Open Asteroid Impact strongly disagrees with this line of thinking. Our theory of change relies on many asteroids filled with precious minerals hitting earth, as mining in space (even LEO) is prohibitively expensive compared to on-ground mining.

While your claims may be true for small asteroids, we strongly believe that scale is all you need. Over time, sufficiently large, and sufficiently many, asteroids can solve the problem of specific asteroids not successfully impacting Earth.
 

It comes from the discussion here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LvKDMWQ3yLG9R3gHw/empiricism-as-anti-epistemology

which also has https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hvz9qjWyv8cLX9JJR/evolution-provides-no-evidence-for-the-sharp-left-turn as a related topic.

As near as I can summarize the arguments, the argument distills to :

 What intelligence in any thinking agent does  :

        A.     Perceive the situation at present.  It will functionally always be unique in the real world.  (it will never exact match to a Q-table entry with a few exceptions like board games)

       B.  Lookup reference classes that are similar to the situation you are in.   

        C.  Use the reference classes that are similar to the situation, and assume the laws of physics will cause a similar outcome now as to then, predict the future outcomes conditional on the agent's actions.  (aka I do nothing, reality will cause outcome 1, I do action A, reality will cause outcome 2...)  (D.  choose the action that predicts the future with the highest EV from the agent's perspective)

This will fail badly when the situation is a black swan.

For example, at one point I sold 80! bitcoins for $10 each because I reasoned that it was similar to fake experimental e-currencies that had been tried in the past.

How you can project the future:

     So when people try to answer questions like 'will there be a recession' and similar, that's how.  You try to find a reference class, or a numerical variable that predicted '15 of the last 10 recessions' and project it will happen when this happens.  

     The argument for "AI won't be that bad" comes to reasoning:

               A.  A piece of software we call a transformers model is kinda like the reference classes "useful software", "useful technology tools", "military applicable technology". 

               B.  You then assume the laws of physics are similar, and assume the other tens of thousands of things that match the above will cause a similar outcome, and there you go, almost 0% AI doom because none of the other technologies risked the doom of humanity (except 1-2).  And also you hit a corollary, we know historically that countries that didn't adopt the latest and most expensive military technology got slaughtered.  Recent examples : Afghanistan invaded by the Soviets, then later the USA.  Iraq hit by the USA twice.  Ukraine.  

And we see the results in Ukraine what even a little bit of better weapons technology donated to their side does on the battlefield, the results are dramatic.  This results in another pro-AI argument, "we didn't really have a choice".

The counterargument:

        The simplest counterargument to above is to say "AI, especially ASI, doesn't match the reference classes of "useful software", "useful technology tools", "military applicable technology".   

    A.  useful software counter: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kSq5qiafd6SqQoJWv/ by @Davidmanheim 

    B.  "useful technology tools" : the argument here is usually that the ASI isn't a tool because it can betray you while a hammer can't.   Also it's smarter than yourself, so you can't really even check it's work or know when it's betraying.

     C.  "military applicable technology" : ditto, you can't trust a weapon that can think for itself or coordinate to betray you

This thread:

The "in joke" is that we all know that slamming an asteroid into the earth and causing a > 1 gigaton explosion of plasma and probably an earthquake (I checked and it's a tiny asteroid to reach 1 gigaton) is something that we know the consequences for.  It really is a bad idea and if we need platinum or iridium or other elements common to asteroids we'll have to process it in place and bring it back the hard way.  

So we're trying to play with the "reference class" to make it seem like a good idea among other purposeful argument faults.  This one is making fun of people saying the asteroid fits the 'reference class' of the one that extincted the dinosaurs and that most doom advocates, unlike yourself, aren't qualified in ML.  

 Mine tries to say that because the reference class data is old, we should get into the business of slamming asteroids and find out the consequences later, and I also make the military applicable tech argument, which is a true argument : if you want to stop people deorbiting asteroids from out past the orbit of Mars, you need space warships and vehicles that can redirect asteroids on an impact course away.  (so the same technology as the bad guys, meaning you cannot afford a 'spacecraft building pause')  

I also made fun of Sam Altman's double dealing.

the asteroid would likely burn up, but perhaps you have a solution for that

Yes, there’s a well known solution: just make the asteroid fast enough, and it will burn less in the atmosphere.

Well, I think Munroe is not thinking big enough here. 

Of course, this might increase global warming in the long run because the impact crater can produce CO2 from both of the global firestorms devastating plant life and the destruction of carbonate rock in the earth mantle, but I think that this can be minimized by choosing a suitable impact location (which was not a concern for Chicxulub) and is partly offset by a decline in fossil fuel use due to indirect effects. Also, all of the tipping point factors in climate change would work to our advantage: larger polar caps reflect more light, more permafrost binds more CO2 and so on. 

At the worst, climate engineering might require periodic impacts on a scale of one per decade, which seems sustainable.