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Comment by h14h | Hacker News Reader

I'm personally rooting for "business decision" over "turning over a new leaf".

If FOSS support is motivated by a clear profit motive, then it'll be viewed positively by shareholders and stick around no matter who is in charge. If FOSS support comes from "turning over a new leaf", it could be dropped at a moment's notice in response to a leadership change.

IMO we will always see far better FOSS support from the private sector when the time they invest has a positive ROI that is obvious and easy to brag about in a quarterly earnings call.

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Incentives trump feelings for publicly traded companies 99 times out of 100. People constantly anthropomorphize them, but they aren't people (regardless of similarities in the law), and they definitely don't act like people, at least normal ones. At best, you can view them as something like a sociopath. I wouldn't look at a sociopath acting nicer and think "oh, they turned over a new leaf" because they aren't just going to change how their mind works, I'd think "oh, they found a reason to act in a way I like for the time being. I hope it isn't short lived."

I like to call them slow-AI. They are paperclip optimizing AIs. No single component wants the larger outcomes, yet they happen. These slow-AIs are terraforming our planet into a less habitable one in order to make GDP number go up, at any cost.

People changed environment even before these optimizations. I think now it's more a problem of fast enough "catch-up and converge", for example for CO2 : https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?c... - if the rich countries would reduce a bit faster (using better technologies) then those technologies could be used by the others and impact would be reduced.

It would be great if we could engineer our way out of this situation, but we can't. For many years I strongly believed in our cleverness, after all I was clever and in the narrow domain I worked in - tech - cleverness was enough to overcome most issues. So why not human climate change?

In Tom Murphy's words:

> Energy transition aspirations are similar. The goal is powering modernity, not addressing the sixth mass extinction. Sure, it could mitigate the CO2 threat (to modernity), but why does the fox care when its decline ultimately traces primarily to things like deforestation, habitat fragmentation, agricultural runoff, pollution, pesticides, mining, manufacturing, or in short: modernity. Pursuit of a giant energy infrastructure replacement requires tremendous material extraction—directly driving many of these ills—only to then provide the energetic means to keep doing all these same things that abundant evidence warns is a prescription for termination of the community of life.

> It would be great if we could engineer our way out of this situation, but we can't.

I think it would be much more honest to say we don't know so we shouldn't bet everything on one approach.

Humans care about survival and will impact the world. It is exactly what all other animals do, and there is a dynamic equilibrium: too many predators => reduced prey => less predators. I don't think it's fair to think we humans are special. Or should we blame the algae for one of the previous mass extinctions?

I do think it is reasonable to take more care about the environment (co2, pollution, etc.) than we do because we need it in order to live well (not because I just want a nice Earth). I think most people agree with that, and are slowly adapting. Will see if fast enough.

Our viewpoints don't seem that far apart and thanks for the nuanced take. Personally I believe we know that technology can't fix this by definition because the problem is of social, cultural and economic nature. Our lifestyles are woefully incompatible with a 100k year horizon, even a 100 year horizon in many areas. Our perception of wealth depends on never ending growth, our welfare systems depend on never ending growth, our economies depend on never ending growth. It seems implausible to the point of impossibility that our economies can grow forever [1]. Technology is good at reaching goals e.g. going to the moon is unlikely without science and technology. But in this case the problem is the goal itself. Technology won't motivate us to let go of our conveniences.

[1] https://tmurphy.physics.ucsd.edu/papers/limits-econ-final.pd...

The slow AIs are driven by consumer behavior. Paperclip optimizers die pretty quickly without demand for paperclips.

The inputs and the outputs of the AI are always human-facing, so the goals vaguely resemble human values (even if the values are greed).

Corporate propaganda is driven by consumer-blaming.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44335953

What gets to the top of the feed? Organic, rational arguments or the arguments with enough money behind them? Economics explains it, again.

I've said for years that the market itself is the best real-world parallel to skynet, not some AGI or superintelligent machine.

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