Well, in the case of a), at least, many of the humans creating it seem to genuinely want more than anything a world where humans are pets watched over by machines of loving grace. And even if that collective intention is warped by market forces into a perverse parody of it, that still seems a net positive: for the rich and powerful to win status games, they need people to have status over, and healthy, well-manicured servants are better for that than homeless people about to die from tuberculosis.

For b), yes, and unfortunately that seems the more likely option to me.

Humans wont determine its interests if its actual AGI. You cant control something smarter than you, its the other way around.

To give an actual argument though: What possible reasons could humans have for caring about the welfare of bees? As it turns out, many.

Their argument is that the problem remains, just with different technology.

And the problem of corporations being too powerful will get only worst if said corporation gets more power via new technology.

The problem of fascists actively creating technology feudal hell for majority will also get worst if those get unique access to powerful technology.

You can fight the economic forces, but you can't win. The moment you stop pushing against them is the moment the economic reality reasserts itself.

Even if one administration was all in on fossil fuel, and fully opposed to renewables? Best it can do is buy fossil fuels some time, in one country only.

In the meanwhile, renewable power is going to get even cheaper - because there are still improvements to be made and economies of scale to be had in renewables. Fossil fuel power not so much. The economic incentives to abandon fossil fuels would only grow over time.

This is the kind of power the right technology has.

Even if you believe that the US government is 100% dominated by fossil fuel interests and everything it does is to ensure their existence and profitability in perpetuity, if solar or renewables became sufficiently economic, those interests (at the behest of their shareholders) would start investing in renewables for the sake of higher profits.

In the long run, Trump changes nothing.

It's not like Trump can to make the learning curve work backwards and make the economics of solar power worse globally, the way it was done to nuclear power. Solar power can already compete with fossil fuel power on price, and it's getting cheaper still.

The economic case for fossil energy is only going to get worse over time. Even a string of anti-fossil-fuel administrations in the US could only delay the renewables for so long before the cost of propping up fossil fuels would become unbearable to the country's economy.

COVID is still around. And so is a lot of the damage that was done by it.

Comparing COVID impact on countries that had strict lockdown and vaccination policies with its impact on the countries that put no effort into fighting COVID at all? The difference is measurable. By all accounts, fighting COVID is something that was worth doing at the time, and good COVID policy saved lives.

The problem is, the difference is measurable, but it's not palpable. There's enough difference for it to show up in statistics, but not enough that you could look out the window and say "hey, we don't have those piles of plagued corpses in the city streets the way they do in Oceania and Eastasia, the lockdown is so worth it".

Everyone could see the restrictions, but few could see what those restrictions were accomplishing. Which has a way of undermining people's trust in the government. Which is a sentiment that lingers to this day in many places.

I really don't think we "solved" COVID as a social/political problem. If tomorrow, some Institute of Virology misplaced another bit of "science that replicates", we wouldn't be much further along than we were in year 2020. Medical technology has advanced, and readiness did get better, but the very same societal issues that made it hard to fight COVID would be back for the round 2 and eager for revenge. We'd be lucky to be neutral on the sum.

How so? Covid was a problem until we had a vaccine. I would describe covid as a good example of where the social/political solutions basically failed.

The vaccine maybe might have played a part in mitigating that issue.

Nope, the fact that people have to work or they starve and society collapses is not about "different values", but real, material production. Actual AGI robots could solve this problem.

> there's not going to be any solution that makes everybody in society happy

Why not?