficult to know how to engage with them on topics like AI and climate change. As a related experience, I picked up my son from a birthday party and the birthday consisted of a rented massive trailer with big screen TVs and 7-8 different video game consoles for couch coop gaming. All powered by a generator. Very cool and very frightening all at the same time.
  • pizzafeelsright 3y ago
    I would love to discuss these topics in detail in person with someone like you. I am completely unconcerned about climate change or AI yet very concerned about how my child will interact with your child when their concerns are vastly different.
• hutzlibu 3y ago
  "it's about the reality that we might not have a future to offer our children." But wasn't that always the case? War was always around the corner and nuclear missile threat amplified it. Btw. it seems the war made russia change its stance and some official "scientific" commitee has decided, that climate warming comes simply from radiation inside earth that follows a natural pattern. So no need to not burn coal then. So the hope is, that china who does believe in human made climate change will push them to still reduce CO2 somewhat. Indeed strange times.
  • katbyte 3y ago
    The need to not burn coal goes beyond CO2, the particulates and radiation coal plants put out is terrible for health. Coal has, and continues, to cause more deaths then nuclear ever has and produces radioactive ash while at it.
    • hutzlibu 3y ago
      I did not debate that, but russia has also a history of not really caring about pollution.
      • landemva 3y ago
        In general, socialist regimes have not cared about the environment. The Stasi records museum in Berlin has a mention of this in the courtyard. Lack of private property leads to government pollution.
  • pgeorgi 3y ago
    > War was always around the corner and nuclear missile threat amplified it. All sides showed remarkable restraint in actually following up on the threats. While the possibility of nuclear war was part of the backdrop, at least the impression was made that everybody tries to be as reasonable as possible to prevent it from happening. Compare to climate change where people actively try to sabotage stuff like renewables build out (e.g. "In 2019, the state tried to further penalize solar users by implementing a law that levied fines against solar users." [0] which was struck down eventually - but still, people considered that a good enough idea to propose, successfully vote and implement that?!?) to stick it to The Man (or something). [0] I don't care too much about the specifics, so not naming and shaming anybody, but the source is: https://todayshomeowner.com/solar/guides/states-that-outlaw-or-restrict-solar-panels/ https://todayshomeowner.com/solar/guides/states-that-outlaw-...
    • hutzlibu 3y ago
      "All sides showed remarkable restraint in actually following up on the threats. While the possibility of nuclear war was part of the backdrop, at least the impression was made that everybody tries to be as reasonable as possible to prevent it from happening." Yes, but still all it takes is one crazy guy at the wrong position and time. I am not ok with that and rather would have all the nukes directed towards the sky against asteroids. And I am also not ok with producing tanks and artillery instead of solar panels, wind turbines and batteries. But it is, what it is. Too many short sighted people in position of power.
• Freestyler_3 3y ago
  Kids are the key to shaping the future, but kids is also the reason we are here. Generations upon generations of children being produced, who with each generation "produce" more CO2. Our planet needs strong leadership that dictates what can and cannot be done. Instead we have leaders making up solutions that are not solutions, but are presented as such.
  • acdha 3y ago
    The problem is less the children than the fact that lifestyle changes made things enormously more CO2 intensive. India has far more people and far lower CO2 emissions because they didn’t change their lifestyle to involve huge increases in beef consumption, daily individual travel in massive gas powered vehicles, and heavy use of climate control systems. A significant chunk of those changes and the CO2 emitted happened after we knew that global warming was happening, too, so it really comes back to the ability of rich people to buy their way into being allowed to ignore externalities.
• aeonik 3y ago
  I'm confused, what do you mean there's not going to be a future for them? No doubt there's going to be some challenges, but I thought all that carbon was in the atmosphere and oceans before it was sequestered by plants and alagae. I thought the major issue was the speed of change, but we really don't know what life is thing to do in response. According to this article, during the Cambrian, the earth was 10C hotter than it is today. https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2022/09/20/you-asked-dinosaurs-survived-when-co2-was-extremely-high-why-cant-humans/ https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2022/09/20/you-asked-dinos... We're going to need to adapt, and things will be harder, but I believe it's totally doable.
  • _Microft 3y ago
    OK, so this is fine? (No, I do not believe that)
    • skrebbel 3y ago
      Pretty much yes
      • WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
        Vanuatu might disagree. In Vanuatu, sea level rise is a very real concept with a number of communities already being inundated during high tides (2016) ref: https://www.spatialsource.com.au/sea-level-rise-mapping-reaches-vanuatu/ https://www.spatialsource.com.au/sea-level-rise-mapping-reac...
        • skrebbel 3y ago
          Yeah but we went from “oh no we’re all going to die and we have to prepare our kids for that eventuality” to “oh no Vanuatu is sinking” in just a few HN comments. In that light I’d like to underline that in the “this is fine” meme, things are actually on fire. It’s an apt comparison.
          • WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
• manmal 3y ago
  Why not frame it as „Major challenges ahead“ instead of „no future“? That sounds like a recipe for learned helplessness and defeatism.
• ed25519FUUU 3y ago
  My children aren’t going to care because I don’t care and there’s no reason to fill them with unnecessary doom and fear. Yes it is outside of our sphere of influence. It’s bad parenting to make kids worry about things outside of their control. And before you criticize me, know that I’m a cloth diapering, organic food growing back-to-land hippy. I’m happy to compare our carbon footprints.
• spacephysics 3y ago
  I think that’s a bit dramatic and airing on fear mongering. Other comment responses of OP have better sources, but I do not agree the “future is at risk” because of this. I’m more inclined to closely watch geopolitical events unfold, as US hegemony becomes slowly unstable and potentially untenable. If climate change were really really as dire as some say it is, we wouldn’t be half-assing our way via renewable energies which don’t have a power grid or power store nearly capable enough to handle a “fully electric future” We’d be spending more money than the likes of other world powers on proven nuclear energy (unlike Germany who has decommissioned theirs in favor of coal) I think I read the nuclear waste of nuclear power stations we have today could fit in a big Walmart? That’s an insane amount of energy density. That doesn’t include the potential for nuclear diamond batteries to reuse the spent fuel rods, or other upcoming technologies to reuse the waste. Don’t get me wrong, we should look into truly renewable energy. But needing vast amounts of rare-earth minerals for solar panels and batteries from China, or nickel and cobalt from child-labor mines in the Congo doesn’t seem to line up with the ethos of “going green” We should “go nuclear”
  • eximius 3y ago
    > If climate change were really really as dire as some say it is, we wouldn’t be half-assing our way Yes, this is why people are worried. It is dire and we are half-assing our responses.
  • civilized 3y ago
    I do wish we could overcome our squeamishness about nuclear. Because our climate circumstances are indeed dangerous. And in my opinion, they're quite a bit more dangerous than nuclear power would be, if we committed to scaling it up with a reasonable balance of safety and cost-effectiveness. It is only expensive because we hold it to a much higher standard of safety than any other power source. And understandably so, to some extent, because the tail risk from operating nuclear is greater, but we are facing tail risk from fossil fuels warming the planet as well, and I think that tail risk is much greater and much harder to control than that from nuclear. I think we need less moralism and fear of complex systems, and more hard-headed, engineering-led cost-benefit analysis.
• EGreg 3y ago
  What I find strange is that people are actively building a zoo for themselves. The population could have been very happy and rich with around 1 billion people — less garbage, less pollution, less extinction of species, less monocultures and farms, more biodiversity, sustainable resources, and not as much pressure on ecosystems. But we live on an exological credit card.
  • moojacob 3y ago
    If this world with a billion people existed, most likely (7/8th chance) you wouldn't exist. How does never existing make you feel? Unless in this fantasy you'd survive and enjoy the extra resources which comes off as extremely selfish to me.
    • EGreg 3y ago
      People can have children below the replacement rate They already do, in tons of countries It might take care of itself, if not for AI and nukes humanity could be fine. But they just can’t resist, humanity seems to be acting like a rapacious child because of competition across countries. As for your question… look ul the Doomsday Argument. 7% of all people who ever existed are alive today. If the population constantly increases then given the fact that you are alive means you’re more than likely living in the last days before a major population crash. The only question is what will be behind it — birth control or some ecosystem collapse?
    • layer8 3y ago
      I guess we should also ramp up industrial livestock production because otherwise those extra billions of animals would never exist.
• quercus 3y ago
  [flagged]
• mistrial9 3y ago
  small children do not have the grounding to deal with existential threats -- IMHO it does no good to have a "logical,serious" talk about such things in the first 10+ years
• alfor 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • acdha 3y ago
    > They have been making so many doomsday predictions that all turned out to be completely false. Citations needed. Remember that we’re aware that the 1990 IPCC report’s predictions were accurate and that the mid-1970s “global cooling” thing was a handful of papers which never had mainstream scientific acceptance and were disproven by the end of that decade, so there’s no point in repeating false claims about either of those topics even if it is popular in certain circles.
• DontchaKnowit 3y ago
  The worst case scenarios of climate chanve are grim but still leace room for humanities future. It will be tumultuous, but not catacalysmic. Alarmism does nothing for us. We should try to stay level headed