I have a very strong opinion here, and I’ll go ahead and out myself (again) as someone who doesn’t consider climate change the greatest threat to civilization. Anyone reading this almost certainly disagrees but please hear me out because I don’t think it matters that much to the argument.

First, I do think climate change is a massive threat, actually I am probably more of a doomer about it than most. Basically I expect nothing of substance to be done about climate change in the next few decades, which being that we’re emitting more carbon than ever is the most critical period so far. Not by any intentional actions of governments, institutions, or very powerful individuals. Not through the power of collective action, this last one because the technology of suppression has advanced quite a bit over the last 100 years, and the actors most responsible for spewing carbon always have the most cutting edge methods of quelling dissent, and improvement of these methods is accelerating. I don’t think it’s controversial to say that revolution is more likely in a country like say Guatemala than in the US, which for now at least running the economic show.

Climate change would take a lot of money and coordination to solve but it’s clearly not intractable and were the western powers to get on board I have no doubt it would happen. Okay then, but green energy is coming, it’s already competitive price wise and will become moreso with building of infrastructure and better technology, perhaps greed will incentivize them? No! Why? Because a fully financialised capitalist economy is designed to always maximize economic output, should green energy ever develop to the point of meeting all our current needs at lower cost the price of oil will drop due to lower demand and as soon as it’s cheaper than green again we start burning as much as possible to make more funko pops, weapons, comically large vehicles, and to drive matrix multiplication engines. Yes there is some cost to production, but oil would have to be much much cheaper than it is now for the profit margin to reach 0, remember that energy giants are still dumping massive amounts of money into researching extraction tech as they also explore alternative energy sources.

Eh, maybe I’m entirely wrong, maybe I’m partially right, in any case we all know things will get bad even if we transitioned to 0 emissions in 5 years, like scary bad, more on that later.

Now to the point where I destroy my credibility: AI. I’ll try to not lose you here by just briefly stating my beliefs in an abstract way: AI is going to get crazy powerful very soon, you ain’t seen nothing yet and you might not until it’s too late because the big firms have all essentially gone dark on what they’re building and how. All the commonly discussed limitations to progress, such as running out of data, data poisoning, are just fluffy nonsense that is either not even really a problem, is a problem that’s partially solved, or is something where there are a thousand obvious ways to try and get around which we just haven’t had to try yet. I can go into more detail but the gist of it is that we’ve gotten to the point we are now without the engineers (alchemists) even trying that hard. As far as architectural improvements to a dense feed forward network, the most basic possible neural network, we have just a handful, they’re clever but not like theory of relativity clever, more will be coming.

What would it mean for AI to get crazy powerful in a capitalist society? No fucking idea but the details don’t matter that much in any scenario I can conceive of. It could kill us outright, could enable effective but human controlled drone armies, it could automate most or all of the economy diminishing collective power of the working class to near 0, it could merely give those in control the tools they need to make continuance of their reign a foregone conclusion, say by automating propaganda, gaslighting most citizens into helplessness, it could and likely will give them powerful tools we haven’t though of yet, or any combination of the above. All of this means we’re fucked, either civilization gone completely or you’d wish it was.

Let’s combine all these doomer outcomes:

1. we all die in the next century from rogue AI
2. via AI advancements in the next century all but the rich either die or become irrelevant to the economy and lose what little power we have left
3. climate change kills a billion or more people in the next century and wreaks havoc on civilization, fascism goes into overdrive or we have a nuclear war
4. biotech or some other technology could actually get scary didn’t even mention that
5. 1, 2, 3, and 4 don’t fully materialize but we are stuck dealing with enough aspects of some or all of them to cause a global catastrophy before the end of the century

What’s the commonality here? Well it’s atrocities the like of which have never been seen and we only have a few decades to figure out how to stop them. Keep in mind what our great civilization has done so far about COVID and climate change, relatively easy problems if we actually tried, under the current system: jack shit. Things aren’t going to get easier to change, the earlier we can act the better.

So I must, most emphatically, advocate for position 1, yes it’s risky but taking our time is moreso, 2 is tempting but given the consequences apathy and inaction are morally inexcusable. Regarding 3, no we can’t be sure disaster is coming but I think a sane analysis will conclude that it’s quite plausible if not very likely, and if you believe that then harm reduction from whatever measures we might have to employ goes out the window, worst case we do short term harm to civilization, harms which we would meet or exceed by doing nothing and we might buy ourselves more time to figure out how to properly change society way a consolation prize.

Now. The time is now. The time was yesterday. The time was early 20th century fuck we were so close. Death to America