We invented effectively unlimited clean energy in 1952. Within 20 years, we had basically given up on it. Works in Progress founder @bswud explains why the same thing could happen even in a world with AGI: "Example one is nuclear power. According to me, the best technology we ever invented before AI. In 1952, we invented a completely clean, massively scalable, effectively unlimited electricity source. And we basically gave up on it completely since then." "The other example is the Ottomans. There's a lot of historical debate on whether the Ottoman Empire literally banned the printing press. It turns out maybe there were a small number of Jewish and Greek language publications in Istanbul in the 1600s and 1700s." "But de facto, the Ottoman Empire banned the printing press, and there were hundreds of years where the Ottoman Empire didn't print anything. That kind of society beats technology thing could just happen." "That infrastructure is almost always constrained at some point by some social decision we make, whether through a law, through how property rights are done, through an institution, through a government decision, through planning policy." "I doubt we're gonna get out of a world where that stuff matters. So it might just be that the most efficient bottleneck to lift actually is changing laws." @WorksInProgMag @stripe