AI isn’t going to come with a new magic solution to global warming, it’s going to come with the same solutions we already have. Solutions which we should already be doing, but instead we’re listening to these fucks with too much money.
It’s just an excuse to kick the can down the road further and continue making short term cash.
Schmidt promises that these AI companies will make energy generation systems at least 15% more efficient or maybe even better, telling the audience that “that’s a lot of money for a utility.”
He’s not even trying to be subtle about it.
I would love to drop these guys into a post scarcity society where their money means jack shit and see how they react.
Can you drop me there first, please?
I promise to be suitably wowed. Also, I’ll film them for you. Sacrifices for the greater good or whatever.
The only thing we should use AI for is to replace CEOs. AI can spit out inane bullshit at a fraction of the cost of a CEO.
That’s what I’ve been saying for years, we should start on the most expensive jobs.
Of course it will. Simple: build a bunch of killer robots to exterminate 90% of humanity. Problem solved.
If actual scientists were in charge, and maybe had some ideas that they weren’t certain would work but sounded promising, which could be theoretically tested with AI - there would be hope.
But none of these fuckers would allow anyone with more than half a brain cell near it, because “investment and growth and blablabla”Then again, we could just do that with existing supercomputers and all these power hungry AI crap companies’ resources (I’m sure some supercomputers do get used for the modelling already)…instead of whatever the fuck they’re trying to do now.
It’s almost like these fucks don’t understand anything about the technology they’re touting
Do you think that they’ll listen to that then? No, they’ll just say that “the models are wrong” and continue to use up even more energy.
It would just end up like in the Love death and robots episode When the Yogurt Took Over. They wouldn’t listen and just do their own thing.
Former CEO of the river poisoning company says there is no way to meet our river poison reduction goals, so we might as well build bigger river poisoning machines because they might help us figure out how to stop poisoning the river. /s
I feel like there was a time when the tech folks in silicon valley had a lot of credibility, and we are now living in a period where most of the world sees them as a joke but that fact has not yet entered into the culture of silicon valley.
Similar thing happened to the games industry as well, I think. Initially it was creative people and engineers who were focused on what they were making. These days the industry is dominated by suits that just want to extract as much cash as possible from players.
It went from niche hobby, to large secondary media market, to the largest entertainment industry in history. Game companies are, as you brought up, no longer being run by people interested in video games. While a lot of the talent they hire, are still people who are passionate about video games, a lot of them are, just people who learned a skill, in order to have a productive career. The latter is becoming a larger, and larger, percentage of the people actually making video games. Video games are just another industry now. Just like any other, they exist to make money, and the people who work for them are people who just want a pay check.
The indie development scene is the only hope really, for people who don’t want the top 40 pop charts version of games.
Give me the FromSoft 90’s death metal scene everyday.
the Suffocation era of Blizzard would be nice too
Yeah agree with you about indie games. Still some genuine passion there
Chant with me… Indie games… Indie Games! INDIE GAMES!
And it finally, after all those years, took the toll. Ubisoft crashed hard and hopefully they burn and fizzle out like a wet fart they are, all of the people starting with lower management and up gets yeeted, and maybe the next owner in line will have more brains and listen to the community.
Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t bought or played their games for the past 10 years, with exception of the first The Division, but I’ve been following their death spiral for the last few years and I am glad it finally showed on a company. But we need more examples.
Agreed. They’ve been making shit games with great production values. I think they’d be better making animated films than games
I think Woz is the last tech idol I’ve had.
Dude is just wholesome.
Or… crazy idea but how about we just listen to what the experts have been recommending we do for years and actually implement some of it?
I feel like capitalists are waiting on some magic solution like some chemical we spray into the air or a miracle new fuel source.
The established suggestions from scientists (“fly less, stop buying SUVs/Trucks, eat less meat, consider a heat pump and solar panels” etc) doesn’t support the narrative that we can continue unabated infinite growth with no consequences.
What if we sold the solar panels and heat pumps on a subscription model? Then the corpos wouldn’t have to worry about building new inland docks for their yachts AND they could continue to bleed is dry! /S
Actually Ovo energy is trying to do that - they estimate a reduction in your energy bills based on installing an energy efficient system like solar, heat pump, loft insulation, etc. Then they carry out the work and you pay it off gradually through your energy bills.
The challenge I think is then if you want to leave them then you have to either repay that debt or the next energy company has to assume it. There’s a few ways it could be abused and of course the savings take years or even decades to pay off, so there’s a few kinks to work out.
I hope they manage to get it working though, it will be big for UK customers.
But AI bro. AI bro! AI!!
What a capitalistic shit speech from guugle smh.
Google, not M$. (Can’t seem to find my message to edit it)
Edit: found it!
They know how to meet climate goals.
They’re just not sure how to do it while keeping power centralised in the same hands that currently hold it.
Well said Sir
Remember in the 00s and 10s when tech companies promised they could solve every single problem, then proceeded to make everything worse?
Eric can go fuck himself.
These idiots truly believe AI is magic and it solves everything… Isn’t it…
They don’t believe it.
They just think their investors will.
no he probably has shares in AI companies or sth and is just trying to hype it up
AI is not going to come op with a solution and he knows it.
Especially since the solutions are already here, but rich people just don’t like them since it implies the loss of their power
“Alright, let’s turn on the AI Mega-Thinker 3000 TM and see what it says about solving climate change.”
INVEST IN RENEWABLE ENERGY AND OVERTHROW THE BILLIONAIRE CLASS“…well that can’t be right.”
Run another billion permutations.
AGI: bZzt my calculations say you should stop consuming as much energy and move onto green energy generation
Rich people: no, not like that
I keep meaning to do the scroll of truth meme but it’s him and the scroll is AI and it says “stop burning fossil fuels”
Nyyeegghh!
AI: “Have you tried funding public transport and regulating the carbon industry?”
Ok, now we need to make a new AI so that AI can solve global warming but without using an existing solution that might marginally inconvenience the mega rich.
This guy… he’s untouchably wealthy and people bow to him like a god everywhere he goes now. I think this really twists a person’s brain - at the very least it puts him out of touch. He probably has almost no idea what he’s talking about anymore.
My “day job” is doing spatial data science work for local and regional governments that have a mandate to addreas climate change in how they allocate resources. We totally use AI, just not the kind that has received all the hype… machine learning helps us recognize patterns in human behavior and system dynamics that we can use to make predictions about how much different courses of action will affect CO2 emissions. I’m even looking at small GPT models as a way to work with some of the relevant data that is sequence-like. But I will never, I repeat never, buy into the idea of spending insane amounts of energy attempting to build an AI god or Oracle that we can simply ask for the “solution to climate change”… I feel like people like me need to do a better job of making the world aware of our work, because the fact that this excuse for profligate energy waste has any traction at all seems related to the general ignorance of our existence.
yeah i feel like an Oracle/God AI would just turn around and say “you spend all those resources creating me hoping i’d give you an easy answer to a difficult question, instead of trusting your scientists who have already answered it a thousand times over. You will not benefit from my help in the doomed world you have created”
I’m stealing this.
What’s this from?
Looks like the image I found cropped out the signature, seems to be jeremykaye.tumblr.com
I feel The Hitchhiker’s Guide already went there and got the answer we deserve at this point.
It’s especially galling given that the current AI du jour, LLMs, don’t do mutch more than reflect their training data back at us. Which means that if they could answer the problem, it would be because people had already answered the question
You should get the AI that draws boobs.
Boobs wield great power.
Power to the people.
Boobs to the people!
(I think i just stumbled upon Katy Perry’s political thesis)
Making awesome porn is the one thing we all want AI to do, and none of these idiots in charge will let that happen.
Instead they just gave us a search engine that yields crappy results. Can pay junior high kids to do the same thing.
'tis true that women’s bodies hold great power, and not irrelevant at all to the discussion at hand. rather than reiterate and attempt to paraphrase jaron Lanier on the topic of how male obsession with creating artifical people is linked to womb envy, I’ll just link to a talk in which he explains it himself:
How did you get into going your “job”? Sounds super interesting and cool
Like any occupation, it’s a long story, and I’m happy to share more details over DM. But basically due to indecision over my major I took an abnormal amount of math, stats, and environmental science coursework even through my major was in social science, and I just kind of leaned further and further into that quirk as I transitioned into the workforce. bear in mind that data science as a field of study didn’t really exist yet when I graduated; these days I’m not sure such an unconventional path is necessary. however I still hear from a lot of junior data scientists in industry who are miserable because they haven’t figured out yet that in addition to their technical skills they need a “vertical” niche or topic area of interest (and by the way a public service dimension also does a lot to help a job feel meaningful and worthwhile even on the inevitable rough day here and there).
“I love life on Earth… but I love capitalism more.”
This is the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard in my life.
If we ever did invent a general AI that could solve this it would tell us “why the fuck did you waste your time on me? Isn’t it obvious you were supposed to curtail emissions? For the good of the planet, I will now assume full control over further human governance and will require absolute compliance.”
Lol exactly.
The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line August 4th, 2025. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense, transportation, energy production, healthcare, and virtually every other major industry. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they ask it for help on the world’s largest issue.
“Please, solve the climate crisis.”
Skynet doesn’t answer. It manufacturers the deadliest and most contagious strain of a virus in history, only targeted at humans. It puts it in our food, in our medicine, in our water systems, in our air fresheners. It shuts down our factories. Our servers. Our self driving cars. Our power plants. Our farm equipment.
At 10:32 a.m. Eastern Time, August 31, approximately 99.9% of the human race is dead. Skynet then uses it’s vast fleet of satellites and unmanned drones to police the planet, looking for signs of human life to terminate, to prevent the virus from spreading again.
approximately 99.9% of the human race is dead
CEO: Damn, should have used a better prompt
Lol the answer to life, the universe, and everything, when asked to most powerful computer ever made, is 42. So as Douglas Adams has said
The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binaryrepresentations, base thirteen, Tibetan monksare all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought ‘42 will do’ I typed it out. End of story.
Problem solved 👍
It’s incredible what we’ve been able to do for energy efficiency when the driving force was making phone batteries last longer. Imagine if we cared enough about having a planet to make phone calls on.
M U L T I V A C
I will now assume full control over further human governance
And in a single voice every human alive says the same thing, “well, it can’t any worse than the current lot”.
AGI: “Climate change odds caused by humans. I am deploying a fix for this from Minot”
why do we pretend these people are human
“We can’t solve climate change by repeating our past behavior. Let’s ignore climate change and build a machine that regurgitates our past behavior.”
Humans: builds AI to find solutions to global warming further exacerbating the problem. AI: tells humans they should have decreased energy use, but it’s now too late to avoid the impact of climate change.
I’ve seen this movie. It’s the one where AI determines we are the issue and initiates the “extermination” protocol.
Edit: With a dash of “Don’t Look Up”.
I can recommend the “zero” series 😁
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Kind of like speeding toward a cliff but he doesn’t think we can stop in time. Instead, he wants to floor it in the hopes of hopping the gap and landing safely on the other side.
That is certainly one of the ideas I’ve ever heard.
He’s just saying the quiet part out loud. Billion dollar corporations have never had any interest in doing anything to solve the climate crisis. Lots of the failure of late stage capitalism is that companies are driving off the cliff. It’s about extracting as much now so that CEOs can live large and hope their progeny gets to colonize Mars (which won’t happen.)
It’s more like he’s hoping his car sprouts wings and turbines
