Last Christmas break, I wrote a detailed briefing on the existential risks to humanity from nuclear weapons.
This year I am starting two more: one on the risks from artificial intelligence, and one on the promises and perils of geoengineering, which I increasingly feel is emerging as our default response to climate change.
I have had a few geoengineering books in my book stacks for years, generally buried under the whaling books in the ‘too depressing to read’ zone. AI I have been learning a lot more about recently, including through Nick Bostrom and Toby Ord’s books and Robert Miles’ incredibly helpful YouTube series (based on Amodei et al’s instructive paper).
Related re: geoengineering:
- We are sliding toward geoengineering
- Planting trees won’t solve climate change
- Open thread: shadow solutions to climate change
- Geoengineering via rock weathering
- CBC documentary on geoengineering
- Paths to geoengineering
- Who would control geoengineering?
- Ocean iron fertilization for geoengineering
- Ken Caldeira on geoengineering as contingency
- Geoengineering with lasers
- Dyson’s carbon eating trees
- Will technology save us?
- Geoengineering: wise to have a fallback option
Related re: AI:
- General artificial intelligences will be aliens
- Combinatorial math and the impossibility of rationality
- Discrimination by artificial intelligence
- Designing stoppable AIs
- Robots in agriculture
- AI + social networks + unscrupulous actors
- Automation and labour
- Ethics and autonomous robots in war
- The plausibility of driverless cars
- Increasingly clever machines
- Automation and the jobs of the future
- Googling the Cyborg
Smog Cloud Silver Lining
https://radiolab.org/podcast/smog-cloud-silver-lining
Summer 2023 was a pretty scary one for the planet. Global temperatures in June and July reached record highs. And over in the North Atlantic Sea, the water temperature spiked to off-the-chart levels. Some people figured that meant we were about to go over the edge—doomsday. In the face of this, Hank Green (a long time environmentalist and science educator behind SciShow, Crash Course, and more), took to social media to put things in context andto keep people focused on what we can do about climate change.
In the process, he came across a couple studies that suggested a reduction in sulfurous smog from cargo ships may have accidentally warmed the waters. And while Hank saw a silver lining around those smog clouds, the story he told—about smog clouds and cooling waters and the problem of geoengineering—took us on a rollercoaster ride of hope and terror. Ultimately, we had to wrestle with the question of what we should be doing about climate change, or what we should even talk about.
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A Messy and Unhinged Introduction to Geoengineering