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Comment by mkaic | Hacker News Reader

Hi! I'm the author. The article is not a joke, more of a lighthearted investigation into a topic I find fascinating. It's also not meant to be perceived as necessarily positive or negative -- I'm personally actually very nervous/scared for the singularity, as after it happens I believe the future gets even more muddy, and the potential for unprecedented extreme outcomes skyrockets -- could be anything from a perfect utopia to extinction of biological life.

This article simply contains my views as to what I honestly expect the future will hold, as well as a few concerns I have in regards to that.

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You’re 19? You should be more worried about how to survive the oncoming ecological holocaust instead of the singularity. One is much likelier than the other. I believe even an ML algo would come to the same conclusion

Oh believe me, climate change scares the heck out of me too :)

I'm really really really rooting for fusion energy to work out soon and solve the energy crisis, but in the meantime I think we need to hard pivot to as much fission energy as possible, as well as convert to entirely electric transportation and shipping.

I have some bad news for you I'm afraid - fusion is not going to be industrially useful on an ecologically relevant timescale. It's a lot like AGI in its "maybe the next generation will have this, but we won't" property.

General Fusion is building their test plant right now.

correct, but that doesn't mean they'll necessarily be rolling out thousands of them around the world next year or even in 5 years time.

There are tens of thousands of fossil fuel power stations around the world, and we globally consume around 138TWh of non-renewably-produced electricity per year (and growing fast).

I used the words "industrially useful" very deliberately. The goal is not to produce one fusion reactor that can run continuously over unity, the goal is to produce tens of thousands of them and have them deployed globally. That is a project that will take decades.

The singularity makes climate change look like a picnic.

Chances of AI singularity happening in our lifetime x devastation caused by AI singularity

Chances of climate crisis happening in our lifetime x devastation caused by climate crisis

Which one do you think is higher?

First one. The devastation will be unimaginable and irreversible. At least with climate it will be possible for human kind to hobble forward somehow. And changing the climate would be infinitely easier than putting the AGI genie back in its bottle.

We need some bookies in this thread. A lot of AGI skeptics could get very rich at the expense of those that are absolutely convinced that AGI/singularity is coming soon. I'm willing to put down 10k that "the singularity" (by some agreed upon definition) will not happen by 2050.

2050 is soon…

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