The people scared of the AI doom are so funny to me because the idea is highly speculative, when there's climate change happening under our noses and nobody says we should stop anything...
About climate change..? It doesn't serve your argument to so blatently misrepresent reality.
When it comes time to vote though people tend to go with the person telling them they'll have more.
If you want to suck co2 out of the air, no one will have issue with it, you will just run out of money without making a dent.
Also these are similar arguments to what has been used to criticize nuclear energy for decades, which has obviously been a disaster on net.
1. This article has nothing to do with climate change, so why is such a comment the top reply?
2. "nobody says we should stop anything [to address climate change]" is a flagrant lie. You guys are being baited.
2. if it was not obvious, my comment was sarcastic. Of course there are people who care about both, what surprises me is all this fanfare from CEOs about something so speculative that is completely science fiction right now, when the existential threat is here and now, and very few seem to point at some urgent solution like, IDK, stopping using fossil fuel in 5 years? We have about a decade to fix this [1] and the progress so far has been, at best, lacklustre [2].
[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/resources/spm-headline-st... [2] https://climateactiontracker.org/
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
Imagine if a real natural disaster occurs within the next 5 years, like another Chernobyl.
It will be pretty tragic for our species.
Good discourse only happens when people take efforts to honestly represent the state of affairs.
Happy to be given counter examples.
Unfortunately, with AI things are different. By the time humans notice a real problem, we may be months if not hours away from death.
The basic idea is that once AGI hits an unknown capability threshold it will likely recursively self-improve into something very dangerous and difficult to control, and will likely be able to come up with an effective plan to remove any obstacles to its intended desires, ie. humans.
People have varying degrees of confidence in this scenario, but even if you peg it at like a 10% likelihood you're basically conceding that it's the single most important policy issue in the current political climate.
What if the likelihood of AI "solving" climate change is 10% and the alternative is human extinction?
Can we agree that coming up with sci-fi scenarios and assigning arbitrary likelihood figures to them is pointless?