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Comment by bwindels | Hacker News Reader

I can't find a reference to it, but a quote comes to mind when I see the list: "Worrying about A.I. taking over in a time of climate change is like standing on the tracks with an oncoming train, and worrying about lightning hitting you". Anyone remember who said it?

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The reason climate change is dangerous is that it threatens food supplies and homes of millions of people.

But the reason people starve or go homeless is not due to scarcity of food or land.

Problems created by people of fairness, justice and equality of opportunity are more immediate threats to human dignity and welfare. People are currently killed, tortured, and abused because of that. Human/civil rights are in no good shape globally, and even here in the US we aren't doing so well.

Climate change is a problem but it has become a run away train of political and bureaucratic inertia, just like the war on poverty and the war on drugs, but even more exaggerated.

While we talk about climate change--high-and-mighty from the comforts of well-paying gigs--causing people to starve or go homeless, there are real people right now In this world who are starving, dying, or homeless with little to no hope.

One of the principles of effective altruism is finding causes which are important, tractable, and neglected. Climate change is definitely not neglected - you could certainly make the case that we ought to be doing more, but not that it's ignored.

Research into x-risks from AI, though, remains an extremely niche field - its total funding is probably several orders of magnitude less than the amount spent on climate change. 80,000 Hours care about effectiveness on the margin, which is why their list of priorities looks the way it does.

Climate change is still largely ignored by a majority or significant fraction of government officials, which are the ones who must take action.

Which makes it a much tougher problem, therefore harder to have as much impact as on a truly neglected problem.

Which one is the bigger or more urgent threat? You say it's climate change but that's not expected to cause much harm for another 50-100 years, and even then not civilization-destroying harm. AI, on the other hand, it's more uncertain. What if most jobs are automated and people everywhere turn to violence to keep themselves occupied?

> What if most jobs are automated and people everywhere turn to violence to keep themselves occupied?

This will be a slow, step-by-step process where the media will be working against the general population.

Truckers are going to be among the first ones to be replaced with self-driving vehicles. Quoted from The Second Intelligent Species: How Humans Will Become as Irrelevant as Cockroaches (Marshall Brain)

In addition, the mainstream media outlets will not cover the protests of truckers, or the force used against them, to any great extent. To the general, TV-watching public, any attempt at a trucker riot will be largely invisible, or will be marginalized as a nuisance. And any truck drivers who do appear in the media will tend to be selected to be the loudest, most extreme people possible. Therefore, when the general public looks at these extremists, teamsters will appear to be crazy. All truck drivers will be stereotyped with this “crazy” label, and the truckers will lose public support.

This is going to repeat itself until there are almost no human jobs left, if any. The rich will get richer and the poor will be stowed away, out of sight.

I see where you're coming from, but the current media situation says that any attempt to do this would be a terrible idea and backfire horribly on them.

I mean, we're already in a world where a large percentage do not trust anything the media is saying. Where 'CNN is fake news' is basically a meme and 'alternative' news publications have taken a large bite out of the older ones' markets.

If they try and paint the trucker actions as all negative or crazy, it could go about as well as painting Trump crazy did prior to the 2016 election. Or pleading for Britain to stay in the EU pre Brexit.

And something similar also led to GamerGate becoming such a catastrophe.

If the media try anything like this against the general population, they'll soon notice that:

1. Trust in them will decline even further 2. Alternative news sites and YouTube influencers will take full advantage of the situation and cover the other side extensively. 3. They'll turn social media sites into even more of a war zone than they already are.

So unless they want Breitbart (or the next Breitbart equivalent) to gain a few thousand times more traffic from people who feel like 'the media' is lying to them, I doubt they'll continue this sort of path.

I think you're wildly overestimating the intelligence and awareness of the general population.

The media is and has been doing this for decades. If they do it in a totally obvious and outright manner, then yeah, everyone's going to notice, but if they do it in a more subtle way and push their agenda over a longer timeframe, most people won't notice that, or they'll only notice it when it's too late. It's not about brainwashing everyone. All you need is a critical mass and once you're there, you've basically won.

Most people lack critical thinking abilities and they're rather contend with having other people think for them. You don't notice this here on HN because the readers and commenters here are far smarter than the average person is.

I guess, but I think you're forgetting just how bad the trust situation is with some groups. I mean, just 43% of people surveyed worldwide trust it:

https://www.ft.com/content/fa332f58-d9bf-11e6-944b-e7eb37a6a...

With the figures getting as bad as 24% trust in the UK:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jan/16/britons-tru...

And it apparently goes as low as 5% among Republicans:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-trust_us_58...

Does that mean the average person has good critical thinking skills? No, not really. A lot of people's distrust comes as much down to feeling like their views/tribe are under personal attack rather than an actual analysis of how the media covers them.

But if they distrust mainstream media sources about stuff like Trump and his policies, then the likelyhood they'll trust them about how others in their own situation are 'crazy' could be even lower.

I mean, they're already used to seeing themselves painted as 'deplorables' here.

It's also likely people outside the larger outlets will write and heavily promote articles that counter any 'narrative' they detect in more mainstream sources.

bad analogy though. AI is far more important both as solutions and trouble than almost any other field. Many times bigger than climate change which might displace us but can be dwalt with.

Except that we know climate change is happening and we're still nowhere near strong AI. Lots of people say it's around the corner but people have been singing that song since the 60's.

You don't need strong AI for it to be dangerous and useful. Climate change isn't going to kill us all, AI or astroid hit might.

Being scared of AI wiping out the human race while dismissing the total disaster climate change has already started causing is pretty insane to me. It's like dismissing gangrene in your leg "We can just cut my leg off." while being scared of an alien disease that has never even been discovered because you're sure it's fatal.

What total disaster are you talking about?

Bangladesh is being eaten by the ocean. Other small islands are as well. Droughts and other natural disasters are becoming more severe. Greenland is melting and the arctic ice shelves are receding. There's tons of information out there on the impact climate change is already having, any quick search will yield you lots of articles and videos.

That has nothing to do with total disaster.

Quick search will show me many different things including climate change is real, climate change is a hoax, ice is expanding 9/11 was done by the government etc.

"A quick search" is the worst form of argument that exist as it will show you many different things.

I'm not sure even where to begin here.

First off, my referring you to make a search wasn't deferring an argument to Google, it was me not wanting to do research for you. Yes, you can find sources that say anything you want, but all sources are not created equal, and the number of sources are not equal as well. If you cannot separate good sources from bad sources of information, well that's a problem I can't help you with.

> That has nothing to do with total disaster.

What on earth do you mean? You don't think Bangladesh and other low lying nations losing land to the rising oceans is a total disaster? I'm starting to feel like you're not interested in a real discussion, and if that's the case I'm done replying to you.

So in other words a quick search does not prove anything as you claimed.

We are speaking for humankind here not for one country. Claiming it's total disaster is missusing that word and sounds more like you are the one who doesn't want a real discussion but just want to preach your already established opinion about the climate.

Thanks but no thanks.

Bangladesh's population is growing by 1-2% per year [1]. Isn't that just as bad as losing 1-2% of their land to sea level ever year? How are you concerned about them losing land but not about them gaining people?

[1] http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/bangladesh-pop...

> Bangladesh's population is growing by 1-2% per year [1]. Isn't that just as bad as losing 1-2% of their land to sea level ever year?

No, it isn't. First off, 1% of the population doesn't "consume" 1% of the land. People can be packed in pretty densely. Second off, people can move/relocate. The land, once lost to the rising ocean, is gone forever.

> How are you concerned about them losing land but not about them gaining people?

Why are you putting words in my mouth? When did I even mention overpopulation let alone dismiss it? Of course overpopulation is an issue, and is a cause of climate change. But it wasn't part of the conversation. If you want to bring it in, I would say it is also a bigger concern than AI.

There's actually very little information about the problems that climate change will cause. We're pretty bad at modelling political effects, especially not decades into the future. We really have no idea how well we'll cope. We can predict sea level rise with reasonable confidence but I haven't seen any predictions of what people will do in response to that. Will they kill each other? Or gradually move away in a calm fashion the way ordinary migrants do all the time?

You're right, modeling the political effects is extremely complicated and I would agree almost impossible to do with any granularity. But we don't have to do that in order to know that the effects we can see happening are disastrous because even the best case scenarios of people calmly relocating are still a disaster, because the destinations are not prepared for the influx of population (think of the Syrian refugee criss but many, many times over.)

>Lots of people say it's around the corner but people have been singing that song since the 60's.

People say lots of silly things though. The predictions based on Moore's law and neural equivalents have always been for around the 2020s. Check out Moravecs thing for example http://www.jetpress.org/volume1/moravec.htm - and it's not rocket science - you can do the calculations yourself is so inclined.

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