It seems like the traditional way to develop good judgement is by getting experience with hands-on coding. If that is all automated, how will people get the experience to have good judgement? Will fewer people get the experiences necessary to have good judgement?
So long as they have coal power plants, and need the electricity unless it get prohibitively expensive, they will just mine more coal. The way to reduce emissions is to replace high-emission infrastructure.
There are about 37 billion tons of CO2 emissions per year. If you could get the price down to $100/ton, you can get the world net zero for $3.7t/year. US GDP is 25 trillion/year. World GPD is about 96.5 trillion. So, it would cost about 3.8% of world GDP per year. World global military is about $2.2t/year, so it would be higher than global military expenditure, but somewhat theoretically possible. If you substantially reduced emissions, it might be feasible to use carbon capture for the rest.
The article provides no historical context. Startups are risky and fail all the time. Are more startups than normal failing? How many startups can cut back and survive without more funding?
Self-driving cars haven't really failed. It looks like Cruise and Waymo are about to get permissions to operate 24/7 in SF.
I think the greater issue is that it is difficult to assess time-to-market. You to asses both what is useful, and how long it might take to build. Some things are just gonna need a lot R&D to work. AI-hype makes people underestimate how difficult it is to actually get things to work.
While a mortal computer could work for some stuff, how are you going to train it? It seems like each computer would need to be trained on a large training set, which is going to be slow. If the computers are the same, then it seems like it is going to make it a lot faster to upload a trained model.
Those things may require government investment, but if there is going to be a lot of investment in those things then it becomes worth it to figure out how to do those things more efficiently. Startups can innovate on the technology for upgrading the grid, or methods of financing it.
If there are going to big investments in nuclear, then it'd make sense to invest in R&D to improve nuclear power. The same goes for any other renewable energy technology.