Former Google CEO says climate goals are not meetable, so we might as well drop climate conservation — unshackle AI companies so AI can solve global warming
Former Google CEO says climate goals are not meetable, so we might as well drop climate conservation — unshackle AI companies so AI can solve global warming
“We’re not going to hit the climate goals anyway…” says former Google chief Eric Schmidt.
You're viewing a single thread.
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.
"we have tried nothing and we are out of ideas"
Fuck it, let's just have a party and fuck shit up. This whole armageddon thing is depressing anyway.
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.
Not all CO2 emissions is from transport.
Heating homes is a big one.
Making plastics, rubber.
And energy production in general.
Meat.
Meat
100% agree.
Lemmy and Reddit are on the same page regarding this. Everyone talks about big game about everyone else reducing their impact but as soon as you mention meat, they turn on you because that’s something they could eliminate themselves but won’t.
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?
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.
Guy even gave the plot away when he claims the AI will be incomprehensible, like meeting aliens. So they aren't even pretending it will justify it's answers.
In general seems a weird idea to me to think that any "AI" will solve what humans can't. Their most ambitious goal is something like an artificial human, on the dumb side at that.
We can have a real human in ~20 years with the fraction of energy their "AI" requires. We already have plenty and they don't deliver that magic they promise.
I think it's just completely clueless people being hellbent on getting from computer science the only thing they think they understand to be valuable in it.
Either that or they want to have an oracle king, plausibly magical and wise in appearances, so that his solutions would have authority, while being, of course, fed to it by the controlling powers. A Mechanical Turk, only bigger.
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.
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.
Allow me to present the most frustrating graph in the world:
Have we tried using the energy generated by spinning dead scientists?
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
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.
but not everybody has a river
Ah, but just wait a few years...
more of a flood then a river /s
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.
Well no because if AI could give us Fusion in the future it wouldn't have already done so in the past.
I don't understand what you're saying