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Comment by mountainriver | Hacker News Reader

Wow this is shocking to hear, It’s one of the most stunning achievements we’ve ever accomplished with computers.

A huge milestone in the journey to AI which is of course the future of everything

AI (ML more accurately) helping to solve climate change would be the future of everything.

To be fair, climate change is already "solved" in that we know how to reduce, slow, or possibly even halt it. It's not a matter of figuring out how, it's a matter of getting people to actually care enough to do those things.

Maybe with sufficient intelligence we can solve it with geo-engineering, which has its risks but is generally more tractable than the social engineering that conventional solutions rely on.

We know how to do it while also massively decreasing living standards for most of the developed world, which would likely lead to massive civil unrest. That tends to lead to war, which seems like a surer way to kill civilization than even unmitigated climate change. So we don’t really have a solution.

Part of me wants to refute because we've always dealt with civil unrest, even major upheavals in empire such as the West Roman civilization collapse. But we live in strange times so who's to say what a new unrest may bring. I just doubt civil unrest is what will do us in when compared to unmitigated climate change in the long run

We do. It's called nuclear power.

It's just that all the deep thinkers won't stop complaining about safety problems that don't exist, and won't stop pushing for solar, which has burned literal tens of literal trillions of dollars without succeeding, when 2t is all you need to finish the job with nuclear

I love fission, but it's really not a silver bullet here. But yeah, it'd be great if we could get out of our own way, and modernize some of the regulation around it. Allowing fuel reprocessing in the US and loosening up around low grade waste seems like it'd help a lot.

"it's really not a silver bullet"

Uh okay, it's just everything we need, the safest, the cheapest, and one of only three zero-carbon options (the other of which is drying up in the heat, and the third of which has never scaled past 0.1%)

Sure, it's been delivering 25% of our grid for 70 years basically without a hiccup, but it's "not a silver bullet" in some undescribed way

"Allowing fuel reprocessing in the US"

Completely unnecessary

Don't checklist opposition. We can go without with no problems

Care to elaborate on what you think the solution is that would "massively decrease living standards for most of the developed world", and how it would do so?

Basically, the energy budget of the average citizen of the developed world is much higher than we can support at the moment. Much of the massive amount of material consumption that the US' current way of life is based on is an artifact of artificially cheap energy (especially single family home suburban).

To avoid relatively catastrophic scenarios, we need to not only cut our new emissions to near zero very quickly, but we actually need to go strongly negative. It will take a mix of many different sequestration efforts to reach the required amounts. And all of this will be expensive, and added onto the effort to deal with large numbers of displaced people as developed areas become untenable to maintain, and crop failures get worse.

A big fission build-out would help a lot, I'm a huge proponent of it, but it's not a silver bullet, and empirically, we have a very hard time with it, at least in the US.

I think a phased-in revenue-neutral carbon tax with dividend and border adjustment is the closest thing we have to a silver bullet option. But we'd have to get used to less material consumption as we work to shift things over, because things would be a lot more expensive for a while. The bright side, for most, is that a large portion would be borne by the rich. Things would be more expensive for everyone, though, and populations usually don't react very well to large sudden drops in living standards, though, especially if they identify a particular group as being to blame for it.

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