nuclear power
Article
nuclear power is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between July 27, 2021 and December 01, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “certainly we did it more with nuclear power”; “If we’d gone full-speed-ahead on nuclear power”; “just like with nuclear power”. It most often appears alongside AI, China, thalidomide.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: July 27, 2021
- Last seen: December 01, 2023
Appears In
- Contra Acemoglu On…Oh God, We’re Doing This Again, Aren’t We?
- Kelly Bets On Civilization
- Links For November 2023
Related Pages
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- AI (2 shared issues)
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- China (2 shared issues)
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- thalidomide (2 shared issues)
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- Aaronson (1 shared issues)
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- Abraham Davenport (1 shared issues)
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- Acemoglu (1 shared issues)
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- activists and intellectuals of the 70s and 80s (1 shared issues)
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- AGI (1 shared issues)
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- AI Policy Institute (1 shared issues)
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- Arizona (1 shared issues)
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- Artificial General Intelligence (1 shared issues)
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- Asilomar Conference (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
It could be that we consider all of these questions and decide on more oversight anyway, at least in those few and debatably-numbered countries where the good people are overseeing the bad people rather than vice versa. One might argue we did this a little with electricity; certainly we did it more with nuclear power. Is narrow AI more like the former or the latter? This is a question we’ve faced many times before, and I have no good general answer.
Here’s an example I think about constantly: activists and intellectuals of the 70s and 80s felt absolutely sure that they were doing the right thing to battle nuclear power. At least, I’ve never read about any of them having a smidgen of doubt. Why would they? They were standing against nuclear weapons proliferation, and terrifying meltdowns like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and radioactive waste poisoning the water and soil and causing three-eyed fish. They were saving the world. Of course the greedy nuclear executives, the C. Montgomery Burnses, claimed that their good atom-smashing was different from the bad atom-smashing, but they would say that, wouldn’t they?
We now know that, by tying up nuclear power in endless bureaucracy and driving its cost ever higher, on the principle that if nuclear is economically competitive then it ipso facto hasn’t been made safe enough, what the antinuclear activists were really doing was to force an ever-greater reliance on fossil fuels. They thereby created the conditions for the climate catastrophe of today. They weren’t saving the human future; they were destroying it. Their certainty, in opposing the march of a particular scary-looking technology, was as misplaced as it’s possible to be. Our descendants will suffer the consequences.
Still, I think about this argument a lot. I agree he’s right about nuclear power. When it comes out in a few months, I’ll be reviewing a book that makes this same point about institutional review boards: that our fear of a tiny handful of deaths from unethical science has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths from delaying ethical and life-saving medical progress. The YIMBY movement makes a similar point about housing: we hoped to prevent harm by subjecting all new construction to a host of different reviews - environmental, cultural, equity-related - and instead we caused vast harm by creating an epidemic of homelessness and forcing the middle classes to spend increasingly unaffordable sums on rent. This pattern typifies the modern age; any attempt to restore our rightful utopian flying-car future will have to start with rejecting it as vigorously as possible.
27: Zan Tafakari has a roundup of responses to Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto”; I think the thalidomide objections are bad (the backlash against thalidomide has harmed far more people than thalidomide itself, just like with nuclear power), but maybe there are some useful tidbits in there. Ezra Klein has a response of his own called The Chief Ideologist Of The Silicon Valley Elite Has Some Strange Ideas (I almost phrased that as “the chief ideologist of the Brooklyn elite has a response…”, but there’s no need to sink to their level).