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Comment by foo12bar | Hacker News Reader

Why is this sarcastic? Isn't this a plausible possibility?

There's not.

The first problem, in order to reverse a chemical reaction, you need to provide at least the offsetting released energy of the initial reaction. That means for CO2 you need to provide at least as much energy as was released when the carbon oxidized in the first place.

The second problem is that the CO2 is diluted in the atmosphere. Consider the amount of energy needed to remove salt from ocean water, it's not simple.

It just takes a lot of energy to that what was done by burning fossils in the first place.

Maybe not. You don't need to chemically turn the CO2 back into hydrocarbons and free oxygen. You just need to remove it from the atmosphere.

Sounds significantly more expensive than not producing it in the first place though, doesn’t it?

Except for the politics

> The first problem, in order to reverse a chemical reaction, you need to provide at least the offsetting released energy of the initial reaction. That means for CO2 you need to provide at least as much energy as was released when the carbon oxidized in the first place.

This is only a problem if AI won't develop cheap carbon neutral energy sources, like fusion or advanced fission, or more efficient solar with cheap grid-scale batteries.

There are many practical substances that can absorb CO2, and "regenerating" them may not be necessary (the resulting carbonate compounds can be useful without releasing the carbon) or as energy-intensive as the original reaction. This has been an active field of research for over a quarter of a century.

there needs to be some form of energy input to analyse the co2 to another molecule. the logical input would be the sun. but why not use the sun directly via solar instead of going the long way over fossils?!

Nobody in the thread is disagreeing with using solar power. The context is an argument about dealing with the CO2 that's already there, and how feasible those approaches are.

There are non-fossil sources of energy, though. Even without a major discovery like fusion power, we could in theory stop the progress of global warming at any time by building a lot of fission powerplants powering direct carbon capture.

We've been hearing some variant of "engineering will solve climate change when it becomes important enough, so we don't need to worry now" since the late 90s.

> We've been hearing some variant of "engineering will solve climate change when it becomes important enough, so we don't need to worry now" since the late 90s.

Well, it was true in the 90s, and it's still true today. Once climate change becomes important enough (that is, causing actual significant damage to important, wealthy countries), it takes just one such country to start a stratospheric aerosol injection project, or, if space launch costs become low enough, put a sunshade between Earth and the Sun. Such solutions have their own risks, of course. But if climate change really becomes bad, they will be tried. And from what I have read, they have a good change of succeeding.

It will still be true another 30 years from now perhaps, but nobody who has the actual funds to spend seems to care. If the world was actually taking it seriously, it would be dealt with like the ozone hole was. Instead, we're still debating whether it's real, and if it's real whether it's important, and if it's important whether it is more important than - I don't know - pretty much anything else.

What qualifies as a rich nation anyway? Europe seems pretty rich, and they're melting. One would think the time is now.

> What qualifies as a rich nation anyway? Europe seems pretty rich, and they're melting. One would think the time is now.

They are still not melting enough. Most of the negative consequences of current summer heatwaves can be pretty much solved by installing US-style ubiquitous air conditioning.

Yup, as I said. Same as rich people do everywhere, they don't have to worry, they won't run out of water or power, if things get too hot where they are they'll just move somewhere nicer. They have the money and zero incentive to solve the actual problem.

An extremely wealthy acquaintance in my local circle is happy to endlessly debate whether climate change is ACTUALLY real or just scientists carving out job security, while flying out for monthly ski holidays wherever there's nice snow in the world when it gets a bit muggy at home.

It is already causing actual significant damage to important wealthy countries. Just not in a way that directly impacts the people with the means to make a significant impact.

It worked out well for every problem so far.

Unless they've somehow restored Norway's glaciers with a refrigerator of some sort, I think you might be mistaking a local maximum for a global one.

Unless it’s social media, advertising, sex trafficking, or fraud.

It’s silly to pretend that technology is anything other than a double edged sword.

I did not say it didn't create new problems, or addressed everything already.

I'll grant you social media and advertising, but the other two are not new, and were way worse in the past.

Given that everything important has trade-offs, no, AI, even if it were very very smart wouldn’t be able to “fix everything”

If we compare 2025 to 0025, a truly remarkable number of problems have been solved by, effectively, intelligent people doing research. While it is impossible that AI will fix everything it is plausible it will fix most things since it looks like it'll be able to do research faster, better and with a higher quality than humans as well as more effectively communicate the results to the masses.

Yet Altman and Amadeo are talking how AI can kill us. So either it solves some problems it creates or kills off humanity... This is a gambling addict level rationalisation of betting your house to win it all at once.

The path they are talking about solves also a lot of problems, tho. They don’t care, because they’ll already live on Moon, Mars or will be dead.

The rule of thumb is that technology creates problems that cannot be solved with the same level of technology.

It’s sarcastic in context. My comment doesn’t make sense without GP.

Or to spell it out more clearly, the sarcasm has nothing to do with the truth value of the claim (I’m not making an assertion in either direction).

Do you think an LLM can change the laws of physics?

Which societal problems require changing the laws of physics to fix?

Entropy means the costs of cleaning carbon out of the air are only going up.

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