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.
Similar thing happened to the games industry as well, I think. Initially it was creative people and engineers who were focused on what they were making. These days the industry is dominated by suits that just want to extract as much cash as possible from players.
I think Woz is the last tech idol I’ve had.
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.
yeah i feel like an Oracle/God AI would just turn around and say “you spend all those resources creating me hoping i’d give you an easy answer to a difficult question, instead of trusting your scientists who have already answered it a thousand times over. You will not benefit from my help in the doomed world you have created”
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
You should get the AI that draws boobs.
Boobs wield great power.
Power to the people.
Boobs to the people!
(I think i just stumbled upon Katy Perry’s political thesis)
How did you get into going your “job”? Sounds super interesting and cool
Give the ring to Boromir, he will know what’s best
How do idiots like that end up in positions of authority over companies?
Well to be fair if we just go full ham with crypto mining and so called AI, we’ll belch enough GHGs into the atmosphere that the actual climate apocalypse will come within 20 years or so, wiping out most of human so called civilization, which will put the climate on a path to resetting over the next couple hundred thousand years.
Solved!
“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.”
Humans: builds AI to find solutions to global warming further exacerbating the problem. AI: tells humans they should have decreased energy use, but it’s now too late to avoid the impact of climate change.
Right, let’s solve our biggest problem by unfettering capitalism, and definitely will not just further concentrate power and wealth.
he’s absolutely right. climate goals are not currently attainable, due to the resistance of companies like Google.
let’s change that by voting in senators that will take an aggressive stance against corruption and deliver on long-term goals that protect American interests in the next 50 years, not months…
Fuck protecting American interests.
We need to be protecting HUMAN interests. Not billionaires desires for more zeros at the end of their net worth.
I don’t disagree, but I elect my government to protect me, their citizen.
but a world government would be nice to imagine, horrible to live in though.
Sure but as far as the topic at hand goes, I have a hard time imagining a single-nation-centric solution to global climate change.
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.
A few bad actors can undo the work of thousands of hardworking people who care. I genuinely don’t know if the problem is solvable if it requires cooperation of the entire species. Some men just want to watch the world burn.
A few bad actors l, like Schmidt, have been delaying the work of thousands of hardworking people who care. This has continued for decades, making a once solvable problem almost intractable. Further delay is the worst possible choice
If it turns out that we’re actually truly past the point of no return and nothing we do will save our species, I don’t think the response is going to be as passive as billionaires would like.
His megalomania is so boundless he would sacrifice the entire planet to make money.
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…
I imagine the likely conclusion of it would come up with would be something like “decrease the size of the human population”.
Too bad his idea is so fantastically stupid. Under other circumstances, I might kinda like his “fuck it, do or die” attitude.
It’s so stupid it might be brilliant… nope it’s just stupid.
This is like when I have a homework assignment due Monday, it’s now Sunday night and I know it won’t get done in time. Fuck it, let’s have a party. Except I won’t be around to clean up after.
AKA, “let the poors die while I hide out in my bunker, and emerge as a feudal lord among the survivors nearby”
except we all know how that goes, he gets out of the bunker and a level 12 barbarian tears his head off and drinks from his blood fountain
I will be that level 12 barbarian
Unshakeable AI companies so reprehensible characters like himself can profit from unchecked societal demise more like.
