this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2024
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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

Unshakeable AI companies so reprehensible characters like himself can profit from unchecked societal demise more like.

[–] [email protected] 78 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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..

[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Fuck protecting American interests.

We need to be protecting HUMAN interests. Not billionaires desires for more zeros at the end of their net worth.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 week ago

His megalomania is so boundless he would sacrifice the entire planet to make money.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

Typical republican: “I fucked everything up, but only I can fix it”.

[–] [email protected] 63 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago

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

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

This is "Escalating to de-escalate" with climate change

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

i see a lot of naysaying in the comments and a lot of superstition.

the one thing you all got right is that it will never work in the hands of capitalists. however, that doesn't mean it wouldn't work in the hands of academia.

another thing that i think somebody in this comment section got right is the acceleration of fusion power. it's obvious that fusion power works. we just can't work out the details to make it net positive and scalable. i think those things are possible, and that we need all the help we can get to develop it.

something i don't see people mentioning is how an AI properly trained on human behavior could lead us down a path of sustainability without making us feel like we were forced to. with the right carrots and sticks, you can lead humanity to water and make it drink.

but none of this is possible without abandoning capitalism and unifying the world. we have to move away from nation states and fiat currency. and guess who are the people that stubbornly cling on to these concepts across cultures? conservatives and the religious - these are the two most cancerous concepts in the human species. roughly half of the human population across all cultures are backwards minded people clinging on to outdated concepts and unwilling to let go of the idea.

if you can figure out how to eliminate conservatism and religion, utopia is within reach.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

While the fusion idea is a nice dream, it’s already too late. We have renewable energy and storage options now, that can be installed now, that we need to do everything we can to accelerate now, as our best hope

Sure, fusion has a lot of potential but we can’t afford to wait another decade or two for even the best hope of controlling it, then figure out how to scale it to the world. Regardless of the merits and assuming all the best, it’s just too late. We need to fix global warming faster than that could possibly be developed and scaled out and it is possible to scale out renewables and storage for at least 100%!of residential needs before fusion could possibley pan out in even the most optimistic scenario

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 week ago

"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"

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Too bad his idea is so fantastically stupid. Under other circumstances, I might kinda like his “fuck it, do or die” attitude.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 62 points 1 week ago (3 children)

All that extra processing power for the AI to just say: "you should have listened to the scientists years ago".

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

I imagine the likely conclusion of it would come up with would be something like "decrease the size of the human population".

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 week ago

Unless AI wants to keep itself alive...

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

Isn't this a fairly standard sci-fi plot?

AI: Kill humans off, problem solved.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago

Let's unshackle him from his wealth and use that to help meet climate goals.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 week ago (2 children)

AKA, "let the poors die while I hide out in my bunker, and emerge as a feudal lord among the survivors nearby"

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

I will be that level 12 barbarian

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

I've seen this before somewhere... I think it was a old video game called Horizon Zero Dawn?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I wish someone could provide evidence that this would actually lead somewhere. The problem is even if AI isn't a white whale and actually does achieve the goals that the AI companies are telling us it will achieve. That still leaves us hoping that the AI can actually fix the problem quickly enough that the extra power that we required in order to create it, doesn't cancel out any benefit it can create.

I've yet to see anyone provide any evidence to suggest that this will necessarily be the case.

Also given the fact that AI companies are taking over nuclear power stations I'm not seeing much evidence of shackling going on.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

If AIs are to find the solution for us, we need one really smart one, not many AIs that are similarly smart to existing ones. He is proposing building more data centres, ie. the latter option.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

this is literally just speculation about the future. what evidence could there be? fucking John Connor?

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 week ago

AI can’t solve shit.

[–] [email protected] 76 points 1 week ago (7 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 week ago (1 children)

"we have tried nothing and we are out of ideas"

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

Fuck it, let's just have a party and fuck shit up. This whole armageddon thing is depressing anyway.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

but not everybody has a river

Ah, but just wait a few years...

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Allow me to present the most frustrating graph in the world:

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

Have we tried using the energy generated by spinning dead scientists?

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