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Comment by jckl | Hacker News Reader

A common theme in technological optimists seems to be a total dismissal of global warming.

I see so many people in tech discuss how interruptive COVID-19 has been on humanity, but they see it as a sort of temporary problem to get over, where once dealt with, they can then go back to thinking about AGI or some other lofty technological goal. In reality, COVID-19 should be seen more as a "taste" of things to come. I don't know why more action, or at least discourse, regarding climate collapse exists in tech communites about this subject. Is it because it isn't as interesting to think about, when compared to working on self-driving cars, VR, human longevity, etc?

Edit: I'm looking at you Lex Fridman and 90% of his guests.

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> A common theme in technological optimists seems to be a total dismissal of global warming.

It seems like the biggest impact a person has on the world is the way they treat people, especially people they don't agree with.

There seem to be three primary options regarding climate change:

1) change your lifestyle

2) make someone else change theirs

3) make better technology

Option two seems to be the default based on average home sizes, commercial flights, food waste from dining out, and iPhone sales.

Technology optimists choose option three.

The outliers choose option one.

the problem with 3 is that often it is more accurately stated something like:

"Assume someone else will develop better technology that will fix the problem."

That's not optimism, it's magical thinking.

A common fallacy of our time is to think that the observed fact that technologies have been developed with massive impact means that we can summon such advances at will in the areas we choose.

It may seem to be magical thinking, but then it goes out into the world and actually delivers magical solutions. Would you like to know how much emissions reduction has come from voluntary impact reduction? Zero. Nothing. The inconsequential fraction of a fraction of people who are willing to significantly inconvenience themselves for others means nothing. Imposing your will upon everyone else to enforce restrictions may sound appealing, but that is never going to happen. So now what?

The people looking for tech solutions will try to think their way out of the problem. Need to reduce CO2? Ok, here is cheap solar and improved battery tech. Horizontal drilling and fracking to deliver cheap natural gas and drive coal out of the market. Modular nuclear and next gen geothermal. Electric cars and smart metering. It is interesting to be sitting in Europe where everyone talks about solutions but accomplish nothing, while tech advancements allowed the US to reduce CO2 emissions to levels last seen almost 30 years ago.

It seems to me that people looking for tech solutions are the only ones making progress on the problem of climate change, and doing so in a way that means they might be able to create substitutes that allow everyone else to continue in oblivious denial without noticing that their climate impact is reducing. I think there is a lot to criticize and object to in tech solutions to these problems, but assuming that any other group is actually going to solve the problem seems to deny reality.

By your response I don’t think I was clear; there is nothing wrong with looking for technical solution - far from it.

The magical thinking is assuming we will find them on our desired timeline, or at all. Technologist (and I'm guilty here too) often like to thing of the technology steering but often it's policy work.

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