Hacker News Reader

Comment by TFYS | Hacker News Reader

Maybe not as fast as we did, but eventually we would have. Maybe more research would have been put into other forms of energy if the effects of fossil fuels were considered more thoroughly and usage was limited to a degree that didn't have a chance cause such fast climate change. And so what if the rate of progress would have been slower and we'd be 50 years behind current tech? At least we wouldn't have to worry about all the damage we've caused now, and the costs associated with that. Due to that damage our future progress might halt while a slower, more careful society would continue advancing far into the future.

View on HN

I think it's an open question whether we can reboot society without the use of fossil fuels. I'm personally of the opinion that we wouldn't be able to.

Simply taking away some giant precursor for the advancements we enjoy today and then assuming it all would have worked out somehow is a bit naive.

I would need to see a very detailed pipeline from growing wheat in an agrarian society to the development of a microprocessor without fossil fuels to understand the point you're making. The mining, the transport, the manufacture, the packaging, the incredible number of supply chains, and the ability to give people time to spend on jobs like that rather than trying to grow their own food are all major barriers I see to the scenario you're suggesting.

The whole other aspect of this discussion that I think is not being explored is that technology is fundamentally competitive, and so it's very difficult to control the rate at which technology advances because we do not have a global government (and if we did have a global government, we'd have even more problems than we do now). As a comment I read yesterday said, technology concentrates gains towards those who can deploy it. And so there's going to be competition to deploy new technologies. Country-level regulation that tries to prevent this locally is only going to lead to other countries gaining the lead.

You might be right, but I'm wasn't saying we should ban all use of any technology that has any negative effects, but that we should at least try to understand all the effects before taking it into use, and try to avoid the worst outcomes by regulating how to use the tech. If it turns out that fossil fuels are the only way to achieve modern technology then we should decide to take the risk of the negative effects knowing that there's such a risk. We shouldn't just blindly rush into any direction that might give us some benefit.

Regarding competition, yes you're right. Effective regulation is impossible before we learn global co-operation, and that's probably never going to happen.

Very naive take that's not based in reality but would only work in fiction.

Historically, all nations that developed and deployed new tech, new sources of energy and new weapons, have gained economic and military superiority over nations who did not, which ended up being conquered/enslaved.

UK would not have managed to be the world power before the US, without their coal fueled industrial era.

So as history goes, if you refuse to take part in, or cannot keep up in the international tech, energy and weapons race, you'll be subjugated by those who win that race. That's why the US lifted all brakes on AI, to make sure they'll win and not China. What EU is doing, self regulating itself to death, is ensuring its future will be at the mercy of US and China. I'm not the one saying this, history proves it.

You're right, in a system based on competition it's not possible to prevent these technologies from being used as soon as they're invented if there's some advantage to be gained. We need to figure out global co-operation before such a thing is realistic.

But if such co-operation was possible, it would make sense to progress more carefully.

There is no such thing as "global cooperation" in our reality for things beyond platitudes. That's only a fantasy for sci-fi novels. Every tribe wants to rule the others, because if you don't, the other tribes will rule you.

It's been the case since our caveman days. That's why tribes that don't focus on conquest end up removed form the gene pool. Now extend tribe to nation to make it relevant to current day.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com