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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   14338 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 5, 2026

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AI risk is nothing like climate change.

Climate change is well understood, it's not going to cause human extinction in the next 500 years, and we have weapons to cheaply mitigate it if we ever wanted to. Climate scientists are calling for a sea level rise of 1 meter by 2100 and a 3% reduction in GDP or something. Its a nothingburger on human timescales.

AI risk is immense. There are many plausible ways in which it could lead to human extinction or irrelevance. We don't know how to align it. And, if something goes wrong, we don't have easy ways to mitigate the damage. (No, we can't just "pull the plug" if it's running our whole economy). Furthermore, the changes are happening over a period of single digit years, not centuries.

No, we can't just "pull the plug" if it's running our whole economy

that's why you stop now and nuke (metaphorically, probably, but i could be convinced otherwise) Silicon Valley and Seattle.

Seattle mentioned!

Another plan would be to attack the source at the root by nuking TSMC or wherever they are making those lithography machines. Problem is, China has parallel technology that would probably catch up within 2-3 years.

This problem would be so much easier to solve if we never let China join the WTO in 2001.

AI risk is nothing like climate change.

I think they are similar in one important respect: Certain people have a very strong incentive to hype and exaggerate them in order to obtain social status, money, and the feeling of being morally and intellectually superior to others. It's a tale literally as old as time.

we have weapons to cheaply mitigate it if we ever wanted to

Huh?

High altitude Sulfate aerosols. All serious cost estimates I've seen come in at <$20 billion / deg C / year of warming averted (and the cheapest options are more in the ~$2-3 billion range, depends if you use existing commercial aircraft as a base or develop a new higher altitude aircraft). Combats the warming part of climate change (which also combats the sea level rise part), there are some other aspects of climate change that would not be ameliorated (ocean acidification, plant growth would be harder to predict but is likely a wash, couple percent less sunlight may have a some effect, but we already see a pretty large opposite effect from CO2 fertilization, and the more politically fraught is that some hard to exactly predict changes in weather / drought patterns would be expected), but it would probably avoid a lot of the potential harm. We have high confidence this would work (see ocean shipping, volcanoes (esp. some larger historic eruptions), etc.) without causing a lot of unrelated problems (again see volcanoes). The main risk is some changes in weather/drought patterns (not that we don't see those with the status quo global warming). Even let's us somewhat target the cooling (limited, but we could vary how much cooling we see in the polar regions (where it's more needed/effective) vs. the world as a whole). Plus and minus is the effect is temporary (half life of a couple of years), that means you can adjust pretty quickly, but it also means if you are doing it to a significant amount and suddenly stop for some reason (war with the AIs?) a lot of built up averted warming could happen very quickly.

I would also like to breathe that air. What reason do we have to believe that this is safe given the tremendous record of health disasters that are only recognized decades after the fact? Sounds like a high-risk solution.

The sulfate aerosols are released in the stratosphere, the whole point is that they tend to stay up there as there is very little mixing with air lower down in the atmosphere which is what allows the whole thing to work. The amount that drifts down (as we can see from the natural experiments with volcanic eruptions) would be barely detectable against background levels (<1 point to the AQI scale), if you live near even a modest sized city you already breath much more of the same compounds from diesel exhaust (and you used to breathe a lot, lot more if you were alive before 2010 when the finally switched to ultra-low-sulfur diesel in the US).

Massive volcanic eruptions have literally the same effect.

To be fair, massive volcanic eruptions also have nasty effects on nearby lungs.

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