Mostly I'll just endorse what GameboyRMH said, because their response was right on. You've never lived in a country without strong worker protections, and you imagine the conditions in your country would be the same without them. They wouldn't.

I do need to specifically reply to one thing you said:

That is false. At least in the US, wages have been stagnant for decades. From a report by the Pew Research Center:

In practice, "let workers and employers sort it out" means, "let employers dictate whatever terms they want." That's especially true in this case. If new technology lets them get more work out of fewer employees, then employers have all the leverage and workers have none. Cutting workers is what the employers want to do anyway. Workers are left desperate for work. They either accept whatever terms the employers dictate, or they starve.

You could have made the same argument against almost any worker protection: minimum wage, standard work hours, safe working conditions, etc. "Why would I (which really means society) get involved in you (meaning all workers) negotiating your wage, work hours, working conditions, etc.?" The answer is the same in each case: if society doesn't get involved and set rules, you end up with a really bad result where a few people profit and most people suffer. That's not hypothetical. Every worker protection that exists today only exists because in the past, employers abused their employees and laws were needed to end the abuse.

A "free" labor market without laws leads to a bad result. Laws improve the result. That's the simple reason for them.

Yes, that's exactly the problem. This is really an act of desperation. If bleachings were isolated events, we could plant new corals to help them recover. But they're rapidly getting more severe and more frequent. Before long, any new corals we plant will just die.

You pretend to believe in climate change, then deny many of the most basic facts about it. What we're witnessing now is not a normal, cyclical behavior. It's an unprecedented event that's rapidly getting worse. From an article from the UN Environment Programme:

You blatantly misrepresent the facts, claiming that if a coral recovers from a bleaching event it somehow proves the event wasn't caused by climate change, and mock the people who say otherwise for "screaming like their hair is on fire." And then you wonder why people accuse you of denialism.

I've worked on projects like that, things that were first written by amateurs and then they thought they could bring in professionals to clean it up and turn it into something robust. Years into the project, they were still dealing with the consequences of the bad original design. You can't take a mess and retrofit a coherent architecture into it. It's almost always better to start over, writing something that's properly designed from the beginning.

This is a classical example of disruption from a technology transition. The incumbents treat the new technology cautiously because they don't want to cannibalize their existing products. They get pushed aside by new companies that don't have that concern.

China saw that EVs were the future and embraced them. The western car companies were making lots of money from their conventional cars, so they tried to keep that going and argued people didn't really want EVs. Guess which strategy will be better in the long run?

Is your goal only to reward whoever makes the most popular product? Or do you care whether the product destroys the planet?

I don't understand what position you're trying to argue. Burning fossil fuels is literally destroying the planet. If you choose to drive an ICE, then you personally are harming the entire human race. Yet you don't seem to see that as a problem, and say governments shouldn't interfere with what people want to do? That not "picking who makes a profit" is more important than preserving the future of humanity?

Seriously?

There is no credible path to stopping climate change that doesn't replace nearly all ICE vehicles with EVs. To start with the engines are far less efficient, roughly 3x less. Then there's the inefficiency of manufacturing chemical fuel, which loses around another 2x. It's just not realistic.

In addition, the total global capacity for manufacturing gasoline from renewable energy is currently zero, or so close to zero as to be effectively the same. Even if we could somehow produce so much clean energy that we didn't care about throwing away 5/6 of it, there's still no way we could produce enough to meet global demand for many years.

Sea level rose by 5.9 mm last year. The number you quoted was the average for 2013-2022, which is already out of date. It's changing that fast.

Sea level rise also varies by location. The east and gulf coasts of the US are one of the places where it's rising much faster than average. If the average global sea level rises by 2.5 feet, that would likely mean at least four feet in the southeast, consistent with what the article says. And the IPCC report is itself already considered out of date, with current estimates being higher than what it predicted.

The argument made in the summary, "If they are promoted... then they are a distraction because to some people they will be a solution to the climate crisis that doesn't require decarbonising," seems to be as much religion as science. I've never seen any hard evidence that it actually happens. The opposite seems to be just as common, people saying, "If you really believed climate change is that bad, you would support geoengineering, so obviously you don't really believe in it."

If someone is going to argue against an entire class of tools, it needs to be based on solid evidence.

Not in this case. It was the largest downward revision ever recorded.

Coming only a month after Trump fired the head of BLS for putting out a jobs report that made him look bad, I think people are justified in being skeptical. It's disgusting that we can't trust government statistics anymore, but it would hardly be the first time he manipulated a government report, replacing facts with lies to promote his agenda. So that's what we now have to expect.

"A free country" means that no one is allowed to do anything the majority doesn't want them to?

Unless you live in Texas, in which case you aren't free to consume what you want. Which is the point of the story.

An expert system is something different. It's a form of AI where the logic is explicitly coded, and is meant to reproduce the logic that a human uses. To create one, you begin by interviewing a human expert, ask them to describe their process for thinking through a problem, and then try to reproduce their process in code.

Most modern AI is based on machine learning, which is a very different approach. No one codes in what the logic should be. You create a generic model that's flexible enough to allow almost any logic. Then you give it a huge library of training data, for example inputs and what the correct output should be for each one, and use an optimizer to adjust the model until it matches the training data.

Expert systems were very popular in the 1980s. They're not used as much today. Machine learning has replaced them in most applications.

Really the distinction you're making is between special purpose and general purpose AI. A simple model that does one thing well is often more useful than a complicated one that does lots of things badly. But companies like OpenAI are obsessed with the goal of "artificial general intelligence", trying to create one huge model that can do anything a human can do.

Is it overly cynical of me to doubt that any job is really promising if it relies on companies caring about ethics?

We've never really had a problem like this before. You compared it to the Manhattan Project, but that was on a totally different scale: organized by just a few countries, lasting just a few years, only involving ~100k people. This problem requires sustained effort by the whole human race over decades. And it turns out humans aren't well suited to deal with problems like that. There's no central authority that can make everyone do it, and any attempt quickly makes people rebel against it. And too many people have their own selfish agendas, and too many people refuse to believe in it just because they don't want to believe, and too many people refuse to make sacrifices for future generations.

So here we are, racing toward destruction.