Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

red75prime t1_ivafssn wrote

Population growth: education is the best contraceptive, and AGI can immensely improve the educational system.

Fossil fuels: if you have a fully automated synthetic fuel factory that needs sunlight, water, air, a bit of materials for robot maintenance, and a carbon tax in place, you will outcompete automatic fossil fuel extractors. The green will probably go mad over the perspective of disrupting fragile desert ecosystems and returning brine to the oceans on unprecedented levels, but you win some, you lose some.

Resource extraction: the same thing, recycling is not profitable and maybe even not ecologically beneficial right now (you need energy, that mostly comes from fossil fuels, to process all that stuff). AGI can change that by providing negative carbon energy (and brains) to sort and process it.

Ecology: it will probably suffer for some time. Delays in UBI introduction will push more people into subsistence farming.

Nuclear waste: deep geological storage is not "kicking the can down the road". After 200-300 years the waste will be not much more harmful than natural uranium deposits and it will be a useful source of radioactive elements.

3

cwallen t1_ivawo5h wrote

Agree on population. That richer nations tend to have declining birth rates contradicts the idea that increased resource availability would lead to population growth.

1