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Comment by dyauspitr | Hacker News Reader

Not succumbing to being cynical I can imagine total elimination of food shortages by completely making farming robot driven, AI driven gene therapy to end most disease, robot driven scalable power generation through building solar panels in an automated fashion, installation and maintenance, one robot at home that can replace all tradesmen etc. There is a lot of stuff that could be possible if the promises pan out and they don’t seem completely out of reach at this point.

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The reason for food shortages is not scarcity of food, nor the reason for shelter, clothing, or transportation.

We have enough technology and resources to make it a heaven for everyone except for unpreventable diseases or similar.

Yet we do not because we did not crack the human-alignment problem.

That’s the problem we need to solve, not the resource problem.

If we solve the resource problem before the human alignment problem, we will cause unimaginable suffering.

It will sort itself out over time. It will be painful. Probably not over our lifetime.

This is the kind of attitude that is the reason it won't happen

I’ll take it over whatever Luddite fucking nonsense the progressives have going on right now. I’m a progressive and will fight whatever short term nonsense perspective vociferously. It’s progressive because it’s forward looking, not some regressive bullshit like we have now.

The billionaires controlling this aren't going to save us no matter how much wealth and power they gain.

Billionaires are the ones making paradigm shifting progress because they are the only ones that can afford it. I’m all for taxing billionaires but not understanding how paradigm shifts have worked in the US for 80 years you’re just going on gut feel not evidence.

> It will be painful

you are choosing the pain of the masses over the pain of the wealthy.

Today more than one million people die annually of TB, a disease that is completely treatable with a fairly inexpensive medicine. We could pretty much eliminate TB from the entire world if we just distributed this medicine differently than we currently do. Yet still there will be thousands of deaths due to TB today.

Why would some fancy new gene therapy be different? We already know what happens when we have a treatment for a deadly disease. People without money still die from it.

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