One should not forget the reason that these technologies have become so cheap is policy interventions. Especially renewables got kick-started by programs like the German Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG) which then created demand for Chinese mass manufacturing to eventually lower prices.
Once it has already spread far and wide with clear economic pathways though? Perhaps less so.
We will never reverse CO2 emissions until humanity entertains itself less, spends less time in tourism, and does fewer unproductive recreational activities like drinking and drugs. Only then will waste go down significantly and utility go up. And only then will we reverse co2 emissions.
If we don't, we all die. it isn't something to leave up to mindless market mechanics.
No, we don't. Even in the worse case scenarios, a runaway greenhouse effect a la Venus was never remotely part of the scientific consensus. Heck, the IPCC just retired the worst case RCP 8.5 scenario saying it is now scientifically implausible. Now a big reason it was deemed implausible is the transition to renewable energy is happening. But even if RCP 8.5 did happen, it was not a humanity ending scenario.
Can you do it like the IPCC report and assign a confidence to that claim?
Mine would be: RCP 8.5 ending humanity (very low likelihood, low confidence), based on absolutely nothing.
Again, a "runaway Venus" was never really in the cards. As far as I am aware, basically all the carbon that is now locked in the ground in fossil fuels was once in the environment, and Earth still supported copious life at that time. E.g. at one point when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, there were no polar ice caps (Antarctica, even when it was near its current position over the South Pole, had lush green forests and lots of dinosaurs, even with many months of darkness), sea level was many meters higher, but life still flourished.
I'm not downplaying climate change. A significant, geologically fast rise in global temperatures would kill millions/billions of people, inundate coastal areas, result in major migrations and resource wars, etc. But "ending humanity" by making the entire planet unlivable was never supported by the science.
The contrarian throwaway said: "A significant, geologically fast rise in global temperatures would kill millions/billions of people, inundate coastal areas, result in major migrations and resource wars, etc."
-- this sounds close enough to what I said, simply "We all die." I didn't say the oceans would evaporate. But with that amount of damage, global civilization and culture would probably not survive. Going carbon-neutral is not a "meh, let's do it later, or not" type of thing.
This is not just arguing over semantics. There is a huge difference between what I wrote and "we all die". The global population is 8.3 billion. Climate change would be most catastrophic to poor populations in heat prone areas like Southeast Asia, parts of Africa, parts of Mexico, etc. where the wet bulb temp would exceed human survivability. Also, coastal cities would have to build defenses or move.
But we could lose one or two billion people and there is nothing that makes me believe that "global civilization and culture would probably not survive". I just done see how you make that leap. There would be huge change but plenty of places would be perfect for human habitation, some moreso than today.
I, for one, don't believe civilization could handle perpetual catastrophe, the loss of billions of people while retaining a grow-or-die economic model, our largest cities needing to "move" inland/uphill, and migrating populations escaping ininhabitable areas, etc. etc., without altogether collapsing.
Look how fragile it is - blocking the Strait of Hormuz alone caused economic near-calamity in some markets. It's like we are all on a fast-moving treadmill, and once tripped, there's no getting back up. This isn't the world of 1933.
This is exactly wrong as it relates to RCP 8.5. A number of research papers came out basically showing how 8.5 was completely implausible, and it was only after these papers were widely cited and reached consensus did the IPCC retire 8.5.
This article by some of the original authors of one of those papers explains the situation well: https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/on-the-death-of-rcp85 . If you actually read their linked research paper, I don't think any unbiased observer could think 8.5 is plausible anymore (and, in fairness, 8.5 was always proposed as a worst case scenario, not a "business as usual scenario", as that climatebrink article explains very well).
That won't happen, of course, since we kept increasing the threshold every time we approached the previous threshold. Luckily for us now, human society won't collapse until we hit 2 degrees!
Man, reading these comments is making me realize how crazy the messaging on climate alarmism actually got. No, 1.5 C was literally never the threshold where "everything would be fucked and human civilization would inevitably collapse." Where are people getting this misinformation? It wasn't from the IPCC, nor from the broader scientific consensus, nor was it part of the Kyoto or Paris Protocol statements. Yes, there would be colossally bad impacts, but "everything would be fucked and human civilization would inevitably collapse" is just total bullshit.
so journalists focus on Number, because Number is simple and understandable. even when Number is mostly or completely bogus.
c.f. https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/reframing-energy-fo...
e.g. Malthus (and others) observed that human populations were growing exponentially, but crop-land is a finite resource. Humanity seemed doomed to starvation in just a few short generations. As a prophet, Malthus tried to get people to stop having so many children. Other prophets repeated this effort multiple times, always warning of an apocalypse that was just a few decades away. Meanwhile, wizards tried spreading bat guano on fields and started breeding new varieties of wheat, rice, etc.. The result has been a continual stream of innovation that has led to the world's food supply growing faster than its population. Yet, the warning of the prophets remains sound. There's an ultimate limit.
Humans seem hardwired to both be and love prophets while totally failing to follow their advice. Prophets have been warning us to reduce our energy use, eat local, bicycle everywhere, etc.. Some of us do some of these things some of the time, but not nearly enough to make a real difference. Wizards have gotten solar and wind to the point where they're economically viable enough to supplant coal and internal combustion engines, and that is making a huge difference.
Prophets are valuable for identifying problems, such as AI, but their demands for abstinence and self-sacrifice usually don't gain much traction. It's when the wizards show up that things usually start cooking.
Prophets have identified AI as a problem and are calling for limits, but history has shown that not nearly enough people are likely to listen. How might a wizard approach the problem in a way that lets people keep doing their thing without the world ending? The pace of AI development is so quick that we also have to ask, is there enough time for the wizards to do their thing?
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EDIT: On the bright side, while the rapidity of the AI revolution seems utterly unprecedented, so too is the concentration of power in those who control it. The prophets really only need to convince or coerce a handful of billionaires in order to buy the world's wizards years or decades.
AI accelerates our rate of energy consumption as we vie for efficiencies and alternative sources of energy. That is concerning.
Maybe the next book will be:
The AI and The Prophet.
But your last sentence "Electric utilities did not end up ruling the world" really struck me. It's a great point, and TBH I don't really actually know why electric utilities didn't end up becoming more powerful. Time for me to go research the early history of electrification.
Edit: This reddit thread on AskHistorians has good info and links: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8373wv/how_f... . Again, thank you very much for your mention of electricity, because it looks like it actually was a pretty severe power struggle between electric companies and governments at large trying to regulate them, and if anything it has given me some hope that maybe "the people" will eventually win out.
Yes. Electric utilities were at one time quite powerful, around 1900 or so. Read up on Samuel Insull [1], the early history of antitrust, the Utility Company Holding Act, and the history of public utility regulation. Many countries just nationalized the electrical power industry. The US didn't, but regulated it strictly for most of a century. As is typical, this followed a financial disaster.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_Commission_of_New_...
This was deeply offensive to the economists of the 80s and 90s and so they were taken over by the state government and turned into a for profit company.
It was corporatised before it was sold off. Privatisation of the NSW energy market began about 30 years ago at this point.
The Stepchange podcast has an amazing episode on The Grid [1], walking us through the arc of history of how it became the utility it is today.
The history of arcs?
I have for a while theorized that transport is what causes an (undue) aggregation of power. Cheap mass shipping was needed for the current industrial globalization to even work. Cheap communication is what gave rise to the internet giants we have today, and the power structures in general.
Transport of energy, especially electricity, is still relatively expensive, and so a distributed structure is naturally preferred. This, along with the ability to produce it in a more-or-less decentral way of course.
If we one day figure out really-cheap transport of electricity, I'm 100% sure it would only take quite a short time for a few global companies to stomp out all the competition.
US for example owns the LNG trade right now and that’s a major choke for power production across the world, China owns the rare earth metals that goes into solar and wind.
RERUM NOVARUM ENCYCLICAL OF POPE LEO XIII ON CAPITAL AND LABOR
http://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/docume...
I wonder though... it seems the tech behind electricity has no moat, broadly speaking, and so was commoditized. Whereas if one of the AI companies finds a proprietary breakthrough algorithm that won't be the case... at least until others catch up.
Sure it does. You have to run a separate set of wires to each house to compete at the retail level. There have been regions which had two competing phone systems in the past, and there are areas which have two competing fiber systems now. But that's rare.
We may arrive at a point where standardized AI is a commodity, and since it was developed using reams of public data, proprietary rights become severely limited. (Personally, this is beyond my current level of optimism in law, ethics and humanity.)
In less important matters, we've regulated many harmful substances that the free market would love to poison the populace with. Nicotine, trans fats, gambling, alcohol. Some regulatory interventions have been more successful than others...
Incandescent lightbulbs vs fluorescent? Low-flow toilets?
So my argument is not that we can't regulate technologies, but that we only do so when it becomes "technologically convenient". I think the comparison of CFCs to fossil fuels also highlights this point. CFCs were used in a relatively small area of the economy, and replacing them was pretty easy, so not a lot of regulatory will was required. Contrarily, the entire world economy runs on fossil fuels, so replacing them is an enormous task, and as one example you get tons of powerful invested interests pushing back. I honestly don't remember any crazy people shouting "the ozone hole is just an elite conspiracy", but you hear that all the time with respect to global warming.
My fear with AI is that it is such a powerful tech (or is at least viewed as such) that the powers that be are scared of being surpassed by another country/company if they slow down.
Various consumer review sites were regularly doing pieces on newer detergents that maybe-kinda work.
We didn’t have an answer when the bans swept the country. It took a while for things to catch up. Then it was fine again.
China continued using freon until 2019. They used it make insulation. The gasses will continue leaking from these buildings for a long time.
I expect prices of goods would have been much lower and the labor would have been used elsewhere and the comp would still have gone a comparable if not longer way because goods would have been so much cheaper.
One example that comes to mind is cloning. It's technically fully possible to clone a human right now (as in make an embryo with one person's DNA), but it's wildly taboo.
Regulated because of the common good, even though there is money to be made selling them OTC as cold remedies or whatever.
Maybe this shows that there are indeed simply more variable in the calculus of how we optimize towards things as a society.
And that indeed we can feel now that certain variables, antithetical to the continued success of many people, are at risk.
The whole idea of "taming technology" starts from a flawed premise. The problem is with people, not the technology.
Technology concentrates power. Yes, people may be the problem, but "taming technology" is obviously not a "flawed premise". There is a big difference between people having the power to bludgeon their neighbors with sticks and stones compared to blowing up entire continents with nukes.
> firearms accounted for 78% of all mechanisms used in homicides between 2018 and 2025.
Watching PBS as we speak.
CFC banning to protect the ozone layer.
one of many caveats to that is lead additives to gasoline, which is a wound to the living Earth to this day.. there are others.. RoundUp comes to mind in a similar way
Firearms and explosives are not abused nearly as much as one would have imagined before their invention (or soon after). I don't think it's because we stunted the explosives tech-tree, but the social contract and general stability have kept large-scale antisocial behaviors at bay.
I see you don't have any hunting enthusiasts in your social circles. Fireworks are explosives.
If your point was to suggest that regular people don't have access to firearms and explosives, then I'd have to vehemently disagree.
Instead, the global powers blocked nuclear technology from disseminating to most countries.
We do not have to tame technologies, we have to tame rich people who only want to get richer.
I'm not a macro economist, I also haven't looked for any sources on this, but this is my guess.
Same for LEDs. I would guess that adoption, investment and improvement of LED tech was driven in large parts by a clear roadmap abolishing incandescent lighting.
"renewable and battery tech is just getting to be the economic best option". This also didn't happen in a vacuum. The place where they are evolving the most is in China, where government policies have been a huge incentive, with huge government investments made in the sector.
In my own country, Portugal, the adoption of renewal energy, was largely the result of government policies that kicked off the market. Now, it seems to have become self-sustaining in the sense that the market is now carrying on regardless of any incentives. I suspect that we might be reaching a point of no-return, if we haven't reached it already. We're still very far away from becoming energy independent, but we're much better than a couple of decades ago.
Moreover, the internet itself didn't just happen because the market led to its creation. It was a result of the cold war. The IP protocol was born in DARPA.
Still, the previous examples I gave were about the government (which is a form of us "as a collective society") spawning new tech or its adoption. Going in the reverse direction, here are examples where it required collective society to "tame" a technology:
- CFCs: It required an international agreement for us to tame the issue with ozone layer destroying chemicals, a huge problem in the 80s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol
- DDT: This was an incredibly efficient tech (pesticidies), but came with big externalities (highly toxic to people and nature), so a convention was required to tame it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_Convention_on_Persis...
- Nuclear weapons: Eventually the most dangerous tech ever invented by mankind. Maybe the reason we're still here is because of the numerous treaties we've been making to curb them. The SALT agreements, the START agreements, and so on.
- TV, Radio and the printing press: All of these are technologies, which we tend to see as forces for good (well, I at least still do), but also with incredible potential for destruction - radio was used by the guys running Germany in the 30s. It required very careful rule making to strike a balance (and the balance varies a lot from democracy to democracy) between freedom of speech and the misuse of this tech for unethical purposes like defamation, intentional misinformation and so on.
- Car Safety: While seat belts were the invention of the market, governments have been regulating cars to make them safer, not only for occupants, but for pedestrians.
The list just goes on and on.
The difference to AI is that we regulated the heck out of radio and television companies. I think this is evidence in favor of heavily regulating AI.
I think that this is a common misconception. I can't find the reference, but I remember reading that this might have been a "marketing" or PR spin, rather than reality - which was, simply, that he needed to pay well to keep talented workers or take them from other industries.
But that gets replaced with Henry Ford wanting a larger consumer base.
> So I guess I'm looking for some specific examples of where we've actually consciously, as a collective society, altered the course of technological progress for the greater good, because I honestly can't think of any.
As a collective society we managed to make industrial society work better for most people. In the First World at least.
Later even when the printing press was invented, we burned books. Certain book ownership is still illegal.
You must be talking about free societies my friend, because... good luck using the internet in Iran or North Korea.
We also restrict making changes to the environment, resource extraction, waste disposal, building permits, etc.
There’s a 1520 encyclical related to the matter: https://www.papalencyclicals.net/leo10/l10exdom.htm
For a period of time, the ban worked and reversed their existence in society. Part of the ban was to respect samurais who would train for years in the art of combat, only for a peasant to be able to shoot them with a weapon.
The problem is that not _all_ societies are participating in this ban. Eventually one nation will use the technological advances to domainte in military and economy, forcing others to adapt or be eliminated. It's a race to the bottom :/
Cars fixed that. And introduced other problems. But there are always trade offs.
Things have been getting better over time. Good enough for me.
For example, if you look at the boom of the middle classes in the mid 20th century, this appears to me largely a consequence of the fact that industrial technology at the time was both incredibly productive compared to what came before but it also required legions of humans to operate it. Ford didn't pay his workers more out of the goodness of his heart, but he correctly realized that it would ultimately be the most profitable to him if he could build legions of cars and had a large customer base that could afford them. In a similar vein, it looks like we may eventually (at least at some point) turn the tide on CO2 emissions, but not because anyone (at large) really sacrificed anything, or did something that was mildly painful now in the hopes for a better future, but instead because renewable and battery tech is just getting to be the economic best option.
So I guess I'm looking for some specific examples of where we've actually consciously, as a collective society, altered the course of technological progress for the greater good, because I honestly can't think of any. But this is not a rhetorical question - I'd like to be corrected if I'm wrong.