Artanthos t1_ixdaqaw wrote on November 22, 2022 at 4:11 PM

Reply to comment by World_May_Wobble in How do you think about the future of AI? by diener1

Implementation and incremental improvement of existing technologies have the potential to address most of the world’s problems.

Solar and wind power are already being implemented at a rapid pace.

Much of the world, and a sizable fraction of the US, have already mandated the switch to electric vehicles.

Bioreactors and vertical farms are already taking food to market.

None of this really changes life for the average person. The steak you bought is labeled Green, you charge your car instead of pumping gas, and life goes on.

World_May_Wobble t1_ixefjwe wrote on November 22, 2022 at 8:39 PM

When I say "sustainable," I don't just mean eco-friendly. For example, it's not sustainable to keep large arsenals of nuclear armed ICBMs, because even if the probability of them being used in any year is very small, the cumulative probability over long time spans approaches 1. Probably the only way to change this is a radical and global change in governance.

Then yes, there are environmental issues. We don't have a ready answer to microplastics, and they're making us infertile when we're already heading into a demographic cul-de-sac. We'll need more rare earth metals for those electrics cars. Oh, and by the way, those electric cars are still being powered by coal.

Europe is the poster child of renewables, and most of its energy still doesn't come from renewables. Its leading renewable isn't solar or wind; it's wood, and it's not even close. Wider adoption of solar and wind require better battery technology, but batter technology has improved at a notoriously linear rate. It's not going to be any time soon that we see all of Europe's energy come from renewables, and again, they're the best at this.

I'm not saying there's no progress, but that's kind of the point. We need progress to get ahead of some of the problems in our future.

Artanthos t1_ixhtd2z wrote on November 23, 2022 at 3:34 PM

>When I say "sustainable," I don't just mean eco-friendly. For example, it's not sustainable to keep large arsenals of nuclear armed ICBMs, because even if the probability of them being used in any year is very small, the cumulative probability over long time spans approaches 1. Probably the only way to change this is a radical and global change in governance.

AGI and the singularity, if it happens, don't really change this.

Now adversarial countries have competing AGI's with ever more lethal weapon pointed at each other.