This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
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)
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
How do idiots like that end up in positions of authority over companies?
The more you can make externalities someone else's problem, the more wealth you can acquire.
It’s the silver spoon, MBA shitlord class. These are the people that have no real talent or personality, and also fail at tackling anything because they have never faced adversity in their lives.
Through nepotism and family money they get these jobs and now we play Indie games that are Chrono Trigger derivatives.
they would just make ais tell stupid things how only way to solve global warming is to give even more money to them, why would same thing from ai be any different. We need to seriously start doing non peaceful protests against this shit or we are going to die if we are lucky or watch the planet wither and always remember how we could have prevented the loss of most animals and plants but couldnt be bothered. ~~Fuck, if some aliens came to earth and wanted to claim it for themselves i would join their side even if the reward was being put to death camp~~, we dont deserve to live on this planet. now i'm getting too dark
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.
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
Unshakeable AI companies so reprehensible characters like himself can profit from unchecked societal demise more like.
"The goals humans made to save the Earth are too hard to reach while resisting any change related to those goals, so we should just get rid of them and let the planet become unhabitable"
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.
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?
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.
