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Comment by wyck | Hacker News Reader

Any system that ignore's incentives with regards to human behaviour will turn into a formula for tyranny and misery.

Climate change will do that anyway. The first thing to go when resources get scarce (I mean truly, decades-long-famine-level scarce) is individual liberty. We're talking back to a worldwide feudal warlord society within 100ish years.

Humans are surprisingly adaptable. We're a species of Saharan apes that somehow managed to find a way to thrive in the Arctic before the miracles of modern technology. Currently, we "waste" a lot of economic productivity on things like advertising and entertainment. In the time calls for it, we'll turn Siberia into a breadbasket before we let society collapse.

I feel like that statement brushes over the frankly enormous amount of suffering throughout history - war, famine, genocide, and so on. While we might survive it's worth at least considering the costs we'll encounter along the way.

Life was brutal and short for the vast majority of humans for hundreds of thousands of years. The last 1-2 hundred are a complete anomaly, brought on by exactly the types of practices that are currently destroying our environment. Sure, we won't probably won't wipe ourselves out completely. But I do not look forward to 99.99% of the remaining population going back to a pre-industrial level of civilization.

The type of technological save you're talking about is already possible. The problem is we have no political or societal will to get it done. Turning Siberia into a breadbasket to feed the world (among many other needed solution) most likely requires exactly the type of tyranny the OP is talking about.

Currently, we're investing a lot of money into things like social media because the world has more than enough food and water (it just isn't distributed efficiently). If demand of food outpaces supply, we'll start pumping trillions of dollars into efforts into desalination, lab grown meat, terraforming, and better GM crops. It doesn't require any tyranny.

Inevitably, climate change will directly or indirectly kill millions of people, as well as destroy many biomes. That should be enough to motivate people to want to change. In my opinion, doom and gloom scenarios encourage people to be more skeptical.

You misspelled "billions".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

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