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Comment by ponco | Hacker News Reader

The benefits of modernity (electricity, cars, iPhone, Claude) are good, but they come bundled with potentially terminal ecological costs which is bad.

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Yup. Best unplug your computer.

Darn, I tried this and the lithium battery kicked in.

Have people (smarter than me) come up with a good equation - or at least heuristic - to determine what inventions are morally good?

I suppose it'd be from a utilitarian perspective?

Ex: My gut feeling is nitrogen fixing would rank "low" on "terminal ecological impact" against "positive benefits to humanity"; the Vinyl resurgence would be around the middle; private jets for the Epstein class would the highest etc.

I was being a bit cheeky, but I’m not really arguing that individual inventions can be determined as good or bad. My point is it comes from the same underlying mode of production. "Claude is useful" and "the way we have organised society that led to its creation may be ecologically catastrophic” can both be true.

There are certainly ecological costs, but in the long run, Earth's life will only survive if an advanced species like ours is able to transport it off the planet before the sun expands and boils away the ocean and atmosphere, in approximately 800 million years.

Fortunately, the rockets for that will be helped along with the GPU capacity to run rocket simulations on. GPUs not being used to run LLMs can be used instead for physics simulations to help make those rockets work.

I'm looking at the second and third order effects of technologies. LLMs massively increase the surplus capacity of human civilization, and it is this surplus capacity enables resources (including human capital) to be expended on developing frontier technologies like rockets that can accelerate the development of space-faring capabilities.

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