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Comment by devnonymous | Hacker News Reader

Climate change has compounding effects (eg: water scarcity, leading to political conflict, leading to displacement, leading to pandemics ...and that's just one vector). Real world is real real messy. COViD should have taught people that. Unfortunately, it didn't.

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I am not saying it's not a huge problem. Hundreds of millions dying would probably make it the worst thing that ever happened.

I am just saying it's not an extinction risk.

...tbh, imo, the impact of this is already visible in the world (eg: it can be argued that the conflict in Ukraine is directly linked to climate change) whereas ASI is still fantasy that exists only in the minds of the AI 1% , to use the terminology of the OP.

I believe you are correct on both points. I believe the first major war to be caused substantially by climate change was the Syrian Civil War, followed by the Yemeni Civil War.

The main AI threats for the foreseeable future are its energy usage contributing to climate change, and the use of generative AI to produce and enhance political unrest, as well as its general use in accelerating other political and economic crises. AGI isn't even on the radar, much less ASI.

>Climate change has compounding effects

Why is the default to assume that every change will be negative?

Because changes in climate mean that the existing infrastructure (in the form of cities, farmland, etc) that are optimized for the current conditions are no longer optimal. Very few cities are designed for conditions below sea level or in a desert, but if the city already exists and the desert and oceans comes to where they are then bad things will happen.

I mean you're right that conditions in some places might get better, but that doesn't help if people have to build the infrastructure there to support a modern settlement in order to take advantage of it. When people talk about the cost of climate change, they're taking about the costs of building or adapting infrastructure.

Not to mention that most species evolved to fit particular environments and don't do well when you rapidly alter those environments far outside the parameters they tend to live in.

Perhaps because we aren't seeing evidence to the contrary?

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