Comment by vouaobrasil | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vouaobrasil | Hacker News Reader

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Some philosophers in the metaphysics of technology have also proposed this idea. The idea is that the arms race or prisoner's dilemma-type situations make the advance of technology unavoidable (technological determinism) and that its inexorable rise forward eventually has a high probability of extinguishing all life on a planet. (More precisely, determinism states that technological development is a strong force; it can be influenced but it is hard).

We already have climate change, advanced AI (that may eventually be able to produce more technology by itself), and a planet of organisms that are counter to growth. Deforestation happens because the long-term costs are not shouldered by the present generation.

In some way, I believe the end of times is near, but that humanity has TWO possibilities:

(A) The planet is destroyed via advanced technology and most humans die, only to repeat the same mistakes again, OR

(B) We reach a critical mass of enlightenment that consists of (1) a cautious approach to growth, (2) a moderation in the use of technology, and (3) a stable, healthy relationship with the biosphere.

The eventuality (B) is certainly possible if one by one, we start to adopt a philosophy that economic and technological growth isn't the right path and we slowly give up all this advanced stuff for a slower-paced life centered on local communities, local economies, and less efficiency in return for a more peaceful life.

I think there are more than 2 possibilities, and the worst of them is what Orwell called "a boot on a human face, forever". Catastrophe -- accidental or encouraged -- leads to consolidation, then history gets written to make the survivors be the good guys or victims of circumstances, and their victims objects worthy of persecution. I can already smell that in the air, there is nothing that can't be handled with the right narrative.

If all humans died at once, it would suck, but there is more where we came from, so to speak... but systems of control that nip any and all possible challengers to totality of their control in the bud would be so dead, even death would be creeped out.

Things will keep changing forever. I don't know why people are afraid of permanent oppression. We only know of around 10k years of society history, in a planet that has had intelligent apes for 100k years, complex ecosystems for 4b years. Even if we vanish in the next century, the overwhelming chances are that a) uncountable complex ecosystems exist right now; b) uncountable intelligent species exist right now; c) uncountable oppressive and uncountable liberal systems exist right now; d) uncountable intelligent species and complex ecosystems will vanish and emerge over the billions of years ahead.

We get too attached to what we see around us, while Hubble and JW have shown we are utterly insignificant in both time and space.

Countless of other things likely existing doesn't discount any of them. If, to just put it like that, people in all those other liberal and oppressive systems have nothing else to say than "meh, there are countless of other systems", what makes them so significant? I see the how it is and what we rationalize it as, I see the trends and I'm not impressed. That others might do worse or better is completely irrelevant to me, that's to their shame or credit.

There's only shame because there's pride. Feel ways about the world you know, it's like feeling good or bad about how the soap bubble you blow come out.

2 Points:

1. We do not have advanced AI. We have LLMs. They're not intelligent, not creative, and are never going to be. I'm with you on the other things, though.

2. The planet will not be destroyed by anything we do. H. sap. might go extinct along with many, many other species, but give the biospehere a couple of million years and it will all bounce back, sans humans.

I've been living/trialing the path you suggest in your last paragraph for 30 years. Sadly it's not gone viral. AMA. ;)

Well, by "advanced AI", I did not mean truly intelligent AI of course. I meant sufficiently advanced to disrupt society to an extent that will make it worse that it was without it. Advanced as in "advanced weapon", not "smart".

Yes, it is true that the planet won't be destroyed, that is a good point. Only we might, like you said. Though, if many other species go extinct, it is sort of like destruction in a way, even though it isn't total.

Feel free to reach out through the contact info in my profile if you want to collaborate.

The biosphere may well bounce back but it may take an absurdly long time to sequester carbon back into the ground.

The first time it happened, as I understand, there simply wasn't a huge amount of oxygen in the air, so things didn't burn and having megatons of carbon rich organic material lying around wasn't likely to catch fire and jump back into the air.

Now, if I leave a bunch of organic material lying around it'll catch fire and go right back into the air.

I'm not sure how long that'll take to change, or what impact that has on future life here on earth, but we've got 2 examples of earthish planets that don't support life right next door.

>> Now, if I leave a bunch of organic material lying around it'll catch fire and go right back into the air.

Only an issue for the 1/3 of our planet that is dry. By volume/mass, most organic material eventually falls into the deep ocean, a place where fire isn't much of an issue.

Why would carbon need to go back into the ground? It’s really good for plant life in general and only bad for humans who want the earth to remain in the same state it was in 1700 indefinitely.

Our industrial revolution benefited immensely from large amounts of carbon buried in the ground where we could fairly easily get to it.

A follow-up species in a few million years might struggle to bootstrap theirs.

There will be no follow-up species besides those we evolve into and/or create. We're going to inherit the observable universe to ourselves. Even if we go through a couple of apocalypses on the road to it, it's really hard to imagine a scenario where ALL humans die, so it's much more economic to rebuild a civilization from remaining humans than evolve intelligence again.

That's a whole bunch of unearned certainty, but the same point applies to a post-apocalyptic resurgence of humanity; the second industrial revolution is going to be missing the readily accessible coal and oil that drove the first one along.

We're from different memeplexes, but both of our assumptions are equally unearned.

But if we're talking about a second industrial revolution it won't be like the first one, because:

- There will be more carbon in the air, hence more wood to chop and burn

- There will books lying around describing how to leapfrog many steps

I don't think it'd take 10000 years again to restore civilization the second time around.

Might take 500 million though.

Earth is highly unlikely to support intelligent life 500 million years from now. Multicellular life entirely won’t exist in 1 billion years.

I don't see anything wrong with humans wanting to control the climate to turn it back into the ice age that we're used to. I just wish we'd be honest about it instead of appealing to naturalistic fallacies.

> The first time it happened, as I understand, there simply wasn't a huge amount of oxygen in the air

When cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) originally cleaned out Earth's CO2 atmosphere and produced O2, I don't know where the C went. To bedrock as calcium carbonates (CaCO3)?

But the carbon that humankind has released into atmosphere by burning coal and oil, was sequestered by plants during the Carboniferous+Permian periods (360 to 250 million years ago). These were large, vascular plants. Not too much different form plants today. And the atmospheric oxygen was already at about current levels.

But your idea might hold in a different context:

There is a theory that 360My ago plants invented lignin, to make their stems more rigid and woody. And then it took time before fungi were able to invent enzymes that are able to digest lignin. So maybe the the large burial of biomass carbon in Carboniferous could not happen again, with out modern fungi being able to decompose wood.

And there is another theory, that as Carboniferous+Permian periods were during an ice age, the low sea levels allowed for large areas of swampy lowland vegetation. Where vegetation sequestered carbon, and wet swampy soil allowed the carbon to get slowly buried, because microbes cannot as easily decompose biomass in wet, anaerobic conditions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous#Rocks_and_coal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal#Formation

Why would Gaia try to sequester carbon back into the ground? It’s useful to her (but not to us).

Or three, none of the above. Those philosophers are arguing from analogy based on one case - which the smarter ones know is philosophically faulty and really just speculation. The probability of calculating the extermination similarly can't be realistically assumed because this time it's based on zero cases, empirically.

But thinking like that doesn't get the likes of Toby Ord and Nick Bostrom millions in funding...

Excellent point, Ill never forget taking a history of armageddon narratives course in 2012 when the Mayan calendar was ending and how simple the social / economic function of end-of-the-world narratives seemed in historical context. Specifically in the context that they have been present for at least as long as weve had writing, which is to say as long as we've had class-stratified societies.

Domesday narratives put us in high-arousal states. We listen to authorities more unquestioningly, we think less critically, we buy more stuff.

Of course that's a slippery slope that can lead to climate denial and conspiracy theories but I like remembering to question who's getting research grants or selling zombie apocalypse gear...

Yeah so much of the philosophy of the future appears to me as science-fiction LARPing as philosophy. The annoying part is that they deny or overlook that, seemingly so enamoured with their own brilliance as they often are. And as you say, doom-mongering in the form of presenting what look like reasonable existential risks is just more amenable to funding. I could sit here imagining up existential risks all day long when all that can be said for the human race and its progress is “ seems to be going ok so far!”

It would be hard to get funding for an existential philosophy that said “everything is fine, and will just roll along and whatever will be will be”.

I feel scenario B is indeed possible: Sophisticated cultural overlays that modify our interaction and impacts on the biosphere are obviously within the nature of the system.

A key question is whether the feedback signals from the biosphere will be strong enough and will be internalized deeply enough to usher a sustainable era. One can only guess, since we haven't really experienced anything of this sort before.

But logically, if scenario B plays out and we enter a sustainable phase we would be sending out technosignatures. Hence if a similar process has repeated across the universe we should at some point see evidence of advanced life that "just made" it. The fact we don't may mean its not possible. But I would not read too much into this pessimistic conclusion because we may be missing important other dimensions regarding the nature of life and its co-evolution with technology.

We should strive to survive independently of what else might be happening in this mysterious Universe :-)

My guess is that we’ll muddle through somewhere halfway between A and B. Sustained enlightenment seems unlikely, unless we start genetic-engineering our brains to behave more constructively. (Messing with our brains that way is quite prone to go the destructive route, of course.)

C) a bio weapon to take out the caste driving kingdom formation and empire aggregation if it has clear target able bio markers?

I think we need asteroid mining for B to be a stable solution.

Why would you want less efficiency? If we had solar panels which power robots that grow food for everyone, you would want to destroy those solar panels and robots? Is it a 'sin' that humans wouldn't have to work?

It's an interesting question, but it's not a blanket statement I made. In some cases, efficiency might be good, but for example, it's often better to have local made products and locally-made foods.

Also, there is the problem that more efficient use of resources make resources more efficiently used. So, how to find the optima?

It's better to grow what grows best in the local environment. You can't grow everything everywhere. Everyone would be really limited in their choice of food if everything was local. Unless we're using some kind of greenhouses, which might eventually be a good idea. But it would require insane amounts of energy.

I'm not sure you know what efficiency means. From Wikipedia: "Efficiency is the often measurable ability to avoid wasting materials, energy, efforts, money, and time while performing a task. In a more general sense, it is the ability to do things well, successfully, and without waste."

Being less efficient means that you're wasting resources, i.e. using more resources than necessary.

I don't think the problem is technological growth itself - the amount of humans on earth and the way incentives are misaligned in a way that wastes large parts of total "effort"/resources are much larger problems IMO.

A society where there was a system that reliable aligned incentives between (eg.) consumers and producers might already reduce resource consumption by an order of magnitude, and would remove most of the "arms race" mentality in risky developments like AI.

Whether we can create such a system in time is a big question though...

(as an aside, while neither socialism or capitalism do anything significant to solve this problem in their current forms, I don't expect either to be incompatible with such an alignment system)

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