I think that’s a separate phenomenon. Renewables are often cheaper than fossil fuels, which is great.

But to avoid pollution, we must actually leave fossil fuels in the ground, unused, unburned.

You know what is the big green initiative at fossil fuel companies? Using renewable energy to power fracking. The worst case scenario used to be that we only leave fossil fuels in the ground when the energy required for their extraction exceeds energy obtained by burning them. Now, the range of scenarios has expanded in both directions. We can leave fossil fuels in the ground because it’s cheaper to do renewables. But also we can extract and burn below-energy-breakeven fossil fuels.

We did give up on it. New shiny shit comes along and they need electricity, where do they get it? Converted airplane turbines, even reciprocating ship engines, etc, all running on natural gas. All the green pledge companies just polluting like there’s no tomorrow, quite literally.

Not to mention that if we didn’t give up on global warming, that would have slowed down AI development, giving more time to prevent AI doomsday.

Plus on the would be dooms day the AI would have less computing power available to it, meaning it would take it longer to figure out how to build another datacenter overnight. Plus if it is more distributed there’s greater latency.

The thing about Yudkowsky’s cult is that like any religion it is really all about not actually thinking anything through.

Everyone accuses them of not really believing what they say, because they can’t think straight about anything that they “believe”. To such an extreme extent it comes off as some sort of cynical ploy with a hidden agenda to convert the oxygen in the atmosphere into paperclips.

Also i used to point out that the real “foom” is how we are fucking up the planet after billions years of evolution. Practically in an instant. Like yeah it feels slow to us because we run pretty fast.

But on geological timeframe it really could just as well be their stupid AI dismantling the planet in 6 days (and on the seventh day, resting).

I would argue that the root cause is that they are complete morons who wouldn’t recognize paperclip maximization if it put a gas turbine in their backyard.

They are still trying to prompt inject the robot god into turning us all into paperclips, I see.

I don’t think getting rid of elections would work. Dictatorships do not rely on election rigging alone. That’s just interventionist propaganda (barge in, set up elections, presto, democracy).

Competent dictators don’t act anything like Trump. Once in power they try to obtain support of as wide of a section of the population as possible. There’s no freedom of speech in a dictatorship; the dictator is giving prepared speeches, designed to bolster his support, to unify the nation, etc, not just having fun gloating at half the nation’s expense.

If he actually tries to maintain power despite his relative unpopularity, the consequences will be utterly disastrous.

Ironically, in a videogame someone like Musk would always be at most an NPC, and possibly not even that (just a set of old newspaper clippings / terminal entries in fallout / etc). Yudkowsky would be just a background story for explaining some fucked up cult.

This is because they are, ultimately, uninteresting to simulate - their lives are well documented and devoid of any genuine challenge (they just get things by selection bias rather than any effort - simulating then is like simulating a lottery winner rather than a lottery). They exist to set up the scene for something interesting.

is somewhere between 0 and 100%.

That really pins it down, doesn’t it?

Other thing to add to this is that there’s just one or two people in the train providing service for hundreds of other people or millions of dollars worth of goods. Automating those people away is simply not economical, not even in terms of the headcount replaced vs headcount that has to be hired to maintain the automation software and hardware.

Unless you’re a techbro, who deeply resents labor, someone who would rather hire 10 software engineers than 1 train driver.