More plausible model for why in present day so many are overweight:
--cheap calories that taste good widely available with very low effort to obtain
--tasty food is, other things equal, an easy exploit to reward / motivation loops, so it tends to get used in exactly this way which results in excess calorie consumption and of course this is habit forming. there is probably also a lower threshold to “get into” food vs something else in this class like drugs since eating is already universal and not taboo or otherwise particularly regulated.
--fewer obligatory opportunities for caloric expenditure to balance intake possibly mostly as a result of modern transport and trend toward less need for physical labor in general
Maybe this is off-base, and it may not apply to the lithium hypothesis, but it seems there are a lot of really implausible ideas for why obesity is common which are motivated by a desire to not blame the obese person. Common perceptions of agency might infer that the above model blames the consumer, but the intention is exactly the opposite; since it’s predictable that humans in the above environment will tend to act this way, who can blame them?
Well, there’s a significant probability COVID isn’t a “natural” pandemic, although the story behind that is too complicated without an unambiguous single point of failure which hinders uptake among would-be activists.
If there’s an AI failure will things be any different? There may be numerous framings of what went wrong or what might be addressed to fix it, details sufficient to give real predictive power will probably be complicate and it’s a good bet that however interested “the powers that be” are in GOF, they’re probably much MUCH more interested in AI development. So there can be even more resources to spin the story in favor of forestalling any pressure that might build to regulate.
Nuclear regulation also might not be a good example of a disaster forcing meaningful regulation because the real pressure was against military use of nuclear power and that seems to have enjoyed general immunity against real regulation. So it’s more like if an AI incident results in the general public being banned from buying GPUs or something while myriad AI labs still churn toward AGI.