The article is okay, but the writing is bad chatgpt. Em-dashes in almost every sentence instead of commas. Out of place analogies and metaphors which barely make sense. Randomly sprinkled slang for an audience of teenage redditors.
112 karma · joined April 11, 2022
Nobody in the AI chip hypespace seems to understand this, it’s just stupid money running around trying to eat Nvidia’s margins. Sam Altman understands this less than plenty of people.
It’s becoming harder for me to see him as anything besides someone who is very talented at growing power, but not much else. Perhaps he will succeed in misallocating a trillion dollars along the way.
Can we not just seed clouds to reflect lots of energy back into space though? Maybe that is a stupid idea, but I could come up with 10 ideas like that and maybe someone could come up with an idea like that, but which actually works.
If climate science is correct, the one hole I still see is that it doesn’t take into account future improvement in technology, which I think might have some solutions especially when the problem actually threatens an economic player like a 1trillion dollar company. It is basically a choice to believe something good like this can/will happen, so you could call this out as semi religious.
Thank you for engaging with me in the end.
Dude neither of us have ever read a scientific study about climate change. We are both going on bullshit we read online and related to experiences we had in corporate land. Maybe I read more right-leaning stuff so I have a more counter opinion. Don’t pretend any of us are fact checking the magical climate science, we aren’t.
The one thing I actually have firsthand experience with is computational complexity. And after thinking about it for a while, it seems plausible to me that we cannot know the scientific prescriptions we see in negative climate coverage with nearly the definitiveness that they claim.
And it also seems plausible that a lot of people gradually managed to form a doom and gloom committee to find doom and gloom in a noisy world where there aren’t that many definitive answers.
The article is about degrowth.
The paperclip thought experiment is a stupid thought experiment. An AI that had the executive functioning to improve its entire substrate (e.g. rewrite the entire TSMC Nvidia chip and software supply chain) would require the same higher order agency that would stop it from destroying the world to turn it into paperclips. It only seems plausible if you spend all your time disembodied from reality browsing lesswrong.
We diverge on this point and I talked about it in other comments.
> we should decrease our current CO2 usage as much as we can, even at a small price of personal luxury
It’s luxury because we live in the first world. In the 3rd world where most people live (and most people are poor), these policies have catastrophic consequences, such as the Sri Lankan organic farming affair.
You could argue that I should turn off the lights, and on that point you might have some ground. But more generally there are many things in my life that I save time on by basically throwing a little money in the trash, and I am very fortunate to have this opportunity. This is on a spectrum and we should obviously not cause obscene long term damage so I can save 2 seconds per day, but we are not at that point yet.
And regarding inequality, it is also on a spectrum, and at some point it is definitely too much, but I don’t think we have necessarily crossed that line. 99% of the people in my city have enough food to eat. And the right amount of inequality is certainly not 0, the only way to achieve that is by killing all life on earth. Some inequality is a natural consequence of the different branches of possibility that people explore with their lives. To the extent that we have anything in our society it’s because we are able to share ideas and cooperate. A society will necessarily always have the have’s and the have-not’s.
The problem is that you are recommending we turn off capitalism, which will have serious consequences that are easier to predict than climate change: we will doom the world’s poor people to lives of certain poverty with no hope of upward mobility.
If humanity does end up accidentally terraforming the planet to get to hot in a positive feedback loop, I believe we will be within a line-of-sight to terraforming it back in the other direction.
Technology has solved all our physical problems so far. Maybe we will seed clouds in the upper atmosphere to reflect a lot of energy back into space. Maybe we will find something useful to do with captured carbon (which doesn’t just release it). It is insane to suggest capitalism won’t solve this problem by the time it actually needs solving, and therefore needs to be shut down (it’s the thing that actually works).
Is loss of biodiversity bad? Maybe. Will we have resurrected most extinct species using jurassic park DNA within the next 500 years? I dunno but if that happened, it would make the current loss of biodiversity into more of a blip than an apocalyptic thing.
The science and technology enterprise is economically motivated. It is pretty good at creating value out of fewer and fewer resources. It is not good at making godlike insights into the far future about the late stage interactions between itself and the physical world. Any definite predictions provided to you are more likely driven by short-term incentives of some political figures.
There is nothing indicating massive wars are coming due to climate change, most of the world is lifting out of poverty not slipping back into it. If the world does heat by 5-10 degrees, we should be focused on making sure indians and africans have enough economic resources to afford air conditioning like we do in rich countries.
People talk about the AI singularity but the whole world is a singularity all the time. To model the entire world and predict how everything is going to play out on a social and economic level is obviously impossible. To make impoverishing top-down prescriptions based on that seems criminal. To utilize this storyline as a political mechanism is cruel.
Otherwise why don’t you calm down and entertain the thought that maybe the future won’t suck, and might even be normal or good, just like the present is right now.
Why are you working on technology if you don’t think the future will be great?
And about the long work hours, I'm doing it right now because I am young, and if compound interest works out, it will give me a lot of financial security to do things starting a company. That is, if this thing doesn't backfire.
That's what I've been doing up to this point. Unfortunately I am naturally starting to build a name for myself as I become the only person with much knowledge on the projects I work on. Trying to start a company would obviously mean ramping that up even more.
That last suggestion actually seems like a good idea that I hadn't thought of. I think I would fit a lot better as a CTO than a CEO, so I will see if I can aim in that direction.