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The people scared of the AI doom are so funny to me because the idea is highly speculative, when there's climate change happening under our noses and nobody say
by dariosalvi78 3y ago
The people scared of the AI doom are so funny to me because the idea is highly speculative, when there's climate change happening under our noses and nobody says we should stop anything...
- narush 3y agoWe should stop climate change. We should also be careful about developing the capabilities of new technology that will put us in similarly precarious situations going forward.
- bugglebeetle 3y agoThe two problems aren’t unrelated either, as we arrived at climate change (in part) because of decades of lies, propaganda, and dissimulation. Before, fossil fuel companies and their ill had to pay quite a bit of money to accomplish this. The prices has now fallen dramatically.
- thx-2718 3y agoPlenty of people are happy to say we should do this or do that. When it comes time to vote though people tend to go with the person telling them they'll have more.
- moffkalast 3y agoNot necessarily, it can also be the person telling them that others will have less.
- lisasays 3y agoPeople have reasonable concerns about AI blowback. That doesn't mean they are doomsayers, or "scared".
- ZephyrBlu 3y agoYud is most definitely a doomsayer.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lisasays 3y agoIt's the general case that I was (very obviously) referring to. Not outliers / clickbaiters like Yud.
- sillysaurusx 3y agoUnfortunately the general case seems to be influenced quite strongly by Yud. It’s a trickle down effect. So, you’re right, and it’s a good point, as you say. But it was also correct for them to point to Yud specifically as one of the original sources of what some might call hysteria, and others might call reasonable concerns.
- ZephyrBlu 3y agoExactly. The median person with AI concerns is nowhere near Yud, but I have seen him influence the discourse so much that to me, AI concerns = Yud.
- interlinked 3y agoWho's yud?
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y agoThere are two conflicting requirements- solve climate change without anybody losing any money. When climate change is strongly correlated with consumption that's difficult.
- yanderekko 3y agoAlso we have to solve climate change without using any fancy-shmancy geoengineering, because as sinners we're obligated to suffer rather than have convenient solutions for our problems.
- jabradoodle 3y agoOr maybe the only kind of geo engineering that is feasible comes with unknowns that people are reasonably suspicous of; especially when it would likely be carried out by profit making entites. If you want to suck co2 out of the air, no one will have issue with it, you will just run out of money without making a dent.
- 2devnull 3y agoAnd trying to go 100% carbon free (or die trying) in the next decade or two doesn’t carry risks? Decarbonizing won’t be carbon neutral that’s for sure.
- yanderekko 3y agoDeindustrialization also comes with plenty of unknowns that people are reasonably suspicious of.
- 2devnull 3y agoOthers downvoted you but I think you’re right to link Puritanism to a specific sliver of climate change activist community. There are some zealots who think we must end modernity as we know it, now!, or all is lost. These people existed before climate change, they just used other arguments to back their agenda. It was over population or before that a fear of factories, industry, progress in pretty much any form. The steam engine was a great fear to many. These are the “return to nature and live off the land” types and authoritarian personalities who are bothered by freedom. Ted Kaczynski was one of these. It’s hard to sort through such peoples thoughts to extract much that’s valuable. It’s like they don’t understand that history moves forward.
- zulban 3y ago> nobody says we should stop anything... About climate change..? It doesn't serve your argument to so blatently misrepresent reality.
- dariosalvi78 3y agomaybe better rephrased: I don't often see an overlap between those who see AI as a realistic existential threat and climate change as a realistic existential threat.
- George83728 3y agoPalantir's AI calculated this comment to be the ideal way to derail this conversation. 1. This article has nothing to do with climate change, so why is such a comment the top reply? 2. "nobody says we should stop anything [to address climate change]" is a flagrant lie. You guys are being baited.
- jabradoodle 3y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
- dariosalvi78 3y ago1. because it made people think and reply 2. if it was not obvious, my comment was sarcastic. Of course there are people who care about both, what surprises me is all this fanfare from CEOs about something so speculative that is completely science fiction right now, when the existential threat is here and now, and very few seem to point at some urgent solution like, IDK, stopping using fossil fuel in 5 years? We have about a decade to fix this [1] and the progress so far has been, at best, lacklustre [2]. [1] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/resources/spm-headline-statements/ https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/resources/spm-headline-st... [2] https://climateactiontracker.org/ https://climateactiontracker.org/
- edgyquant 3y agoNot comparable at all. I’m not afraid of AI, thinks it’s a lot of marketting on OpenAIs part, but climate change is a trend not something you don’t see one day and then the next day everything’s different.
- yanderekko 3y agoYep, this is key. With climate change maybe we should be alarmed now, but few people argue that human extinction without our lifetimes is a possible outcome of inaction in the current argument. Unfortunately, with AI things are different. By the time humans notice a real problem, we may be months if not hours away from death.
- mattdeboard 3y agoAnything to distract from the climate crisis huh Mac
- yanderekko 3y agoJust like the climate crisis is a distraction from the "no 2nd season of Firefly" crisis, sure.
- nightfly 3y agoHow do you envision this AI caused extinction happening?
- yanderekko 3y agoHere's an influential article on the subject: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a-list-of-lethalities https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a... The basic idea is that once AGI hits an unknown capability threshold it will likely recursively self-improve into something very dangerous and difficult to control, and will likely be able to come up with an effective plan to remove any obstacles to its intended desires, ie. humans. People have varying degrees of confidence in this scenario, but even if you peg it at like a 10% likelihood you're basically conceding that it's the single most important policy issue in the current political climate.
- Lewton 3y agoI’ve met exactly 0 AI doomers who aren’t also highly concerned about and involved with fighting climate change
- _8ts0 3y agoSam Altman invested $375m in Helion to the contrary.
- dariosalvi78 3y agoI consider nuclear fusion for energy production highly speculative too, meanwhile our houses burn.
- _8ts0 3y agoThe point isn't whether you agree with the approach, it's that it's not intellectually honest to claim nobody who considers AI to have existential risks thinks we should do anything about climate change and not eg. mention that Altman's biggest investment is to fight climate change. Good discourse only happens when people take efforts to honestly represent the state of affairs.
- dariosalvi78 3y agoStill haven't heard anybody who says we should stop developing AI that we should also stop, say, driving cars or stop all datacenters. Yes both are drastic, maybe even silly, but one is a response to a real threat affecting the planet here and now, the other is a the result of a vivid fantasy. Happy to be given counter examples.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- oceanplexian 3y agoHey now, plenty of CEOs care about the climate. As long as it doesn’t affect profit margins or the “Remote work” thing gets popular. In that case screw the climate. Make everyone drive cars to work!
- ChatGTP 3y agoIt would be cool if we could just focus on climate change though. We didn’t need a another man made crisis to deal with. Imagine if a real natural disaster occurs within the next 5 years, like another Chernobyl. It will be pretty tragic for our species.
- dariosalvi78 3y agothe thing is, there are several of such disasters happening every year because of climate change, and given that climate change is man-made, we can infer that those disasters are too. Pretty tragic for our species indeed, but even more tragic for the other species that live on this planet.