Comment by mbgerring
13 hours ago
The only extant “X-risk” is, and always has been, climate change. “AGI” is science fiction, and actually-existing AI is making climate change harder to deal with, by increasing electricity demand on our fossil-fuel-powered grid with no attendant increase in clean generation.
Serious engineers need to stop whatever they’re doing and work on this problem.
Also, if you’re hiring: I’m an expert on the U.S. regulated utility industry, demand management, and solar & battery system design, fabrication and deployment.
To work on this problem check out https://workonclimate.org/ Founded by two ex-Google employees.
From their About: “Work on Climate quickly built the world’s largest and most successful community of its sort – with tens of thousands of members around the globe, thousands of whom have found climate jobs and started companies”.
Not affiliated but I ran into this initiative recently.
Really AI is a drop in the bucket compared to other things. Beef and dairy take up an incredible amount of water, land, and energy but we don't complain about that.
AI could lead to massive savings and improvements in terms of emissions and climate change. AI could possibly help us out of this.
Beef and dairy have no chance of helping us. They'll kill us and the beef nuts will say how they saved 4% of emissions by moving some cows around. Problem solved.
I remember a couple years ago my family was worried about the Amazon burning and I was like "well, you could eat less beef as that's driving a lot of that in Brazil". Turns out they didn't care that much. With how generally hippie my family is it really made me realize how absolutely screwed we are ecologically.
There's a reason bird populations are down 30% in my parents' lifetimes (https://www.audubon.org/press-room/us-bird-populations-conti...) and I don't think my generation is going to do much better.
I'm not sure about AGI as in human level intelligence being sci-fi. We seem rather close. I've never been much of a doomer though re AI X-risk.
AI is also a useful tool that offers a lot of potential to untangle the permitting thickets that make it difficult to build the infrastructure necessary for the energy transition...
The only extant “X-risk” is, and always has been, economic collapse due to loss of energy. “Climate Change” is science fiction.
/s
It amazes me climate change X-riskers scoff at denialists and then do the exact same denialism with AGI. How many leading AI scientists (like climate science) would it take to convince you?
"Our great religion, their primitive superstition"[0]
[0] https://imgur.com/EELDM6m
“AGI” was literally made up by a Harry Potter fan fiction community