Many people claim AI can help us solve climate change, so I decided to ask Google Gemini.
It regurgitated the same points climate advocates have made for for over 40 years:
- Transition to Renewable Energy
- Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions
- Sustainable Agriculture and Land Use
- Climate-Resilient Cities and Infrastructure: Design cities to be more walkable, bikeable, and transit-oriented
- International Cooperation and Policy
So there we have it folks.
If you’ve been waiting for an LLM to give you the list of things we need to do to solve climate change, then you now have the answer as regurgitated by an AI.
Now let’s get on with it.
#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #ChatGPT #ClkmateChange #ClimateCrisis #ChatGPT @fuck_cars
The question you should ask is “how do we get people to give a shit enough to be slightly inconvenienced in order to stop destroying humanity’s future?”.
It’s hard ebough to convince people to eat plant based for a single say, or to offset a single car ride with their bike.
Yet we need the majority of people (and any corporations they run) to make a real effort, when they are too lazy, ignorant, uninterested, unmotivated, unwilling, too entitled, or narcissistic to take action.
@Showroom7561 I respectfully disagree.
If the infrastructure is in place, then the sustainable option becomes the default easiest option, no personal choice or sacrifice needed.
For example: If your local grid is powered by renewables + storage, then no personal choice or sacrifice is needed. It’s the default that comes out of the socket.
It’s only if the grid is powered by gas and coal that personal choice and sacrifices (saving up for solar panels, using less electricity) are needed.
Another example: If you live within walking distance of a modern metro or a frequent bus with dedicated lanes, where services run more than once every 10 mins, then no personal choice or sacrifice is needed. It’s the default option because it’s often faster than getting stuck in traffic and finding parking.
It’s only where services run once every 15 minutes or less that sacrifice is needed.
Same goes for cycling when there’s a good city-wide network of protected bike lanes vs mixed traffic.
Or travelling domestically by train when there’s high speed rail vs no or slow, infrequent rail.
Or walking to the shops when they’re within walking distance of your house vs 30 mins walk away with no good footpaths.
Have the right Infrastructure in place, anf no sacrifice is needed.
All these LLMs should be required to show you the power costs and the CO2 emissions for every response they generate. If “AI” is the latest reason why we’re going to blow right past the 2.5c point, the real costs of using them should be right in every user’s face.
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We’ve known the solutions for decades.
AI isn’t going to do shit about the fact that the real problem is human institutions dragging their feet on the matter because they’d rather not deal with the immediate expenses and downsides of doing something about climate change.
ChatGPT isn’t going to give us a sentence that simply solves the climate crisis (other than “Hey fucks, use less energy”) but AI can absolutely be used to minimize energy use in some real ways by using prediction to control when generators go on and off and disable devices when they aren’t useful.
ChatGPT is pretty fucking dumb and ill-suited to this purpose but ML algorithms have and will continue to be rolled out to try and reduce wasted energy… still, we need more dramatic action to address climate change at this point.
Well, every time we ask questions we waste many liters of water (and energy, which is more heat) when you could just use a search engine to find what scientists said 30 years ago. 😆
The problem is that ChatGPT is not capable of original ideas. When you see AI, you (and the bulk of the population) think Artificial Intelligence, but what you should be thinking is Assumed Intelligence.
If you open up a mobile phone keyboard and tap the next suggested word repeatedly, you’re doing exactly the same as a large language model like ChatGPT, just much slower and with a tiny dataset.
And just like an autopredict keyboard can spout nonsense, so can ChatGPT. It’s euphemistically called hallucinations, but really it’s just grammatically correct gibberish.
@vk6flab @ajsadauskas Back in my days, “artificial intelligence” meant things like equipping a computer with some “quality function” helping to win some sort of game by rating possible future situations. Or it meant applying all sorts of filtering to raw data (e.g. images) to help with pattern recognition (so, that’s a cow on that picture!). So now we’re modelling natural languages by collecting huge amounts of (text) data, which then helps a computer to spit out plausible stuff in natural language form. The term “artificial intelligence” is not wrong, but non-technical people assume a very wrong meaning. 🤷
The major misunderstanding is to mentally draw a trajectory towards what we consider “human intelligence”. That’s entirely not where all of this is heading though, artificial intelligence is a completely different game.
But that said, thanks for this awesome comparison to explain what an LLM *actually* does, I guess that’s a perfect way to explain it to anyone without the theoretical background! 👍
I should add “Debian, Vic 20” :)
@vk6flab In this case, the answers it’s serving up are the statistically most probable sequence of words based on what climate scientists, energy experts, architects, urban planners, meteorologists, geologists, physicists, engineers, chemists, and other researchers have been saying for decades.
I’m personally pessimistic about whether the same words regurgitated by Gemini or ChatGPT will make a difference.
Hopefully it does.
Off topic: 73’s, love the callsign 😁
QSL 🙂
they know how to stop it, they don’t want…
This post can be pickled cause it’s salty as hell!! And I’m here for it!
You know what? You’re right: Put this on the news. AI said it, so finally we know what to do. Let’s get to it. Hell, make it a Blockchain AI or whatever buzzword you need to make people listen to what we know since the 80ies.
