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Kevin comments on The Craigslist Revolution: a real-world application of torture vs. dust specks OR How I learned to stop worrying and create one billion dollars out of nothing - Less Wrong
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Comments (219)
You don't care about $1 billion for tuberculosis control? TB may not be an existential risk, but it's still a really big, important problem, and it's one that could easily get a lot worse if universally antibiotic resistant strains start becoming common. If the Dark Lords of the Matrix offered me the choice between "tomorrow someone invents a fusion power plant that actually works, is easily built and maintained, and generates electricity energy at a lower cost than burning fossil fuels does" and "all TB bacteria spontaneously die", it's hard to say which would actually generate more utility.
I would take the fusion plant; an energy technology that is cheaper than fossil fuels in all major ways is basically a license to print money. Most literally it is a license to print money -- you could sell the patent for more than a billion dollars and then cure even more tuberculosis.
Note that I said "someone" - meaning someone other than me - does the inventing. And the alternative is "The TB bacteria immediately becomes extinct - nobody ever gets TB again, and everyone who has it is immediately cured."
Point taken, I misread your scenario.