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Comment by dottjt | Hacker News Reader

Not that I necessarily believe it, but isn't the rationale that technology allows us to scale without the need for additional humans? A bit in the same way that oil provides us many multiples of manpower?

So for example, if AI can replace the need for additional humans, then overall we're using net less energy?

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Whose rationale? More efficiency leading to less resource use never happened, it always leads to more resource use (jevons paradox).

AI companies currently simply are a major contributor to climate crisis, justified by racing for future riches for a few people, provided by some imaginary moat. Probably right near the one built by Uber.

> it always leads to more resource use

It does, but this due to the demand created by humans. If you create a technologically advanced civilization, with robots doing a lot of the work, and considering their lack of desire to own things like pretty houses, it could be possible to scale down civilization to a few select millions in such a way that the entire system is then respecting earth's resources.

If you were to ship a big group of people through the galaxy, you'd also have to put some constraints on how many people will be on that ship, yet it will have to function regardless of how little people exist on that ship. The same could be applied to earth.

This would also give animals more room on this planet.

How are you envisioning this "scaling down"? Chinese-Style One Child Policy? Large scale purge?

No vision here, but it looks like developed countries are already working on it by themselves, with the demographic change we're able to observe. If that were the way, strong borders would need to be built.

What about the not developed countries? That's where most of the population growth is happening.

Should the developed world do frequent culls of the less fortunate in addition to the strong borders?

IDK. Maybe let them develop until they also reach the state of lack of desire to procreate.

That's what China has been doing. It's greatly increased its emissions.

Maybe what trump is doing is it

That would be a compelling argument if procreation was somehow primarily driven by a need for people.

As it is, we already have quite a lot of people and they’re not going anywhere, however many terawatt-hours we pump into AI.

The rationale I've heard is that AGI is gonna come around any day now and will fix all our climate issues through its superior intellect.

Which seems like a very strenuous proposal to be betting the future of humanity on.

The "we will invent our way out of this"-argument goes back way before AI, at least to the early 00s, but probably earlier.

It's a great strategy that works fantastically well and saves a lot of time and money, except when it doesn't.

In my eyes it is a cop-out to delay the necessary structural changes until the point of no return.

At that point the structural changes will be denied with a "oh well, it's too late now anyways!"

> The rationale I've heard is that AGI is gonna come around any day now and will fix all our climate issues through its superior intellect.

Skynet says: Get rid of the people

Is that what happened with oil (and coal and fossil gas)?

Or did human labour instead come to resemble machine labour?

Do you see fewer humans working ? Fewer humans taking their cars to do groceries, fewer humans going to school, fewer humans cooling down their houses ? All AI does is potentially make said humans jobless, with a job here and there created with a bullshit title like prompt engineer. The energy you're "saving" is absolutely nothing. When you pay someone to do data entry, the majority of their energy expenditure isn't the computer they're working on, it's the transportation systems they use, the food they eat, etc. These never go away. Well, not unless you kill said person. The current AI trend is purely additional energy consumption, without any tangible benefits.

Capitalism as a system is fundamentally incapable of functioning without continously running forward, and stopping means the system collapses. It needs consumption, it needs perpetually renewing debt, perpetually working humans. It's a death cult.

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