The problem with all these “smart people” is that they have failed to answer one vitally important question:

How will computationally hot AI survive on a planet that has tipped over into a full-blown Venus Scenario?

Because if you cannot cool yourself, if the runaway heating has gotten hot enough to start melting lead, there ain’t much an AI can do to survive here.

And yes - just like anything that “moves”, the current speed of climate change has an ”inertia” to it’s nature that normally the planetary ecosystem would act as the “friction” to retard. Normally the biosphere would “migrate” across thousands of kilometers, keeping pace with the climate changes, and sequestering carbon as it went.

But that was previously done on time scales that went from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years. The biosphere had the power to migrate and adapt on those time scales.

But our current changes have happened in only a century, thousands of time faster than the planet has ever seen before, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it speed in geological time. The ecosystem will have no capability to react under these timelines, and will fail to act as any sort of “friction” to the “inertia” of climate warming.

And humanity is still solidly on its “worst case scenario” path, where “business as usual” causes us to continue accelerating the release of CO2e – and this is before the feedback loops that are kicking off in nature (methyl hydrate boiling, permafrost melting, etc.)

So we are still firmly on the path of the +12-16℃ temperatures where heating will no longer be stoppable under any scenario, and the planet will turn into a second Venus, killing all life on it.

But of course, we will be extinct long before that, somewhere around the +4℃ level that will kill off all megafauna (animals over 45kg). And with climate change showing a dramatic acceleration over the last 2-3 years, which projects more warming over the next 10 years than we’ve seen in the last 50, +4℃ could conceivably come as early as the 2040s-2050s, with +8℃ - which will see palm trees and crocodiles at the North Pole - happening before the end of this century.

So I agree with them that having children is a bad thing. I just agree for totally different reasons. Bringing a child into a world that has such a violent civilizational end is the height of selfishness and narcissistic ego. You’re creating a life that will experience only pain and suffering and a brutishly nasty and early end in the second half of their lives. Things might be fine, now, but just wait a decade and compare back… the civilizational and environmental decline by that point won’t be pretty, and will only point towards much worse in the future.