Hacker News Reader

Comment by MrMcCall | Hacker News Reader

AI does not want to do anything, whatsoever.

It's owners, however, definitely want you to fall into lockstep that cooking the Earth for their billion$ is perfectly fine and that waking up to a life of low-impact, serviceful compassion to the Earth and its peoples is just virtue-signalling when, in fact, it is simply virtuous in the face of demented psychosociopaths.

Note that this all started with all that digital coin-mining. Just more burning the Earth for fakeass money so callous bastards can get richer.

View on HN

> Note that this all started with all that digital coin-mining. Just more burning the Earth for fakeass money so callous bastards can get richer.

Always strikes me as interesting that "Nvidia" sounds like the syllables in the middle of "invidious"

invidia = envy in latin

If AI gets us back to nuclear power, LLMs will have done more for climate change than all climate activists, ever, combined.

Not for geopolitical stability, though. What did we learn about making the entirety of human civilization dependent on a constant supply of rare materials hostile countries dig out of the ground?

And what happens when they run out? Back to carbon fossil fuels?

Oh come on - we've been doing this since way before crypto was a thing. We knew about climate change in the 80s.

So then it's ok to not only continue ignoring it as the evidence mounts, but to actually accelerate it?

No. No, it's not. It doesn't matter how many fools do something, they're still fools. The root word of ignorance is "to ignore".

You said

"Note that this all started with all that digital coin-mining"

But it didn't. That's what I'm saying.

They weren't using modern GPUs and muiltiprocessor machines to cook the Earth, which has been happening on a large scale since the turn of this century.

That's what I was and still am saying.

No, we were burning coal and cutting down trees. I'm not saying that what we're doing now is fine, if anything I'm agreeing with you but pointing out that profit-driven environmental destruction has been happening since way before the invention of cryptocurrency.

"profit-driven environmental destruction has been happening since way before the invention of cryptocurrency"

Yes. People forget that every tree on the east coast was cut down. Every forest you see today on the east coast was re-grown, new. It was all clear cut for progress during expansion. I think it was mostly for 'potash' by burning it.

We knew about climate change in the 1880s.

There, fixed it for you.

Thanks; I don't think I said that we didn't know about it before the 1980s but extra information is rarely a bad thing.

We knew about global warming in the 1880s?

Yes.

got a source for that?

Yes. The green house gas effect has been studied since 1856.

The 'right' is willfully ignorant. Not just ignorant because they just haven't been exposed. They willfully decide to be ignorant because knowledge goes against their religion.

"The year was 1856. Foote’s brief scientific paper was the first to describe the extraordinary power of carbon dioxide gas to absorb heat – the driving force of global warming."

https://www.weforum.org/stories/2021/07/scientists-physics-c...

https://history.aip.org/climate/co2.htm

Reply on news.ycombinator.com