Technology
Which posts fit here?
Anything that is at least tangentially connected to the technology, social media platforms, informational technologies and tech policy.
Rules
1. English only
Title and associated content has to be in English.
2. Use original link
Post URL should be the original link to the article (even if paywalled) and archived copies left in the body. It allows avoiding duplicate posts when cross-posting.
3. Respectful communication
All communication has to be respectful of differing opinions, viewpoints, and experiences.
4. Inclusivity
Everyone is welcome here regardless of age, body size, visible or invisible disability, ethnicity, sex characteristics, gender identity and expression, education, socio-economic status, nationality, personal appearance, race, caste, color, religion, or sexual identity and orientation.
5. Ad hominem attacks
Any kind of personal attacks are expressly forbidden. If you can't argue your position without attacking a person's character, you already lost the argument.
6. Off-topic tangents
Stay on topic. Keep it relevant.
7. Instance rules may apply
If something is not covered by community rules, but are against lemmy.zip instance rules, they will be enforced.
Companion communities
[email protected]
[email protected]
Icon attribution | Banner attribution
view the rest of the comments
We could witness a collapse of our high tech civilization that effectively ends AI research without necessarily leading to extinction. Think of a global warming supercharged Mad Max post-apocalyptic future. People still survive but the population has crashed and there’s a lot of fighting for survival and scavenging among the ruins of civilization.
There’s gotta be countless other variations on this theme. Global dystopian techno-feudalism perhaps?
Sure, but that's still just a speedbump. In a few hundred or thousand years the civilization would rebound and we'd continue from where we left.
I don’t think there’s any guarantee that civilization would rebound. Fossil fuels were a one-shot deal in the geological history of the planet. For all of our efforts to build a sustainable future with renewable energy, fossil fuels remain critical for a lot of non-energy uses: food production (fertilizers), plastics, steel, and even cements for construction.
Another major issue is critical minerals for building renewable energy infrastructure. These minerals are being mined at an incredible rate, processed and turned into technology (think circuit boards full of components), aging out, and ending up as e-waste. Unfortunately our e-waste recycling infrastructure is a total nightmare involving the shipping of this stuff across the ocean to 3rd world countries where it gets picked over, scavenged for valuables, and the rest turned into toxic landfill.
All of that technology lifecycle creates huge amounts of toxic pollution and consumes huge amounts of fossil fuels (in particular for the mining, processing, and shipping). So in fact without fossil fuels we don’t even know how to build any technology, let alone renewable energy.