I wonder at what point there will be roving mobs of people destroying every device in sight. Anti-AI vigilante groups, etc.
We had this pattern with the following ones:
- Nuclear war
- Peak Oil/Resource Depletion
- Ozone hole
- Y2K Problem
Seems like "Climate Change" is on the way out and "AI Doom" is on the way in.
Did you try stepping outside this summer? Because it was the hottest year on record, ever.
(to be fair, the Y2K would have been solved regardless since that could have impacted immediate quarterly financial reports)
We now have infinite oil (thank you Petro-Jesus for making it so)
The ozone hole just healed itself with no action required by humans
Like, we didn't just all decide to stop. We identified the issues, and made steps towards stopping it.
If there was no bans they'd still use it.
It would be a shame if (culturally, as is your framing here) it is on the way out and AI Doom is on the way in… because there's nothing inside the AI Doom box other than the ability to displace human labor. Any hard drive already surpasses human memory for scope and accuracy. We have to get used to machines out-scoping us on technical grounds. We can't run as fast as cars, either, but we're still around to think about and sometimes even attempt 'walkable cities'.
Reality always gets a vote. With 'AI Doom' the vote isn't what you think it is. It is a Jacquard loom of words. Some things change hugely, and others aren't even touched.
With all your examples, the mitigations were not quiet at all.
- nuclear war, well, that one got resolved by an entire empire outright collapsing after engaging in a decades long financial war with both the USSR and the US spending hundreds of billions of dollars every year.
- Peak Oil was ... mitigated by making an example out of Iraq and Libya: don't fuck with our oil, or else. On top of that, governments (most notably the EU) instituted strict emissions controls, much to the chagrin of the car establishment.
- The ozone hole was mitigated by globally banning CFC gases, again much to the chagrin of the refrigerant industry.
- the Y2K problem was mitigated by investing 300 billion dollars in preparation efforts (updating and especially testing), and a further 308 billion dollars in remediation costs worldwide [2].
> Seems like "Climate Change" is on the way out
It's certainly not. The "war for attention" may be (as it's being replaced by the Russian War and now the I/P clusterfuck), but this year was among the hottest on historical record, and natural disaster severity and frequency keeps increasing.
Unfortunately, this time we can't trust that those in the background will continue to mitigate the problem of climate change. Germany is being politically ripped apart with the only thing keeping the country together being the knowledge of the coalition that a new election would see them replaced by a conservative "trickle down" moron and a ragtag band of Nazis. The Netherlands struggle with the fallout of a few court decisions impacting the agricultural sector. And in the US, Trump is looking to make a comeback, with his fanbase deeming climate change an outright hoax.
[1] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/935886/umfrag...
- Peak Oil: happened. EV's are mitigating the consequences.
- Ozone hole: treaties banning the world-wide production of CFCs solved the problem.
- Y2K Problem: billions of dollars were spent fixing that problem. We did such a great job fixing that problem there are now a bunch of deniers stating the problem never existed in the first place!
See a pattern here? These problems just didn't up and solve themselves. We took action and solved them. Since there's no point dwelling on old problems we move on to new problems to solve. That process is otherwise known as advancement.
If they're just going to be sending out a $1,200 check once a year, then yeah, things are gonna burn.