this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2024
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the techbros that think that with sufficiently advanced AI we could solve climate change are so stupid. like, we might not have a perfect solution, but we have ideas on how to start to make things better (less car-centric cities, less meat and animal products, more investment in public transport and solar), and it gets absolutely ignored. why would it be different when an AI gives the solution? unless they want the "eat fat-free food and you will be thin" solution to climate change, in which we change absolutely nothing of our current situation but it is magically ecological
I don't think you're imagining the same thing they are when you hear the word "AI". They're not imagining a computer that prints out a new idea that is about as good as the ideas that humans have come up with. Even that would be amazing (it would mean that a computer could do science and engineering about as well as a human) but they're imagining a computer that's better than any human. Better at everything. It would be the end of the world as we know it, and perhaps the start of something much better. In any case, climate change wouldn't be our problem anymore.
That's the thing, there could be a human 10'000x smarter than Einstein telling us what to do... And it would still not happen.
I disagree with you, because a modern human could offer the people of the distant past (with their far less advanced technology) solutions to their problems which would seem miraculous to them. Things that they thought were impossible would be easy for the modern human. The computer may do the same for us, with a solution to climate change that would be, as you put it, magically ecological.
With that said, the computer wouldn't be giving humans suggestions. It would be the one in charge. Imagine a group of chimpanzees that somehow create a modern human. (Not a naked guy with nothing, but rather someone with all the knowledge we have now.) That human isn't going to limit himself to answering questions for very long. This isn't a perfect analogy because chimpanzees don't comprehend language, but if a human with a brain just 3.5 times the size of a chimpanzee's can do so much more than a chimpanzee, a computer with calculational capability orders of magnitude greater than a human's could be a god compared to us. (The critical thing is to make it a loving god; humans haven't been good to chimpanzees.)
Imagine Jesus Christ as a time traveler, going back from a dying planet to just about the dawn of both roads and also safer sea travel than previously, those two connecting what would become the entire modern world.
Jesus: like, forget all this "religion" crap about what foods to eat & where & when & with who, and like, just be excellent to one another dudes & dudettes
Everyone since then, especially those who borrow His actual fucking name to label themselves: um... how about "no"?
There was a (fiction) book I was called "all the birds in the sky". I really liked it. Highly recommend.
One of the plot threads is a rich tech bro character that's like "the world is doomed we need to abandon it for somewhere else. Better pour tons of resources into this sci-fi sounding project". And I'm just screaming at the book "use that money for housing and transport and clean energy you absolute donkey".
There are a lot of well understood things we could be doing to make the world better, but they're difficult for idiotic political reasons. Racism, nimbyism, emotional immaturity, etc.
$ GPT how do we solve climate change?
GPT: command not found
$ cd /home/chatgpt
cd: command not found