Hacker News Reader

Comment by ohadkr | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

Because all this fancy tech requires concrete and iron (smelted by burning fossil fuels), we're still in the Iron Age: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2024/03/how-to-escape-from...

This is a senseless comment. Worlds progress also stands behind the emissions it produces. In fact there are almost no examples of high gdp low energy use countries at all.

High energy use is exactly how prosperity happens. If anything, you should see physical infrastructure and go “yeah that’s great for economy and people”.

There is clean(er) and safer renewable energy. The human race doesn't have to pollute and climate change itself into near extinction to greedily chase prosperity at the expense of its children's future.

There’s no evidence of near extinction. You are doing a disservice by promoting conspiracy theories like this while the last 50 years pulled billions out of poverty by using more energy.

I would love to verify that the consensus is that humanity would get extinct if we don’t do anything about emissions.

Humans idk, but wildlife in general is getting fucked

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

> The Holocene or Anthropocene extinction[3][4] is an ongoing extinction event caused by human activity during the current geological epoch,[5][6] impacting diverse families of plants[7][8][9] and animals, including mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians,[10] fish, and invertebrates, as well as both terrestrial and marine species.[11] It is sometimes also called the sixth extinction

Would there be so many billions if we didn't figure out how to convert petroleum into fertilizer and so many other useful things? My point is that, just because we now have billions, it feels wrong to justify maintaining those billions of people at the luxury levels so many of us enjoy. We differ from other animals only by degrees, not by kind. From watching so many nature documentaries over the years, and reading nonfiction books about animals, I understand many mammal newborns don't make it into childhood. I'm not convinced that a high human infant-mortality rate is bad. It just feels bad, and with our pathological focus on feeling happy and suppressing sadness, a consequence seems to be we make decisions out of momentary selfishness rather than care for future generations long after we individuals are dead.

> I'm not convinced that a high human infant-mortality rate is bad

Sigh.

Why? We basically broke evolution and purposefully make the specie more dysgenic. At that point we need life long drug treatments to keep people from overeating because they have less self control than pigs and literal cattle. Surely there is a middle ground

> High energy use is exactly how prosperity happens

Yeah I guess if you don't account for any of the side effects and externalities sure... We might as well start using asbestos, leaded gas and other magic prosperity products again.

We're so focused on short term numbers that we forget about the past 3b years and anything that will happen after the next 10 years. Don't conflate prosperity and brain dead productivism/consumerism

It also feels much less magical when you see what people actually waste it on.

Images of hyperrealistic big booby waifus -or- A habitable planet.

Which way, western man?

As if there wasn't already pretty much endless big booby waifus online before AI, too

You don’t consider surveillance magical!?!?

Unfortunately, this report doesn’t tell us about resource usage per model call. It only tells us the numerator and we also need the denominator.

Yeah trillions of investment into development and paying millions to researchers to say they solved a bunch of math problems and it can write mediocre code

Reply on news.ycombinator.com