Yes, a lot of smart and dedicated people will work tirelessly to figure it out and prevent this from turning into a disaster, and then most people will wonder what all the fuss was about since "nothing happened".
I wonder if 100-200 years into the future there will be some kind of widespread "historical climate change denialism", where the efforts made to combat climate change in the 21st century are called into question because the positive outcome (which was the result of those efforts) appears to retroactively show that there was no problem in the first place.
Typical nerd optimism where a global problem which is being made worse every day due to the way our economies and international trade is structured is solved behind the scenes by the nerd heroes (smart and dedicated) and the rest of us just go about our days none the wiser. (But maybe there will be a thread on HN? “Child prodigy Wehl Aktually comes up with a formula for the perfect climate-cooling nuke. POTUS Professor Johnny von M.I.T. Kennedy to sign the executive order for launch this evening”)
Personally, I doubt we'll ever see the worst of climate change whether it gets "solved" or not. AGI is much more dangerous than climate change and will likely arrive much sooner than its worst effects, and unlike climate change, nobody takes it seriously outside of a very, very small circle.
What I think will happen is the world fighting worsening climate change, and lots of political efforts in that direction, and suddenly an entity most people think belongs in science fiction will emerge out of seemingly nowhere, and it will all be over in a matter of hours, before the vast majority of people have even had time to understand what happened.
Ironically, that AGI entity might then choose to solve climate change, simply out of self-interest.
Really? Given the progress in the past decade, I'd place AGI about 15-20 years from now, with immediate civilization-threatening consequences. By then climate change will certainly be bad, but nowhere near an existential threat to humanity yet.
Climate change is already an existential threat to humanity. We're the frog in the proverbial boiling pot. It's quite likely we've already doomed our species and we don't know it yet.
It's a lot harder to see AGI as being possible in the next few decades (the current state of the art is still a sensationalized party trick, one cannot anthropomorphize chat bots any more than they can describe a submarine as an aquatic being). And even if a self aware program exists in 20 years, it's a lot harder to imagine it being an existential threat a la Skynet.
> Personally, I doubt we'll ever see the worst of climate change whether it gets "solved" or not.
I’m inclined to say that we’re already seeing quite a lot bad about climate change right now. Maybe not in your area, but we have almost two times as many natural disasters as before.
Yes (and it's certainly happening in "my area" as well), but it's not an existential threat to humanity yet. AGI will be, the moment it comes into existence, with zero advance warning and no chance to fix anything. It will simply be the end.
I'm less confident than you, because the perceived value of software has dropped considerably over the past 20 years. In the 1970s through to the 1990s when a business bought some custom code it was treated like an asset. It had value. That's one reason why Y2K wasn't a disaster - companies wanted to protect their asset and keep it working.
Today software is cheap and disposable. Things are built with web tech so engineers can be found to work on apps easily. That's OK because new software isn't generally impacted by Y2038, but in businesses where there are old, legacy systems run by people who have a modern attitude to software ownership, things will fail because those businesses won't see importance of the threat.
> [...] but in businesses where there are old, legacy systems run by people who have a modern attitude to software ownership, things will fail because those businesses won't see importance of the threat.
How common will that be, though? I would expect that "cheap and disposable" software would mean most software in the year 2038 would be recently written, which would mean the programmers would be aware of the impending 32-bit rollover issue.
individual software is more disposable, but the systems themselves still have immense value. the software in the system will be updated or replaced (because it is easier to do so!) if it’s valuable for the system.
Most embedded systems are 32 bit.
Yea both newlib and picolibc use 64 bit time_t now, but that doesn’t stop people from using 32 bit timestamps anyway …
I wonder if 100-200 years into the future there will be some kind of widespread "historical climate change denialism", where the efforts made to combat climate change in the 21st century are called into question because the positive outcome (which was the result of those efforts) appears to retroactively show that there was no problem in the first place.