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Couldn’t cryptocurrency proponents make a similar argument?

• arthurcolle 3y ago
  Yes they could. Does that make it harder to reason about?
• WithinReason 3y ago
  No, how does a lot of crypto mining infrastructure now reduce the cost of cryptomining 5 years down the line? I will say though that at this point in time it's ridiculous how little research has gone into reducing the energy use of networks.
• abecedarius 3y ago
  OK, I will: it's illiberal to ban a computation on the grounds of the pollution emitted by some ways to generate energy. If the pollution is bad, you want to discourage the bad way to generate it, and encourage the good way. If this makes a computation more expensive (in those places where less-pollutey power is less available), that will discourage that computation if and only if it's not valuable enough to the person choosing whether to run it. A human may emit more CO2 than a computer doing the same work. As AI improves, this will happen more and more until they dominate humans by this measure. Then you'll have established a principle justifying a ban of biological humans. If you believe in human rights, it's mostly bad to put prior restraint on people's use of computers, just as it's bad to restrict writing, talk, and privacy. The restriction of this kind that makes the most sense to me is on the development of superhuman general intelligence, until we understand better how to avoid that ending humanity.