re: #150 Love-Child of Cassandra and Sisyphus

On the other hand, perhaps those two protestors are onto something. Maybe the Magna Carta is where everything went wrong.

Imagine going back in a time machine and helping King John defeat the noblemen.

The world will then go through a different path up till today, and maybe climate change would be a non-issue in that case.

It’s interesting that nearly all sci-fi universes involve some concept of galactic empire, in which beings with the power to travel through literal wormholes can’t also imagine a life without capitalism.

I’m not convinced that unregulated socialism works any better than unregulated capitalism, but our current system is completely broken. Some people now call it “enshitification” but the basic incentives to maximize profits have always been there. How does a system designed to extract wealth deal with longterm consequences on a global scale? It can’t. There is no mechanism for it beyond regulations. And regulations can be changed if the money flows to people who promise to change them. Capital can just bribe its way out of consequences, so now you have the added incentive to engage in bribery as well as environmental destruction.

At my job, all anyone talks about is using LLMs to solve problems that can be solved using normal computing. Every time I point out how horrible LLMs are for the environment, I get blank stares. As if we should not care about trivial things like this.