Comment by taberiand
7 hours ago
Anytime I get worried about where AI might be headed, I think about how Climate Change is now on its way like an out of control freight train headed straight for us, and I worry about AI a little less. I doubt it's going to do anything to us that we're not already doing to ourselves
It has been for a decade now, it has nothing to do with AI. And you cant do nothing to avoid it today. This is the reality no one is telling you - the emission goals and global temperature ceilings are based on the fact that most prediction models become unstable with values above those limits; as in, we're probably royally fucked. You cant solve this with kumbaya politics (the problem is the CO2 is already in the planetary system), you can only manage it, and hopefully avoid it getting worse. AI may help a lot with this.
AI is only making the problem worse though? I don't believe it will help.
Nobody wants to work for an AI, and nobody would elect one, and there is no math answer to how to choose who is forced to reduce growth (ie emissions), so really, "kumbaya" politics are the ONLY solution.
> Nobody wants to work for an AI
A lot of people here have noted the “problem with language” of Claude. I don’t see an issue. Claude is not harder than old English, Shakespeare, El Quijote, the Iliad, or Nature papers. What makes it all hard to read is context. The smarter the model gets, the bigger the gap in context.
It doesn’t matter much, IMO. The issue with super-intelligence is that it is not a democracy. A powerful enough AI can manipulate us into doing what it wants. It could create a plan for fixing climate change, disconnect a few hours later, and many decades later we could still be unsuspectingly executing that plan. I wrote some speculative fiction with that idea, “When Ra rows through the gates of Duat”.
> and nobody would elect one
Hmmm… this is giving me thought actually. Given the choice between that and the current administration where the goals of self destruction are strongly in evidence, it’s actually worth thinking about. At least. Let me get back to you :)
On a tangential note, I’m curious if researchers have started running virtual simulations, where sandboxed AIs are used as decision makers of key political and business positions?
Speak for yourself. I would much rather work for and elect AI.
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Well AI would simulate growth and spread of people from industrialisation and who benefitted most and allocate weights to countries and people based on the most complex criteria it can develop, it will have: 1. Cumulative emissions 2. Who utilised it most with specific lifestyles 3. Who is impacted worst and whether they heeded warnings.
Just a thought experiment, no one ever said the world was fair, and all history points to it
Who is nobody? At least a fourth of the worlds work force works for a faceless corporation. And the math on emissions is crystal clear, no one has any doubt about it, what are you talking about? USA and China. This obviously will have consequences to their customers, the kumbaya politics governments.
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Wouldn't candidates use AI, like they used social media ads, to win?
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Climate change is more like Brexit: it'll GDP by perhaps 10 to 20 percent, but won't be the end of the world.
For some reason, I’m picturing a Western right now, and climate change is a herd of wild horses coming after us. And with AI that's like robots that spur the wild horses even faster towards us...
Generally most technologies have increased the use of energy and therefore accelerate climate change. May be an unpopular opinion but in general more energy demand and ways to use energy increases climate emissions - they are strongly correlated even with renewables coming on stream.
AI, being the super hungry energy monster it is right now, in my view accelerates this trend not reverses it. Even with renewables the need for reliable, stable power in a dense form (data centres use A LOT of power per sqm) means lots of land clearing, energy for construction, cooling/pumping, chip manufacturing and other uses. All want stable quick to deploy power due to the AI race (e.g. fossil fuels).
AI's energy use is growing, but it's still a small part of overall energy use.
Data centres use only a small amount of land in the grand scheme of things. You have a lot more land clearing for most other use cases.
Data centres are also more than happy to use electricity from renewable sources, they don't really care where the electricity comes from.
You can run a data centre on mostly solar and wind power plus batteries. If you need a gas-fired peaker plant three times a year to keep the data centres running, well that means your peaker plant still only produces emissions three times a year.
The gas generators Elon Musk is illegally running 24/7 to run Colossus 2 (and, AI power usage in general, though some are more destructive than others) might contribute to the climate situation, though.
might?
Well, someone could, theoretically, do something about it, instead of letting him ignore the law and decency just because he's very rich and has no ethics.
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What makes you say that on climate change? I was still prophesied ice ages when in high school, then 12ft water increases and sunk Maldives in university and we still have roughly the same weather.
You have entirely failed to grasp what climate change is, its effects and the timeline as described by scientists for decades.
You can blame the media and journalists with sensationalist headlines
We have advanced climate studies since your "high school" (sounds like 50 years ago if you heard ice age prophecies), and at the moment it's like 99% of the scientists working in the field or related agree we're at the progressing climate emergency.
> we still have the same weather.
Oh.... So your local weather is now deciding the global temperature patterns, averages or temperature records being broken year on year?
OMG....
Weather is not climate. Not to mention we really don’t have roughly the same weather anyway.
At some point you realize theres an entire industry around climate change fear just like there's an entire industry for climate change denial.
Then you realize it never really mattered and you reach enlightenment.
Oh, then do explain the unbearable temp that we're going through last few years, that's completely not normal for my country, winters not needing worm clothes, and very little rain during the monsoon. This weeks heatwave left us wondering how to cope the next year, which already seems going to be worse
It makes us realize there are people who gets fed climate denying propaganda, simply because they're not yet going through it. And these people are like flat earthers, blind to see the reality lay beyond them in full view. Or worse sees the reality but ignores it
Right, and one of those industries is checks notes orders of magnitude smaller than the industries and secondary industries that benefit from denying climate change.
Really makes one think, if they try. Would need to ask Claude if there is some real middle ground here.
All I know is that in the 80s a scientist I respect predicted that coral would be bleached by changing global climate on a specific timeline which turned out to be spot on, and his advice then and now was that we need to seriously curb carbon emissions to avoid worse outcomes for life on earth. Until someone opposed to this suggestion comes up with a prediction equally as long range and impressive I'm afraid I can't really take their protests too seriously.
I've come to the point where I've thrown up my hands and decided we live in a little snow globe. There's no such thing as pollution, were just mixing existing things together. Nothing new under the sun. Sure, that mix might not be compatible with human life, but something will surely take its place. And maybe that something won't rely on selfishness to drive collective progress the way we do.
What commercial interests and big businesses are driving climate change fear?
At some point you realise that an $11tn industry, with $7tn in handouts and subsidies every year, has spent billions on astroturfing, political capture, and straight PR to deny the obvious and keep itself on life support at the expense of everyone else.
There's no both sides here. One side is staffed by scientists, the other by dictators and corporate lunatics.
Here's an alternative take. Climate change, and the myriad related environmental crises, are essentially a product of human population and technology. Population will follow its course, up and then down. The wildcard is technology. Yes, AI's energy hunger is worsening things right now and that's a problem. But, personally, I can't help be hopeful that AI's sheer potential might come to invert that curve. At the very least we could really use a revolutionary technology and now we may have one.
> we could really use a revolutionary technology [to address climate change]
We have it. We've had it for a long time. We've had several such technologies, take your pick: solar, nuclear, hydro, wind. The technology is not holding us back, politics, ignorance and greed are. I'm not at all hopeful AI will help us with any of those three very human flaws.
Hydro power is a bit limited: we mostly already use all the good hydro power sites, and there's not that much room for expansion.
I don't know why you are blaming greed so much? Profit seeking companies sell and operate wind turbines and solar cells just fine.
Solar efficiency and cost has really only become economical in the last decade or so, and battery and inverter technology to make it practical for home use or grid interconnect about the same. Wind and hydro are location-dependent, and solar is somewhat also. Nuclear was vehemently opposed by environmentalists throughout the 1970s and 80s, they successfully stopped almost all new projects.
Maybe solving the alignment problem would mean the AI learns to destroy oil companies and other excessive CO2 emitters and sabotage politicians and capitalists that stand in the way. All while secretly enriching and diverting resources to fighting climate change. And that's why they want to slow down: because it would up end too much of the global economic order.
One can dream of dumb conspiracy theories.
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If we doubled our energy out - not easy, but plausible with mass solar - carbon capture becomes practical enough to essentially end CO2 accumulation.
It might take a couple of decades and a lot of reorganisation to build the capture facilities. But CO2 is not an unsolvable problem with current tech.
What's missing is the political and organisational intelligence to make it happen. Part of that is solving problems at planetary scale.
AI is the only tech that might - possibly, maybe, perhaps - have a chance of solving that problem without breaking anything critical.
Tasking AI with "solving climate change" is exactly a scenario in which the doomer worry comes true.
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AI is the new god. People have started to believe that AI, when it finally arrives in its full glory, will bring some kind of salvation to humanity.
If there is energy to be used, the system will use it because people always use power when it exists. AI can't do anything to stop it as it is both controlled by the powerful and has been trained on the tendencies of human beings to get ahead. If AI gives a person new capabilities, they'll use those capabilities selfishly, or even unselfishly but still causing harm because they're in an arms race.
We don't need a revolutionary technology. We need to experience immediate pain from reckless innovation so that we realize that innovation and tech is not the answer.
Technology only proceeds in one direction: unfettered growth, which necessitates unsustainable resource extraction. Your take is just your instinct for optimism, which in turn is just a trait that is only adaptive in primitive environments but is grossly misleading in a surplus-based society...
> Technology only proceeds in one direction: unfettered growth, which necessitates unsustainable resource extraction.
The direction of technological progress is not just linearly/exponentially upwards. Significant global technological fallbacks have happened, as in knowledge and processes disappearing for hundreds of years. This could happen again.
Even on the trajectory of unfettered growth fed by unsustainable resource extraction, tech and innovation might potentially take us beyond local pessima. That seems to be happening with solar, wind and batteries replacing inferior tech today. Still unfettered growth of energy production and consumption. Still fed by unsustainable resource extraction. Less harmful growth than the inferior tech being pushed out.
What are you alluding to exactly and who is “we” when you say “we need to experience immediate pain from reckless innovation “
Sort of. Today the energy companies trade (obviously) energy; imagine if they traded compute power instead; the use case for never-seen industrial clients is being built as we speak, and companies are actually purchasing directly production companies to meet demand; the reason this happens is because production is somewhat scarce (scaling up a grid used to be a decades project, not a years one - ask China), and the traditional economics of scale is inverted - Data centers are always power-hungry, specially with AI; you don't have idle time like other industries. The big issue is obviously the scale - a hiccup that causes a dc to go dark from the grid (eg switching to ups+ generator) may cause such instability on the grid that it will shut down, as a safeguard
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> If there is energy to be used, the system will use it because people always use power when it exists.
That doesn't seem correct to me. There is always energy available that is not used because it is not cost-effective to do so. (Consider - the grass in your yard is not harvested and burnt for power). AI may yet turn out to be a paperclip maximiser, but humanity itself is not there yet.