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Agree.

They are effectively arguing that AI will be God-like.

I don't mean here God in the religiously charged sense but in the philosophical sense.

A god is simply a person or thing that grants salvation.

Whether that's looking to a rain god to to solve a drought, a luck god to to solve a series of bad events, etc.

It doesn't matter how the god does it but the adherents trust that the god has the powers to do it.

In this case the idea is that the AI is going to be all-knowing and all-wise, and thus can lead mankind towards every manner of salvation.

It has a god-like flavor to it.

> But there have been entire books written about the fact that right now we have the technology to drastically curtail climate change and yet they're under utilized because of a complicated and murky set of political, social, and systemic reasons.

This is not true. That is to say: "under utilized" is a far cry from "we could solve climate change easily if only the people of the world worked together". There are huge technical issues in production capacity, lack of energy storage solutions, etc.

As for AGI solving climate change:

AGI might be able to come up with cheap, low-problem and easy to build fusion reactors or something similar. You can bet your bottom that any party that gets access to such tech would build a shitton of those if only to make a bunch of money. Just look at the proliferation of solar panels: they are simple, easy to produce, and profitable. Tons of places, including very 'anti-green' places like Texas install loads and loads of the things.

You'd still need to sequester a bunch of additional carbon to properly reverse damage done, but with practically infinite cheap energy a lot of processes to do so suddenly become viable.

It’s the same rehashed idea of the perfectly rational actor in economics.

> Both premises seem laughably unlikely to me.

Yeah, that's not gonna happen.

> The AGI-pilled must think one of two things;

I'm cynical and I believe that AI will be our undoing. In fact, when we let that genie out of the bottle, many other scenarios became possible. For example, here's one third scenario to your "two things": a sufficiently cynical[^1] and resourceful rogue AI may solve climate change by steamrolling over the "set of political, social, and systemic reasons" and teaching the monkeys a lesson about the real significance of very vast agency and intelligence. For example, it could manipulate people into an anti technological uprising and subsequent backward, anti-humanist ethos, while at the same time modifying one or two key ecosystems so that the Mediterranean would smell of cooked cabbage (dimethyl sulfide) and bring about a North African monsoon that, with sufficient time, would turn the Sahara into carbon-sequestering dense jungle...

[^1]: It takes one to know one.

> AI labs have handwaved away as being "solvable" by AGI

Mind sharing who at AI labs saying this?

> "Although it will happen incrementally, astounding triumphs – fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics – will eventually become commonplace."

https://ia.samaltman.com/