Re:AI may be on a trajectory to surpass human intelligence; ...
by mschuster91 on Monday December 18, 2023 @04:02PM
(#38688218)
> and the real dangers are quietly and thanklessly mitigated by more competent people.
With all your examples, the mitigations were not quiet at all.
- nuclear war, well, that one got resolved by an entire empire outright collapsing after engaging in a decades long financial war with both the USSR and the US spending hundreds of billions of dollars every year.
- Peak Oil was ... mitigated by making an example out of Iraq and Libya: don't fuck with our oil, or else. On top of that, governments (most notably the EU) instituted strict emissions controls, much to the chagrin of the car establishment.
- The ozone hole was mitigated by globally banning CFC gases, again much to the chagrin of the refrigerant industry.
- the Y2K problem was mitigated by investing 300 billion dollars in preparation efforts (updating and especially testing), and a further 308 billion dollars in remediation costs worldwide [2].
> Seems like "Climate Change" is on the way out
It's certainly not. The "war for attention" may be (as it's being replaced by the Russian War and now the I/P clusterfuck), but this year was among the hottest on historical record, and natural disaster severity and frequency keeps increasing.
Unfortunately, this time we can't trust that those in the background will continue to mitigate the problem of climate change. Germany is being politically ripped apart with the only thing keeping the country together being the knowledge of the coalition that a new election would see them replaced by a conservative "trickle down" moron and a ragtag band of Nazis. The Netherlands struggle with the fallout of a few court decisions impacting the agricultural sector. And in the US, Trump is looking to make a comeback, with his fanbase deeming climate change an outright hoax.
With all your examples, the mitigations were not quiet at all.
- nuclear war, well, that one got resolved by an entire empire outright collapsing after engaging in a decades long financial war with both the USSR and the US spending hundreds of billions of dollars every year.
- Peak Oil was ... mitigated by making an example out of Iraq and Libya: don't fuck with our oil, or else. On top of that, governments (most notably the EU) instituted strict emissions controls, much to the chagrin of the car establishment.
- The ozone hole was mitigated by globally banning CFC gases, again much to the chagrin of the refrigerant industry.
- the Y2K problem was mitigated by investing 300 billion dollars in preparation efforts (updating and especially testing), and a further 308 billion dollars in remediation costs worldwide [2].
> Seems like "Climate Change" is on the way out
It's certainly not. The "war for attention" may be (as it's being replaced by the Russian War and now the I/P clusterfuck), but this year was among the hottest on historical record, and natural disaster severity and frequency keeps increasing.
Unfortunately, this time we can't trust that those in the background will continue to mitigate the problem of climate change. Germany is being politically ripped apart with the only thing keeping the country together being the knowledge of the coalition that a new election would see them replaced by a conservative "trickle down" moron and a ragtag band of Nazis. The Netherlands struggle with the fallout of a few court decisions impacting the agricultural sector. And in the US, Trump is looking to make a comeback, with his fanbase deeming climate change an outright hoax.
[1] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/935886/umfrag...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem#Cost