[defrost]

If it takes > 100 years and all the energy of tens of billions of tonnes of fossil fuel to put us in a state of extreme peril then yes, it will at least * take another 100+ years and all the energy of tens of billions of tonnes of fossil fuel to reverse out of that position.

If that's your suggested strategy then I would suggest that we can do better by not going there in the first instance.

* Thanks to the arrow of time, the issue of unbreaking a glass, methane release and other factors it very realistically could take more time and energy to get out of the hole we seem intent upon driving into.

> Technology is for solving problems.

It's not 'magic' though and I have little time for green washing or praying to the technology fairy.

[hashxyz]

> I would suggest that we can do better by not going there

The problem is that you are recommending we turn off capitalism, which will have serious consequences that are easier to predict than climate change: we will doom the world’s poor people to lives of certain poverty with no hope of upward mobility.

[kaba0]

Who recommends turning off capitalism?

But un-restricted capitalism is literally the stereotypical paper clip AI. It will seek out maximal profit at every cost. As per the very Adam Smith, it only works well in small, welll-regulated markets. Let the government do its job, and capitalism its own.

[hashxyz]

> Who recommends turning off capitalism

The article is about degrowth.

The paperclip thought experiment is a stupid thought experiment. An AI that had the executive functioning to improve its entire substrate (e.g. rewrite the entire TSMC Nvidia chip and software supply chain) would require the same higher order agency that would stop it from destroying the world to turn it into paperclips. It only seems plausible if you spend all your time disembodied from reality browsing lesswrong.