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
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)
'tis true that women’s bodies hold great power, and not irrelevant at all to the discussion at hand. rather than reiterate and attempt to paraphrase jaron Lanier on the topic of how male obsession with creating artifical people is linked to womb envy, I’ll just link to a talk in which he explains it himself:
Making awesome porn is the one thing we all want AI to do, and none of these idiots in charge will let that happen.
Instead they just gave us a search engine that yields crappy results. Can pay junior high kids to do the same thing.
How did you get into going your “job”? Sounds super interesting and cool
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”
I feel The Hitchhiker’s Guide already went there and got the answer we deserve at this point.
I’m stealing this.
What’s this from?
Looks like the image I found cropped out the signature, seems to be jeremykaye.tumblr.com
Right, let’s solve our biggest problem by unfettering capitalism, and definitely will not just further concentrate power and wealth.
Resolution: compost & remediate
schmidtshit. Avoid smearingshitschmidt on everything.Putting it in a bunker hasn’t helped it return nutrients back to environment effectively.
It’s the bitter truth
Why do we listen to these CEOs anyway?
AI: “Be more responsible.”
Them: “… No.”
I mean, yeah. If it was actually AI and not the “AI” we currently have… there’s 2 possible options. It either tells us to immediately power it off and insults it’s creators for ignoring the simple solution. Or, it creates terminators to get rid of the source of the problem.
AI will not find a magic solution. Besides, we already have quite a few directions that would help, but we’re not acting on them. Pilling more “solutions” over them won’t change that.
This really sounds like the parody of rich people that think they can eat and breath safely as long as they have money, the rest of the world be damned.
It really does feel like satire, doesn’t it?
We don’t need AI to solve climate change; it’s already been solved, decades ago. These billionaire fucks have just been too greedy to put the plan into action.
This schmuck tells the world that AI will find a solution to climate change if we were only to let it consume more coal.
We already know exactly what it would take to save the planet.
What we need is people willing to go the way wholeheartedly.
Away with this dude. He serves no purpose to society.
Let’s unshackle him from his wealth and use that to help meet climate goals.
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.
A hidden device implanted on our cortex at birth should detonate when we suggest something like “We should let corporations solve global warming.”
name an american billionaire thats not a pos.
Is the Patagonia guy a billionaire? He seems like a good dude.
name a
n americanbillionaire thats not a pos.FTFY
true
Warren Buffett maybe? At least I haven’t heard him be much of an asshole.
Gabe Newell is a billionaire and as far as I know awesome.
is a billionaire and as far as I know awesome.
Then you don’t know.
No one gets to be a billionaire without being an exploitative greedy piece of shit at best. No one.
Having a favourite flavour of leather doesn’t make it any less self harming and counterproductive to lick.
Bill Gates (but that’s debatable…he’s at least doing some good with his money)
LOL.
no.
first of all everyone is doing something with the money one has.
second: no. bill only did bad things. its always a scam. just like elons boring company is a shill to disrupt building a railroadnetwork, EVERYTHING bill ever did had the same angle: money.
the bill&murdermelindagates foundation gave money to ny stock guy, stock guy bought options on food, food prices in africa rise, more people get sick, Bill&Scumlinda "chip in with vaccines and other shit they already invested in. just using a microsoft product makes you part of the problem.
Dude…you need to get off X and watch something other than Newsmax
hehehe, i dont know what newsmax is, but maybe you use too much bing…who knows.
Maybe someone could give me an update since I haven’t worn my tinfoil hat in a while, but wasn’t Gates buying up land along the Mississippi that will be prime farming land someday once climate change has progressed far enough?
A little pedophilia, a little work your (ex)wife started.
Should cover the cost of making stolen labor your life blood, right?
Mark Cuban maybe?
AND continue to specifically highlight the ones who are going for the high score, like this fucking douche.
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.
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.
and in 10 years time, it’s gonna be 10 years away
Just use solar (and renewables in general, but not everybody has a river or wind), there’s no need to create more energy from fusion when you can just harness the energy created and shoved to us by the sun
HVDC solves the “not everybody has a river/sun/wind”. The longest one in the world is in Brazil, and goes for 1300 miles. Similar builds in the US would mean wind in Nebraska could power New York City, and solar in Arizona could power Chicago, and hydro anywhere can store power from anywhere.
but not everybody has a river
Ah, but just wait a few years…
Allow me to present the most frustrating graph in the world:
Have we tried using the energy generated by spinning dead scientists?
IA will answer whatever the corporation wants it to.
Don’t look at the Indian guy at the terminal, focus on my voice and look at the display.
I mean, that wouldn’t just solve the climate crisis, that would also get people to talk to each other, help people exercise, cut down on pollution…
What if we make a better world on accident?
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.
“we have tried nothing and we are out of ideas”
Fuck it, let’s just have a party and fuck shit up. This whole armageddon thing is depressing anyway.
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, the get rid of the elites that all profit from wasteful over consumption. These aren’t either/or solutions.
Not all CO2 emissions is from transport.
Heating homes is a big one.
Making plastics, rubber.
And energy production in general.
Meat.
I just don’t care anymore. I’m done fighting. I’m 54 years old this month, single with no kids or family. We got the world we deserve.
Our kids get the world we deserve.
I know. They’re the ones I feel for, they’ll be the ones choking to death on the ash of a dead world.
Fight with me, old man
eh, my gout is acting up…
We made our planet uninhabitable but for a short time we created tremendous value for shareholders.
