AI doomer/optimist?

[SvennoJ]

haxxiy said:

SvennoJ said:

We're paying now for the industrial revolution with climate change and oil wars verging on WW3. The messy transition is still fully ongoing with the hope now that AI will fix the mess from the industrial revolution. It comes awfully close to sunk cost fallacy, pump more resources into AI in the hope it will solve climate change, food and water shortage. Things that we can already solve without AI, yet capitalism stands in the way. So while I do think AI can certainly help to optimize food, water and combat climate change (put AI to use to speed up Nuclear Fusion research/improvements, solar panel production and transition to hydrogen fuel cell economy) I don't think the current political and economic environment allow for that. I'm afraid in the current climate AI will only accelerate civilizations' downfall. So far it provides a great distraction from tackling actual real problems.

Natural disaster-related deaths and global conflict deaths are both at or near an all-time low, as far back as we can glimpse into the historical record, though. We're talking 90-99% drops in the past 100-200 years.

In that regard, it seems like we got away pretty well with increasing world GDP 100x since the Industrial Revolution...

Damages in USD and the number of displaced people have increased recently, granted, but that's a consequence of a larger human population and more infrastructure and means of transportation for the most part.

38 million deaths from economic sanctions doesn't sound like an all time low!
https://progressive.international/wire/2025-08-02-pi-briefing-no-28-38-million-lives/en/

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/iran-war-may-push-45-million-people-into-acute-hunger-by-june-wfp-says-2026-03-17/
pushing acute hunger tally over it's current all time record

Shit is hitting the fan now. The explosive growth from the industrial revolution is now taking its toll.