> And as the world’s poorest countries are also the world’s sunniest, the democratization of both new and traditional storage technologies will grant energy abundance to those already bathed in sunlight.
I would love to have that kind of optimism...
I see so many people in tech discuss how interruptive COVID-19 has been on humanity, but they see it as a sort of temporary problem to get over, where once dealt with, they can then go back to thinking about AGI or some other lofty technological goal. In reality, COVID-19 should be seen more as a "taste" of things to come. I don't know why more action, or at least discourse, regarding climate collapse exists in tech communites about this subject. Is it because it isn't as interesting to think about, when compared to working on self-driving cars, VR, human longevity, etc?
Edit: I'm looking at you Lex Fridman and 90% of his guests.
It seems like the biggest impact a person has on the world is the way they treat people, especially people they don't agree with.
There seem to be three primary options regarding climate change:
1) change your lifestyle
2) make someone else change theirs
3) make better technology
Option two seems to be the default based on average home sizes, commercial flights, food waste from dining out, and iPhone sales.
Technology optimists choose option three.
The outliers choose option one.
"Assume someone else will develop better technology that will fix the problem."
That's not optimism, it's magical thinking.
A common fallacy of our time is to think that the observed fact that technologies have been developed with massive impact means that we can summon such advances at will in the areas we choose.
The people looking for tech solutions will try to think their way out of the problem. Need to reduce CO2? Ok, here is cheap solar and improved battery tech. Horizontal drilling and fracking to deliver cheap natural gas and drive coal out of the market. Modular nuclear and next gen geothermal. Electric cars and smart metering. It is interesting to be sitting in Europe where everyone talks about solutions but accomplish nothing, while tech advancements allowed the US to reduce CO2 emissions to levels last seen almost 30 years ago.
It seems to me that people looking for tech solutions are the only ones making progress on the problem of climate change, and doing so in a way that means they might be able to create substitutes that allow everyone else to continue in oblivious denial without noticing that their climate impact is reducing. I think there is a lot to criticize and object to in tech solutions to these problems, but assuming that any other group is actually going to solve the problem seems to deny reality.
The magical thinking is assuming we will find them on our desired timeline, or at all. Technologist (and I'm guilty here too) often like to thing of the technology steering but often it's policy work.
You pair the app to your NeuraLink brain interface, you black out for five hours, and some amount of money appears in your bank account. Sometimes $50, sometimes $5000.
If that does occur, it certainly won't be driven by the emerging biotech factors he identifies and will instead be driven by expansion of healthcare in the developing world.