My current hypothesis is:
No references, but can expand on reasoning if needed
Addendum WRT Crimean economic situation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Crimean_Canal, which provided 85% of the peninsula's water supply, was shut down from 2014 to 2022, reducing land under cultivation 10-fold, which had a severe effect of the region's economics
What's extra weird about Nordstream situation is that apparently one of the two NS-2 pipelines survived and can still be put into operation after inspection while a few months earlier (May 2022?) Gazprom announced that half of the natural gas supply earmarked for NS-2 will be redirected to domestic uses.
Perhaps U+1984 or ᦄ-Risk
This should be, in fact, a default hypothesis since enough people outside of the EA bubble will actively want to use AI (perhaps, aligned to them personally instead of wider humanity) for their own competitive advantage without any regard to other people well-being or long-term survival of humanity
So, a pivotal act, with all its implied horrors, seems to be the only realistic option
Economics of nuclear reactors aren't particularly great due to regulatory costs and (at least in most western countries) low build rates/talent shortage. This can be improved by massively scaling nuclear energy up (including training more talent), but there isn't any political will to do that
Somewhat meta: would it not be preferable if more people accepted humanity and human values mortality/transient nature and more attention was directed towards managing the transition to whatever could be next instead of futile attempts to prevent anything that doesn't align with human values from ever existing in this particular light cone? Is Eliezer's strong attachment to human values a potential giant blindspot?
What I meant is self driving *safely* (i.e. at least somewhat safer than humans do currently, including all the edge cases) might be an AGI-complete problem, since:
In contrast to this, if we have precise and reliable enough 3d sensors, we can relegate safety to normal physics-based non-NN controllers and safety programming techniques, which we already know how to work with. Problems with such sensors are currently cost and weather resistance