I'm sorry, but there is no major decarbonization mystery for AI to solve for us. We have what we need today. This tired argument is just another repackaging of the oldest response to climate action. These people don't want to decarbonize, so they're pretending we don't already know how to do it. - ThreadSky

jlappen1.bsky.social • 139 days ago

I'm sorry, but there is no major decarbonization mystery for AI to solve for us. We have what we need today.

This tired argument is just another repackaging of the oldest response to climate action. These people don't want to decarbonize, so they're pretending we don't already know how to do it.

Reposted from Paris Marx

Eric Schmidt says we’re not going to meet our climate targets, so we must put all our energy into improving AI and hope it solves the problem for us.

He’s part of a growing chorus of tech billionaires openly admitting they’ll sacrifice the climate on the altar of their AI ambitions.

Comments

catebridget.bsky.social•139 days ago

this really is an Underpants Gnomes situation

1. steal electricity and water
2. ?
3. less pollution

robink.bsky.social•139 days ago

Turning it off

hendrikschaefer.bsky.social•137 days ago

The first thing that the AI should identify is that AI needs eliminating because AI massively drives up energy demand.

katharinehayhoe.com•139 days ago

I completely agree

timsull.bsky.social•138 days ago

Just need to cut some rentiers off from their rents.

coretta.bsky.social•138 days ago

The jig is sky high

juliebygraves.bsky.social•139 days ago

Exactly

maranoagirl.bsky.social•139 days ago

We were told by Eunice Newton Foote in 1856, weren't we?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-woman-who-demonstrated-the-greenhouse-effect/

russ.amodernremedy.com•139 days ago

I'm onboard with the circular economy, but circular logic? Not so much.

AI is indeed the answer... to fast-racking our climate crisis.

What about "nutrition labels" that illuminate how much energy is required for every query or generative junk that AI produces?

dreid63.bsky.social•139 days ago

Another tech weirdo

johnrussell40.bsky.social•138 days ago

AI solves climate change for the human race.

(computer voice) "Stop anthropic carbon emissions".

alansloan.bsky.social•138 days ago

We DONT know how to do it. We now have a population of 8 billion most of whom depend on fossil fuels.

https://overshoot.footprintnetwork.org/food-and-fossil-fuels/

nebulousmenace.bsky.social•137 days ago

Are you quite sure about that? Because electrifying "everything" and providing green electricity [ already cheaper than the status quo for at least the first 80%] cuts the problem by a factor of 10 at least.

alansloan.bsky.social•137 days ago

Yes! There was a Soviet Russian propsal to do just that but it would have needed a lot of copper/ aluminium cable or batteries... : https://youtu.be/iWcLBb8QmJs?si=CuOYBlcCarMAPXuB

nebulousmenace.bsky.social•137 days ago

Mm-hmm.

There are people selling batteries at $50/kWh. In 2008 that was $1000/kWh .

When something gets twenty times cheaper, it's essentially a different thing.

alansloan.bsky.social•137 days ago

Yes thats a very interesting development that I've been waiting for for 50 years. Great to see it arrive.

And there are several possible technologies that may take us to the next level .. or perhaps (like Fusion) may be always 20 years in the future.

/ cont

alansloan.bsky.social•137 days ago

All of which avoids (or is being seen as sepatate to) the questions of ecocide (being part of ecology thats us, folks), climate disruptions (bye bye cheap groceries) and AGW (flooding, mass migration, wars).

Oh happy days :-/
Welcome to Coho-s world.

jlappen1.bsky.social•139 days ago

Can AI work out some tough chemical problems? Maybe! Help us better understand land-use change? Maybe! Crack fusion? Maybe! But we do not need to do those things to drastically curtail climate change. And we do not need to solve those problems before starting on all the ones we solved a century ago.

jlappen1.bsky.social•139 days ago

Decades of experts calmly restating the obvious here never seems to stick, so I think it's also worth saying: I am so sick of this shit. These people are not serious, nor are they in good faith - they just don't want to stop using fossil fuels, because that would be expensive for them.

eubanksengineeringresearch.com•137 days ago

Fellow member of the sick-of-their-bullshit club.

benbarclay.bsky.social•139 days ago

I think machine learning could also be useful for power grid management, but that doesn’t avoid the need for increasing clean power generation and limiting consumption as much as possible.

It just helps at the margins - it can’t magically generate clean energy out of nowhere.

kevinjkircher.com•139 days ago

We've been using machine learning for power grid management, in real control rooms, for decades. Large language models do not come close to meeting the stringent safety and reliability requirements of mission-critical operations.

benbarclay.bsky.social•138 days ago

Yes, I mean that I think there are new applications for ML that will become increasingly important and sophisticated for managing demand response, variable renewables, power flow control valves, etc. So if you mean AI = ML, it can be part of the solution.

As you say, LLMs won’t be.

cgeroux.bsky.social•139 days ago

I want to see it put to use combating disinformation, doing PR and marketing for the climate and helping to move the public to action to demand change and hold politicians to account . This is why we are failing. Though AI can't do that alone but it could help.

jlappen1.bsky.social•139 days ago

I generally disagree that artificially-generated communications can weaken disinformation on net, or improve social trust, which is the underlying problem.

cgeroux.bsky.social•139 days ago

Strong communities and trust between members of the public, is definitely needed. But I am not sure if that on its own will be sufficient. They also need to be well informed. You can have a strong community and have them appose solutions.

nbrookus.bsky.social•139 days ago

LLM is very good at repeating misinformation, because it's eating a steady diet of it in the cesspool the internet is becoming.

cgeroux.bsky.social•139 days ago

There was a recent volts episode that talked about a group using ml to identify people who where concerned about the climate and get them to vote. You maybe correct that generated communication might not be a good use of ai..but it maybe useful in other ways.

excitedgiraffe.bsky.social•138 days ago

We’re hearing the same shit in CA— that AI can solve the housing crisis. We don’t need AI to solve housing or climate, we have very clear tools for solving both. We just refuse to use them.

shaunheiser.bsky.social•139 days ago

On its face the idea that AI can help is preposterous when you consider just how destructive AI is to the environment by simply existing at all.

justinbuist.bsky.social•138 days ago

Google is has been a leader in data center designs that are energy efficient for a long time. When they let their DeepMind optimize it further it reduced consumption by 15%. In some cases 50%.

Given that it worked for them I don't consider it preposterous.

justinbuist.bsky.social•138 days ago

It's a decent talk. He goes on at length about reducing carbon output. One segment talks about using solar in Arab countries to run things. Bringing nukes back. A more efficient grid, more efficient data centers, more efficient compute.

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