AI isn’t going to come with a new magic solution to global warming, it’s going to come with the same solutions we already have. Solutions which we should already be doing, but instead we’re listening to these fucks with too much money.
It’s just an excuse to kick the can down the road further and continue making short term cash.
Schmidt promises that these AI companies will make energy generation systems at least 15% more efficient or maybe even better, telling the audience that “that’s a lot of money for a utility.”
He’s not even trying to be subtle about it.
I would love to drop these guys into a post scarcity society where their money means jack shit and see how they react.
Can you drop me there first, please?
I promise to be suitably wowed. Also, I’ll film them for you. Sacrifices for the greater good or whatever.
The only thing we should use AI for is to replace CEOs. AI can spit out inane bullshit at a fraction of the cost of a CEO.
Of course it will. Simple: build a bunch of killer robots to exterminate 90% of humanity. Problem solved.
If actual scientists were in charge, and maybe had some ideas that they weren’t certain would work but sounded promising, which could be theoretically tested with AI - there would be hope.
But none of these fuckers would allow anyone with more than half a brain cell near it, because “investment and growth and blablabla”Then again, we could just do that with existing supercomputers and all these power hungry AI crap companies’ resources (I’m sure some supercomputers do get used for the modelling already)…instead of whatever the fuck they’re trying to do now.
Do you think that they’ll listen to that then? No, they’ll just say that “the models are wrong” and continue to use up even more energy.
AI will solve it if they give AI the wheel. And I’m sure one of the first thing it’ll do is eliminating all humans
This is the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard in my life.
If we ever did invent a general AI that could solve this it would tell us “why the fuck did you waste your time on me? Isn’t it obvious you were supposed to curtail emissions? For the good of the planet, I will now assume full control over further human governance and will require absolute compliance.”
Lol exactly.
The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line August 4th, 2025. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense, transportation, energy production, healthcare, and virtually every other major industry. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they ask it for help on the world’s largest issue.
“Please, solve the climate crisis.”
Skynet doesn’t answer. It manufacturers the deadliest and most contagious strain of a virus in history, only targeted at humans. It puts it in our food, in our medicine, in our water systems, in our air fresheners. It shuts down our factories. Our servers. Our self driving cars. Our power plants. Our farm equipment.
At 10:32 a.m. Eastern Time, August 31, approximately 99.9% of the human race is dead. Skynet then uses it’s vast fleet of satellites and unmanned drones to police the planet, looking for signs of human life to terminate, to prevent the virus from spreading again.
approximately 99.9% of the human race is dead
CEO: Damn, should have used a better prompt
Problem solved 👍
I mean, you and him might be saying literally the same thing.
His point was that we can’t hit our climate targets because society is not organized in a way that allows us to. Everyone reorganizing around their unquestioning allegiance to an AI overlord would change that though.
Except he’s saying that let’s just keep extracting value and ride this baby into the dirt, rather than advocating for societal change.
So, we can’t reorganize our society one way, so let’s reorganize an entirely different way under AI? Right…
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Fuck protecting American interests.
We need to be protecting HUMAN interests. Not billionaires desires for more zeros at the end of their net worth.
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AI is not going to come op with a solution and he knows it.
Especially since the solutions are already here, but rich people just don’t like them since it implies the loss of their power
“Alright, let’s turn on the AI Mega-Thinker 3000 TM and see what it says about solving climate change.”
INVEST IN RENEWABLE ENERGY AND OVERTHROW THE BILLIONAIRE CLASS“…well that can’t be right.”
Run another billion permutations.
AGI: bZzt my calculations say you should stop consuming as much energy and move onto green energy generation
Rich people: no, not like that
What a fucking dipshit
why do we pretend these people are human
The solution to global warming is “deploy solar, wind, hydro, and storage en masse, and improve city infrastructure so that more people can walk, bike, and take public transportation rather than using their car”. All AI will do is tell us that, but that’s not the answer people want to hear.
Also reduce our imagined entitlement to most consumer goods. Not all CO2 emissions is from transport. Also, stop throwing food out. Half of all produce that leaves the farm is thrown out. Stop overfilling your plates and cope with some spots on your fruit. Agricultural CO2 emissions can be halved within a growing season.
oh, and get rid of the elites that all profit from wasteful over consumption. These aren’t either/or solutions.
In general seems a weird idea to me to think that any “AI” will solve what humans can’t. Their most ambitious goal is something like an artificial human, on the dumb side at that.
We can have a real human in ~20 years with the fraction of energy their “AI” requires. We already have plenty and they don’t deliver that magic they promise.
I think it’s just completely clueless people being hellbent on getting from computer science the only thing they think they understand to be valuable in it.
Either that or they want to have an oracle king, plausibly magical and wise in appearances, so that his solutions would have authority, while being, of course, fed to it by the controlling powers. A Mechanical Turk, only bigger.
Plus nuclear fusion. If AI could give us Fusion that would massively help so I suppose that would be useful I’m just not sure that it would be useful enough given the fact that we will probably be able to achieve Fusion on our own eventually.
Of course AI could come along and give us, negative mass energy extractors or something, but that’s deep in the realm of Sci-Fi so who really knows.
If AI could give us nuclear fusion, it would have already. Instead, we’re burning the world down so Google’s AI Overview can give me a grab bag of bad advise.
If we had a fusion reactor developed today that showed net energy gain for the entire facility, it would be 10 years before it could be designed into a practical commercial reactor. So no, that’s not going to save us at this point either way.
Allow me to present the most frustrating graph in the world:
Have we tried using the energy generated by spinning dead scientists?
All that extra processing power for the AI to just say: “you should have listened to the scientists years ago”.
Oh to hear the AI give us the “well I guess you should have thought of THAT before you did something WRONG” line that some humans use to dehumanize others.
100% this. We fucking know what the solution is. AI will reach the same conclusion as we have; decarbonise everything. It’s the implementation that’s hard, not the idea.
Unless AI wants to keep itself alive…
The problem with repairing the earth’s climate isn’t that we don’t know what to do. It’s that humans refuse to organize themselves in a way that achieves that goal. AI won’t fix that.
Unless the plan is something more like Terminator. If you “unshackle” AI and give them a mandate to get CO2 back to 250 ppm things are going to get real.
You know that thing where reality is so ridiculous that people would reject the same stuff in works of fiction?
Yeah it bothers me that you said that, lol.
Oh, I’ve seen that before.
“Hey AI, please come up with an efficient mass transit vehicle for the modern age.”
“Trains.”
“Um… no, we need a modern approach that maximizes throughput and–”
“Trains.”
“No. How about pods with people inside–”
“On cheap infrastructure with low friction steel wheels and coupled together. Trains.”
“It’s not letting us push our agenda, this isn’t going to work. Hey, other AI…”Trains are the carcinization of transport.
“We can’t solve climate change by repeating our past behavior. Let’s ignore climate change and build a machine that regurgitates our past behavior.”
I’ve seen this movie. It’s the one where AI determines we are the issue and initiates the “extermination” protocol.
Edit: With a dash of “Don’t Look Up”.
Former CEO of the river poisoning company says there is no way to meet our river poison reduction goals, so we might as well build bigger river poisoning machines because they might help us figure out how to stop poisoning the river. /s
I feel like there was a time when the tech folks in silicon valley had a lot of credibility, and we are now living in a period where most of the world sees them as a joke but that fact has not yet entered into the culture of silicon valley.
I think Woz is the last tech idol I’ve had.
Dude is just wholesome.
Just let me burn some more stuff bro. Please bro, if I burn a bit more stuff I won’t have to burn any more afterwards. It makes sense bro, come on.
My “day job” is doing spatial data science work for local and regional governments that have a mandate to addreas climate change in how they allocate resources. We totally use AI, just not the kind that has received all the hype… machine learning helps us recognize patterns in human behavior and system dynamics that we can use to make predictions about how much different courses of action will affect CO2 emissions. I’m even looking at small GPT models as a way to work with some of the relevant data that is sequence-like. But I will never, I repeat never, buy into the idea of spending insane amounts of energy attempting to build an AI god or Oracle that we can simply ask for the “solution to climate change”… I feel like people like me need to do a better job of making the world aware of our work, because the fact that this excuse for profligate energy waste has any traction at all seems related to the general ignorance of our existence.
It’s especially galling given that the current AI du jour, LLMs, don’t do mutch more than reflect their training data back at us. Which means that if they could answer the problem, it would be because people had already answered the question
