yishan

Or, Sam really was the last key thing restraining AI capabilities from exploding upwards, and the AI just engineered his departure.

Correct, water scarcity is in fact the PRIMARY bottleneck.

The main "innovation" in this solution isn't "we must plant massive forests," it's that clean (solar-powered) desalination is now possible at very large scales, so we are able to provide the volumes of freshwater necessary for large-scale reforestation and conversion of deserts.

Forestry people have known for decades that trees were the best solution to CO2 in the atmosphere, but there wasn't enough forestable land. And while we can reclaim deserts, we couldn't do it at scale unless we irrigate. And we couldn't do it unless we could affordably create a new source of freshwater that wasn't already needed for humans and agriculture.

Now we have it. Now the solution in possible.

I agree and would say the same thing, but slightly less dismissively. :)

The key here is that we're out of time. This coming decade is probably the last one we will have where the problem can be solved at a cost less than 10% of world GDP. If we wait another 10 years, I suspect all solutions will require a significant fraction of global GDP and authoritarian-style interventions.

As a technologist, I'd love a magical new technology. But I'm also an engineer, and I want to execute the most efficient and low-risk solution in the smallest possible timeframe. After taking all factors into account, that's massive reforestation.

If new technologies are developed in the meantime, that's GOOD. Every bit of help that's put into play helps us. It's not a competition, it's a collective race against time, and we can all contribute.

I'm proud to say that one of the authors of this (and the one who apparently was the instigator) was my Operating Systems partner back in college. :D

Hi, I'm the author.

This comment is correct. My intention is not to prioritize tools over thinking about anything else. If you read the essay linked from it, I said "your most talented engineers should be working on your tools." So when I say "highest priority," I mean development priority, i.e. you shouldn't have your best people working on features and your second-tier people doing tool work, like many organizations do.

Hi, I'm the author. Someone alerted me that this showed up on HN, so I figured I should come by to clarify.

I believe my statement might be clear. What I mean by that is "it's [everyone's] job to say no-hire," as opposed to anyone feeling like "well, I'm not sure about this candidate, but I'll let someone else reject them because I don't want to be perceived as mean." One problem with hiring is that everyone must be willing to uphold the standard - if you have too many people who are never willing to be the one to say no-hire, the standard will fall - everyone has to be willing to take the responsibility for saying no.

That said, systemic bias is an orthogonal (and real) issue. Being "not sure" should be applied to "does this candidate measure up" not "is this candidate a lot like me?"

Thanks Gary and Michael for emailing me about the broken links.

Gotcha: It turns out that quoting links using """ (say, if you had previously run a script to do a bunch of search/replaces) works in Safari, which apparently just fixes it for you, but does not work in Firefox (and presumably other browsers).