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Comment by candiddevmike | Hacker News Reader

IMO, the backdrop to all of this is global warming. We're seeing so many warning signs and growth stagnating that governments need something, ANYTHING, to prop up their debt fueled economies and keep the music playing. In the face of impending GDP/population contraction due to global warming and the upcoming breadbasket collapses, GenAI isn't going to do shit for us. All of the money and effort being spent on it is money that could be spent on figuring out how to give our kids a glimmer of hope.

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Yep, but instead of that we're wasting land, energy and resources in data centers that run "you are not the father" memes based on Sora 2.

It's the American Way(tm)! We've been this way for a long time. Just look at the glut of holiday decorations made of plastic that will be bought, then end up in landfills in a few months. We have literally fought wars, killed millions, just for control of the oil from which they're made.

I don't think global warming is the cause of population contraction.

I think major breadbasket collapses can be avoided through geoengineering. Thanks to volcanoes and emissions from marine traffic, we know for a fact that climate change can be slowed down by spraying enough stuff reflecting sunlight high in the atmosphere.

Of course some conservative US states are enacting laws against geoengineering, but thankfully they can't prevent rest of the world from doing it. I hope we'll eventually reach some kind of a solution where Trump-voting radical Christians can have the biblical apocalypse they want locally, while rest of the world continues to improve.

I can accept some temporary geoengineering as long as we stop burning dinosaur juice. My reservations lie in unintended and non-reversible side effects like ecosystem disruptions.

Europe and even China show that renewable energy can be done. Greenhouse gas emissions stopped increasing after Paris agreement (I failed to find the article), and we can do iteratively better as long as we want to.

You're having kids while admitting they don't have a glimmer of hope? Ouch.

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