[brigadier132]

Are you seriously suggesting humanity would be better off without the combustion engine? Also, presumably an AI powerful enough to kill vast swathes of humanity would be powerful enough to prevent something like climate change.

[ChatGTP]

Yes, I am absolutely suggesting that. Not all engines but petroleum fuelled combustion engines, yes.

The world is going through a mass extinction event because of burning oil and coal and combustion engines have been an absolutely integral part of that ecological disaster. So yes.

Just be real about it? Why do “EV” subsidies exist? To wean us off combustion engines to save the planet.

Combustion engines should’ve been much more carefully regulated and we should’ve had better incentives against their use.

[lannisterstark]

>Yes, I am absolutely suggesting that.

Alright unabomber. What an unhinged statement that is.

Combustion engine that is arguably one of the major causes of reducing poverty everywhere is a bad thing, I tell you hwat!

I love how you people(and it's generally people from developed countries too lol) can't think beyond your own needs and POVs. Yeah man, how dare the poor people in developing and impoverished nations increase their QoL.

[ChatGTP]

I'm not going to get upset about your ignorant statements, but you should be easily able to realize that we could've achieved similar results with electric systems a long time ago.

We could've deployed nuclear a long time ago, wind etc. We could've used and invested further in electric tractors 50 years ago.

You're conflating what I'm saying, I'm not saying technology wasn't helpful, I'm saying the internal combustion engine, sucked and still sucks and that we need to be careful when deploying technology at scale.

It wasn't just the internal combustion engine that has been a problem, oil wars, dictators, lead based fuels, deaths from air pollute, these thing have caused incredible amounts of harm.

Lastly, we're not also out of the woods yet, it's not over, go look at some climate charts and look at the trajectory we're on, the world is getting hotter, faster. Also strip mining the world for lithium and cobalt will also have massive implications for the planet.

I know we like to think we're clever, but we're rarely wise.

[nonbirithm]

For our civilization the time to proliferate electric engines before ICEs is gone, though. I have to wonder if there's something inherit to the properties/efficiency of petroleum combustion that ensures that intelligent civilization will proliferate it first over electric engines.

It sounds like the bottleneck is lack of foresight. Our ancestors were incapable of seeing the end result of ICEs everywhere when they were first used. How is any future civilization supposed to combat this when they aren't handed the correct answer by some forebearer civilization that destroyed itself first? It feels like not only humans but all future intelligent life with access to petroleum would fall into this trap over and over again.

It's as if the only way to avoid the current scenario is to discover all the petroleum and then not touch it for the rest of time. About the only guardrail that could incentivize that behavior in my mind is the blind faith of religion.

[ChatGTP]

It was lobbying, it had little to do with psychology or prehistoric urges or anything like that. Greed of a few mostly.

Read up about the world class tram system in Sydney, bicycle networks in LA and what killed all that. Take a look at all the coal lobbies in Australia. Wars for oil in the Middle East, it just goes on and on.