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Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

> To model the entire world and predict how everything is going to play out on a social and economic level is obviously impossible.

Sure.

But that's a trite non sequitur entirely orthoganal to the simplicity of the thermodynamics underpinning the cause of climate change.

Ever increasing levels of trapped energy that will increase at an even faster rate once methane and water vapor get seriously involved in the mix unless action is taken to either block the sun or reduce the insulating effects of atmospheric gases.

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I agree with your last statement, although it is describing a very simple interaction and I don’t feel certain that we are observing that in action yet. I also don’t know if there are counter-balancing interactions that we aren’t aware of yet.

If humanity does end up accidentally terraforming the planet to get to hot in a positive feedback loop, I believe we will be within a line-of-sight to terraforming it back in the other direction.

Technology has solved all our physical problems so far. Maybe we will seed clouds in the upper atmosphere to reflect a lot of energy back into space. Maybe we will find something useful to do with captured carbon (which doesn’t just release it). It is insane to suggest capitalism won’t solve this problem by the time it actually needs solving, and therefore needs to be shut down (it’s the thing that actually works).

If it takes > 100 years and all the energy of tens of billions of tonnes of fossil fuel to put us in a state of extreme peril then yes, it will at least * take another 100+ years and all the energy of tens of billions of tonnes of fossil fuel to reverse out of that position.

If that's your suggested strategy then I would suggest that we can do better by not going there in the first instance.

* Thanks to the arrow of time, the issue of unbreaking a glass, methane release and other factors it very realistically could take more time and energy to get out of the hole we seem intent upon driving into.

> Technology is for solving problems.

It's not 'magic' though and I have little time for green washing or praying to the technology fairy.

> I would suggest that we can do better by not going there

The problem is that you are recommending we turn off capitalism, which will have serious consequences that are easier to predict than climate change: we will doom the world’s poor people to lives of certain poverty with no hope of upward mobility.

Who recommends turning off capitalism?

But un-restricted capitalism is literally the stereotypical paper clip AI. It will seek out maximal profit at every cost. As per the very Adam Smith, it only works well in small, welll-regulated markets. Let the government do its job, and capitalism its own.

> Who recommends turning off capitalism

The article is about degrowth.

The paperclip thought experiment is a stupid thought experiment. An AI that had the executive functioning to improve its entire substrate (e.g. rewrite the entire TSMC Nvidia chip and software supply chain) would require the same higher order agency that would stop it from destroying the world to turn it into paperclips. It only seems plausible if you spend all your time disembodied from reality browsing lesswrong.

> It is insane to suggest capitalism won’t solve this problem by the time it actually needs solving

That time is now, and it has failed.

But it is crystal clear that we should decrease our current CO2 usage as much as we can, even at the (imo small) price of personal luxury — even if some new technical advantage can solve the problem, we should stop at least speeding towards the cliff, and try to break as much as possible.

You are forgetting just how much bigger the planet is then us.

> That time is now

We diverge on this point and I talked about it in other comments.

> we should decrease our current CO2 usage as much as we can, even at a small price of personal luxury

It’s luxury because we live in the first world. In the 3rd world where most people live (and most people are poor), these policies have catastrophic consequences, such as the Sri Lankan organic farming affair.

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