Driving down costs to shift equilibria. Probably the largest driver of decreased CO₂ emissions has been the emergence of cheap wind and solar power. This illustrates a powerful dynamic: as production scales, costs fall along experience curves (sometimes called Wright’s law), until clean energy becomes the default rather than the alternative. Before this inflection point, decarbonization meant fighting against economic incentives; after it, the incentives pulled in the same direction, and the market did the work of driving further R&D.
Also relevant here is that it broke the need to address the politicization of climate change, and meant that you didn’t need political will anymore once the 2010s and later rolled around for the clean energy transition (assuming you don’t care about animals much).
One of my hopes is that even if the discourse on AI safety degenerates into a politicized mess, that boring technical work will still progress enough via Wright s Law to make at least large parts of AI safety demands be incentivized by markets alone.
Also relevant here is that it broke the need to address the politicization of climate change, and meant that you didn’t need political will anymore once the 2010s and later rolled around for the clean energy transition (assuming you don’t care about animals much).
One of my hopes is that even if the discourse on AI safety degenerates into a politicized mess, that boring technical work will still progress enough via Wright s Law to make at least large parts of AI safety demands be incentivized by markets alone.