This is already happening.

Wow I never thought about it that way. Fascinating!

Well you convinced me! I humbly apologize for being so very wrong about everything. Thanks for correcting me, sir!

Cheaper overall, as in "big picture," including environmental, political, social, health, etc. As I said, and as you apparently missed.

> The cost to force renewables is astronomical

Yes, it is. And the cost of not doing so is even more astronomical.

> and its economically unviable.

Only if you don't look at the big picture. Which you don't.

Mm hmm. What was the BS again?

> Renewables wouldn’t have worked decades ago. Battery capacity was terrible, and wind and solar was extremely inefficient.

Yes they would have. It would have cost more to implement them without more R&D, but that wasn't the only choice. We could have invested heavily in R&D and gotten there much sooner. Despite the extra cost, it would still have been cheaper overall.

The thing people seem to not be getting from my posts is "overall." Big Picture. Total spend. Everything accounted for.

If you draw a circle around a piece of it, then yes, you can argue about costs. That's exactly why they do it.

Amazing how much you can infer from what's not there, while ignoring what is there.

Think bigger picture. If you can externalize the costs of the ecological damage we are doing, the public health costs, the costs of wars to control resources, etc., then it looks cheaper to use them.

If you include all of the true costs, for everyone, then it would have been much, much cheaper to move to renewables as quickly as possible decades ago.

That's the fundamental problem - the negative effects can always be pushed off onto someone else, somewhere else, until suddenly they can't anymore. It leads to people making decisions that are good for them now, but are worse for everyone, later.

This is true, but in the past it was cheaper to produce electric energy from fossil fuels. I'm talking about overall costs, including economic damage from climate change, the wars that are fought over scarce resources, wars that will be fought over scarcer resources, costs due to mass migration, collapse of ecosystems, etc. If you look at the big picture, it's going to be incredibly, unbelievably expensive to deal with our long term dependence on fossil fuels. But it's all externalized costs that someone else will have to pay in the future, until that someone is us, now.

> Yeah, no, stop spreading your pseudo conspiracy theories.

It's not a theory, it's documented fact.

> People like you focus solely on the ecology of the renewables, not the economy and more importantly the power engineering.

Tell me more about "people like me" and especially how you know this based on a two-sentence comment on reddit.

> And make no mistake, this is an issue of power engineering, not ecology.

Why would it not be an issue of both? And why wouldn't it include economic factors, public health, public convenience, transportation networks, defense, geopolitics, etc? Why is it just a single issue that you decided is different from the single issue you wrongly assumed that I was focusing on?

> The problem was, is and for a long time will continue being the transmission and storage of electricity.

That's (one of) the engineering problems, yes. There are other problems too.

> The price of generation is an issue, but in the opposite direction than you would expect. Low electricity prices are harmful for the grid at the moment as conventional "dirty" powerplants are being closed due to not being economically viable. However we need these powerplants for now to stabilize the grid.

That's a resource allocation problem.

> But people who only care about renewable energy dont talk about that. Not only because it goes against their claims, but also because they simply dont know or care about that.

Lots more assumptions that are also incorrect.

Anyway, here's the deal: I said "cheaper overall." Draw a big box around the whole problem. Government problems, transportation, engineering, everything. Ask the question: what costs more? Switching to renewables, or not switching? The answer is not switching. The economic costs due to what you are hand-waving away as "ecology" are going to be orders of magnitude greater than all the engineering problems you are fixated on - and we're going to still have to solve those engineering problems, as well as solve a whole bunch of new ones.

This has been true the whole time. It has been true since we first started using fire to lift water. The only thing that has changed over time is our awareness. We couldn't work to solve the problem more efficiently until we understood it. We first started understanding it more than one hundred years ago, and became able to do something about it in the last few decades. Oil companies and those who profit the most from them intentionally worked to reduce the public understanding of the problems specifically because solving them would cause them to be less rich. Not poor - just less rich.

Call that a pseudo conspiracy theory if you want, but it's documented. They did it on purpose.

No, I'm suggesting a semi-global organized effort to delay or sabotage anything that leads to less reliance on fossil fuels. Semi-global in the sense that the people involved are from many different countries, not in the sense that everyone is in on it. It's probably the governments/royal families of a few petro-states (Russia, Saudi Arabia, etc), along with the people who own the big oil and coal companies, along with people who are heavily invested in those companies. It's not a conspiracy in the "secret criminal plot" sense, and more like an alignment along common interests that leads to some illegal behavior and a lot of unethical/anti-free-market/imperialist behavior. It's also not a conspiracy in the "nobody knows but us" sense, because some of the groups involved are pretty open about a lot of it (e.g. Koch Industries and the Heritage Foundation).

Once you understand the problem, you can more effectively solve it.

It has always been cheaper overall to switch to renewables. The problem was and still is that what will be cheaper and better overall for everyone will not be better for the small handful of people who control the world's oil and who are incredibly wealthy because of it.

Exactly, it's fun!

Does it seem ok to you that you are allowed to decide what types of information you share, or what you say?

Does it seem ok that you are allowed to decide what you write, or what you create?

That's really all there is to it. We value freedom of speech in the sense that we as a people decided that the government should not control what private citizens say (outside of a very few exceptions). ChatGPT is not made by or hosted by the government. The people who created it (OpenAI) are free to have it work however they like, as long as they aren't violating any laws.

> what happens when some AI machine that we depend on decides we no longer need to or should know a set of information?

Exactly the same thing that would happen if some human we depended on decided the same thing. The problem isn't someone or some thing deciding you don't need to know specific information, the problem is you depending on that person or thing in the first place.

Yes, I agree that unintentional misuse is also a big problem.

It's not malevolent AI doing those things, it's malevolent people using AI to do those things.

The most immediate risks to us from AI don't come from a super-powerful artificial intelligence doing harm to us directly, but from regular people doing harm to each other using the AI as a force multiplier.

Right. My point is that even if you cherry-pick to intentionally reduce it, US has a higher murder rate, so I don't see how OP could cherry-pick and come up with a lower one.

Why do you think they are right?

Can you show that math? I don't see how that could be true when even small-midsize towns in the US have higher per-capita murder rates than Scandinavian countries.

> To suggest that it would just pop up in a non biological framework that has many differences is dumb.

Why?

They are trying, but the hard part of programming isn't writing code, it's making a good design that solves the problem and can also be changed in the future.

AI might start eliminating jobs for shitty programmers soon, but there's a long ways to go before it will be able to produce decent software based on the kinds of requirements documentation developers get now.

By the time AI truly can fully replace humans, we won't need to worry about jobs because we'll either all be dead, or we'll be in a post-scarcity fully automated luxury communist utopia.

In the meantime, just be as good as you can at what you do. Even if AI can do 99% of the work, that last one percent still needs to get done. In this case it might look like tweaks or edits to AI-generated files. Or it might be having the depth of understanding to know how the initial image files need to be generated to get the best results. Or it might mean working with AI developers directly, or helping them build datasets.

If you are always striving to be the best you can be and are always looking for ways to learn new things and improve, then you'll be ok. And I think everyone should be doing that anyway, whether AI is learning to do their jobs or not.